Posted by Dan on Jul 2, 2009 in
Reviews,
twitter Twitter has become a massive force on the Internet, I am wrapped up in it and tweet obsessively (@Dansgalaxy) as well as managing many twitter accounts and twitter bots.
As well as this other (bigger) businesses are taking advantage of twitter and using it as a way to communicate with their users, often it can be hard to tell which accounts are official here’s a list of companies / celebrities twitter accounts which are worth a look.
Microsoft:
- @Microsoft – Main MS account being run and managed by the corporate communications team
- @MSWindows – Announcing Windows 7
- @WindowsLive – Official Twitter account of Microsoft Windows Live
- @liveframework – liveframework
- @livemesh – Sync, share, and access the information you care about—wherever you happen to be.
- @SharePoint – The official tweetstream of the SharePoint product group – managed by @LLiu
- @bizspark – Microsoft BizSpark – Software, Support, Visibility
- @zunemarketplace – Zune Marketplace is a store for the way you love music, with brand-new releases every week and a huge selection of music in every style imaginable
- @wmdev – Windows Mobile
- @microsofttag – Microsoft Tag
- @ch9 – listen to the cockpit, help us fly the plane
- @ch10 – Channel 10 is Microsoft’s online community for the technology enthusiast
- @ch8 – Microsoft’s community for students
- @mixonline – Come check us out at www.visitmix.com
- @MIX09 – The Next Web Now, pre-empted by @MIX07, @MIX08 and @PDC08
- @SiteNamedDesire – Want a copy of A Website Named Desire? This li’l birdie will tell you how. Wait for the tweets.
- @MicrsftTech4All – News from Microsoft Accessibility team, which strives for technology to be usable by everyone & complements our physical & cognitive abilities.
- @MSDN – Updates from the MSDN site team.
- @adCenterBlog – News, Tips, Tricks & Best Practices From The Guys At Microsoft adCenter
[ Most Microsoft twitter accounts sourced from on10.net ]
Tech News:
Twitter can be a great place to stay on top of the latest tech news, and I often use it as a basic RSS system, and am often reminded to check out TechCrunch.com or the Guardians tech articles when i see their tweets.
News:
- @BBCbreaking – Breaking News stories from the BBC.
- @Reuters – Reuters breaking news stories.
- @SkyNews – SkyNews news stories.
- @GoogleNews – Breaking news stories and updates from Google News
- @CNNbrk – CNN.com is among the world’s leaders in online news and information delivery.
- @NBCnews – NBC News — a leading source of global news and information for more than 75 years
Twitter Bots:
Twitter bots are becoming a fun part of the Twitterosphere (Twitter community). Twitter Bots can be like marmite, you either love them or hate them as with most things.
Personally I love some twitter bots (particularly the ones i run) and tend to take the view of don’t like it don’t follow.
Here’s a few of mine and others which I follow which are worth checking out.
- @JacksonBot – Picks up tweets about Micheal Jackson
- @LMAObot – Picks up anything with “LOL”, “Lmao”, “ROFL” etc in it picks up some random and funny tweets.
- @IsDeadBot – Picks up tweets about all things er dead. Which can be more interesting than you might think.
- @NoteRobot – Retweets “Note to self” tweets, very funny and some random laughs!
- @LuvOrHate - Picks up on what people love and hate, again some random interesting tweets – Created by @aaronbassett.
Celebrity Twitterers:
There is no doubt that celebrities have jumped on the twitter bandwagon, be it for self promotion or simply to tweet their life.
I wont go into an extensive list of Celeb twitterers, as there are lots so instead I will share my favourite picks and share with you some great celeb twitter stalker sites!
@StephenFry is one of my favourite twitterers with some interesting posts and insights into an interesting mans life as he goes about his day to day tasks, from visits to the apple store to ponderings a must follow for twitter users.
@lilyroseallen is one of my favourite artists (I know maybe a little sad) but i do love her, and from what i can tell she tweets for “real” and isn’t using twitter purely as a publicity vehicle, which i like you get to see Lily Allen the person.
One of the difficult parts about the web is you don’t really know if the person you are following is the person you think it is, this is where Valebrity.com comes in. Valebrity enables you to “validate” celebrities online so you know who your following is who it says it is!
Worth checking out if you want to follow your favourite celebs.
Also came across a blog post on Mashable.com which is worth checking it out which has 25 celebrities accounts from actors, musicians, politicians and writers which is worth checking out too.
So take a look, follow people and get involved in the wonderful world of twitter!
Don’t forget to follow @Dansgalaxy for updates and randomness from the world of Dan.
Tags: bots, celebrities, news, tech, tweets, twitter, twitter bots
Posted by Dan on Jun 27, 2009 in
General stuff Just posting a few basic bits of info about how the TwitterBot Service is currently running.
So the twitter bot is currently requesting the last 20 tweets fron the public timeline every minute (on a every minute cron) meaning at the moment the public timeline requests come out of the main server IP and are falling far below the 100/hr limit. However currently looking into ideas on how to increase the rate to catch more tweets! (Ideas welcome, please leave a comment or email me).
The tweets which get catched by the tweet grabber bot are saved into a database to be processed, I then have another bot “ProcessingBot” (I am immaginative with my script names i know) runs every 5 minutes and loops through each unprocessed tweet, and each bot in the system checking for matches to 3 phrases stored in the DB (I will be changing this part to make it more flexiable ASAP) and if it matches the tweet gets retweeted to the bot account in the format of (@SCREEN_NAME) TWEET as you can see on @JacksonBot which is currently retweeting tweets with the key phrases of “Jackson” “MJ” and “Micheal Jackson” and seems to be working very well (currently 500+ tweets in 12 hours and 32 followers – Yes I am hoping this doesnt hit the post limit and have applied for whitelisting).
For anyone who is interested 
Dan
Posted by Dan on Jun 27, 2009 in
General stuff Hello,
Wow i finally pulled my finger out and have been working hard today starting work on a twitter bot service, now so far i have some of the core done, and infact now have 3 bots running @jacksonbot which unsuprisingly (should) pick up tweets about Micheal Jackson, the second is a Note to self bot… appropriately named @NoteToSelfBot and then the 3rd bot i have going is the @IsDeadBot which while slightly morbit picks up tweets for things realted to erm dead things.
Now i will be working very hard on this system to get it all working nicely and there maybe bugs in the output (please email me if you spot any!) , and eventually i will be developing this into a full service which should enable users to simply signup and have their very own twitter bot!
I honestly can’t wait to get this going so see you tomorrow and will try and keep you all posted.
Will be fun to see how they go overnight.
Night all. x
Posted by Dan on May 4, 2009 in
Reviews,
youtube So I noticed a shiny new feature the other day on YouTube, the ability to pop out the video or to “Watch this video in new window” on certain videos.
Now so far the only video I have come across using this feature is a 1:05:37 long talk from Vint Cerf and amazingly, I have yet to find a bug… and there’s only 1 improvement i would like to see at the moment.
So on videos using the feature you see a little TV shaped square with an arrow pointing into the top right corner right next to the Turn Down the Lights button.
When you click this it pauses the video on the main page and loads the video in the pop-up as you can see below.
This seems to work pretty well and is a nice little idea, but it can be taken further, now i have been watching this hour long talk and i want to watch the video in a new window after 20 minutes and the pop-up opens and starts playing from the beginning, which isn’t a massive deal but it would be a lot easier if it resumed from where you were watching, like BBC iPlayer can.
Tags: google, vint cerf, youtube
Posted by Dan on May 2, 2009 in
Humor and funny crap!,
Ranting,
youtube I was checking out the shows on YouTube now to see if they had any others since i last looked, and i immediately see Britain’s got Talent…
I live in Britain. This is a British show. Shown on British TV. Why the F#!? isn’t it available on YouTube in Britain… I mean come on! Are you Sh!ttin’ me?!
And yes… I am submitting this to Fail Blog.
So much for me watching Susan Boyle again and again… guess will have to just watch all the clips uploaded without permission of the show eh… instead of the version which YouTube can put specially targeted high quality high return ads on.
Well done YouTube. Nice one.
Posted by Dan on Apr 18, 2009 in
Humor and funny crap!,
Ranting Now, my MSN address is plastered all over the Internet on God knows how many forums, websites blog you name it; and often i have some er “special” people who add me and then just randomly pop up… like this guy. Offering web hosting to a web host, a web host which i might add is better than him. but then again, i would say that ^^.
Noob: need host
Dan: Hello
Noob: need host
Dan: Okay, what do you need hosting.
Noob: so am i
Dan: Ok.
Dan: What is your website?
Noob: http://lime-host.co.uk/index.html [ Its okay... hes not online any more strangely.. ]
Dan: lol
Dan: i know your host.
Dan: I also know the guy he is in business with :l
Noob: who
Dan: ******host,
Dan: Sean
Noob: nope lol
Dan: yep
Noob: no
Dan: lol
Dan: go on then whos your host
Noob: jack
Noob: dual-host
Dan: really…
Noob: yh
Noob: y
Dan: so why is your name servers for lime-host with ******host
Dan: and the server IP is the server ip for *****hosts shared webserver
Noob: old we need change it
Noob: just uploaded old 1
Noob: lol
Dan: lol
Dan: so your still using ***** host servers then
Noob: unno
Noob: umm
Dan: rofl
Noob: g2g bubi
Okay, so just to be clear…
This is a person claims to be a web host who, doesn’t even know where his main business site is hosted, what server is on or who is running that server.
Noob web hosts annoy me, they give people like me who genuinely have a clue a bad name.
Tags: chat log, msn, noob, web host
Posted by Dan on Apr 17, 2009 in
Reviews,
youtube Well i have been on and off YouTube all day and finally seen a mention about the TV shows and Films which are supposed to come in and take over normal videos and all this crap… and YouTube just tweeted about they blog post on the matter so i thought i would check it out and share with you my views, however as its almost 4am I will leave that till the morning… but i will leave you with a few thoughts on the new Beta layout for the user page.
Beta Profile Layout/Design
First off this morning on my twitter i saw Alan (fallofautumndistro) was chatting about the new Beta profile layouts (i naturally activated mine and you can take a look here)
As you can see its a totally different look and puts a lot more focus on the users videos themselves. This in my view is a good thing, and YouTube have said in their blog post about the new channel design, that it does need more work and new features are on the way soon hopefully.
Personally I’m hoping the upcoming features include more usability and interactivity with the videos themselves i would love to be able to do everything i can on the normal video page on the user page as well, thus enabling the page to “channel” all that users content to you without having to leap frog back and forth between videos and users channel which never made sense to me…
Btw, Don’t worry about opting in to using the new Beta design, YouTube save everything about your current profile design so you can easily revert back if you don’t like things!
Tags: changes, deisng, films, hulu, movies, profile, tv, user, youtube
Posted by Dan on Apr 16, 2009 in
Humor and funny crap! Just a strange little chat i had the other day which amused me, hopefully someone will bother to read it and also get a little chuckle… if not o well.
I was talking to a friend and well, he came out to me. My friend is, well he’s a trekky.
I couldnt belive it, it came as such a shock to know he was living this kind of lifestyle and i never even knew, i added the convo below so you can see.
Friend says:
i’ve decided to have a star trek day
Dan says:
what u mean
Friend says:
i’m going to watch the most recent three star trek films
Dan says:
o god
whos making you do this?
Its abuse you know
you can prosacute
Friend says:
i enjoy it
Dan says:
oo.. hmm
nwell its okay
everyones er different
I mean im sure you didnt choose this life style.
its just who you are…
Friend says:
ha ha! i love that!
Dan says:
And if your a well a erm a a “treky” i wont stop you, its your choice.
all i want is for you to be happy and be yourself.
Friend says:
ah, i never thouhgt you would be able to swap the words gay and trecy and keep them in the same sentence
Tags: trekky