Tag Archives: idea

How may I merge or duplicate Twitter accounts?

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I manage multiple Twitter accounts. At some point, I will need to retire one; let’s call that Account A.

Is there a tool which will allow me, with ease, to make my Account B follow all the people currently followed by Account A?

Some people may find it useful, too, to be able to create a new account and have it follow all the people followed by an existing account which they or a third party own.

If there isn’t such a tool, would somebody care to make one?

Any such tool would need to deal with any duplicates (i.e. people already followed by Account B); and perhaps any limits set by Twitter on the number of follows made in a short period.

Idea: A tool to make it easy to subscribe to web-based lists of Twitter accounts

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Here’s an idea: a tool (which could be web based, or a browser plug in, or a mobile app; or a feature added to existing Twitter clients such as TweetDeck), which would take the URL of a page with a list of links to people’s Twitter profiles, like the one at http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/twitter, which I set up and maintained in a previous career,

Part of Birmingham City Council's list of Twitter accounts, showing those of parks' rangers

and either subscribe the operator to them all, or do that and then create a Twitter list containing them all.

Optionally, it could first present a checklist, from which individual accounts could be selected, or removed.

Would someone like to make this happen?

Extracting contact data from e-mail signatures

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I often receive emails with signatures (footers; also known as “sigs”) like this one:

—
John Doe
Director of Flying Cars, Acme Ltd.,
A: 21, Example Street, Birmingham, B1 1AA
E: john.doe@example.com
T: 0121 555 5555
M: 05555 555555
W: www.example.com

(that first line is the standard sig separator of “dash dash space return”)

It’s irritating, if I want to add the sender to my address book, to have to copy’n’paste each item separately.

LG Cookie Fresh Email Setup

It seems to me that it should be possible for mail clients, such as Google Mail, to parse such sigs, and allow the user — after making any necessary edits — to add them to their electronic address books, without needing vCard (.vcf) file attachments or hCard microformat markup (which is not possible in plain-text e-mail).

It would need some agreement (or declaration by fiat) of which short codes to use:

A: = Address
E: = E-mail
T: = (landline) Telephone
M: = Mobile (cell) telephone
W: = Website

and which properties can be plural. It might be determined that the first line should be the name; the second the job title/company — but, as users would be offered an “edit” option before saving the data, that’s not a deal-breaker.

Some thought would need to be given to internationalisation, also: do the above abbreviations make sense to speakers of, say, German or French? What about Japanese or Chinese speakers?

Alternative

Even without the labels:

—
John Doe
Director of Flying Cars, Acme Ltd.,
21, Example Street, Birmingham, B1 1AA
john.dow@example.com
0121 555 5555
05555 555555
www.example.com

it should be possible to scrape some data (e-mail address, phone numbers, website, name if on first line) from a sig.

Over to you

Does anyone fancy writing a demonstrator plug-in to parse such sigs, for an extensible mail client such as Thunderbird, or a browser like Firefox or Chrome? Do such things already exist anywhere?

Improving the already excellent ‘Twitter Blackbird Pie’ WordPress plugin

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I’ve just started using the “” plugin to embed tweets into WordPress posts (I use the self-hosted wordpress.org package). You can see an example below:

[blackbirdpie id=”66835851316957185″]

It’s fantastic — no more taking screen captures, cropping and uploading; or faffing about manually constructing links. All I have to do is include the magic code [blackbirdpie id="66835851316957185"] with the ID of the tweet (in the above example, taken from http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/66835851316957185) as the id parameter value.

However, there are a few ways in which the plugin could be improved.

hCard microformat

Firstly, add an to emit details of the cited tweeter as metadata, by changing, for example (inline styles omitted for clarity):

<div><a href="http://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=pigsonthewing">@pigsonthewing</a><div>Andy Mabbett</div></div>

to:

<div class="vcard"><a class="nickname url" href="http://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=pigsonthewing">@pigsonthewing</a><div class="fn">Andy Mabbett</div></div>

with the addition of three class attributes: “vcard”; “nickname URL” and “fn”.

Citation

Next, instead of wrapping the contents of the tweet in a span, wrap it in a semantically-appropriate blockquote element, by changing:

<span>Blogging about a Blackbird.</span>

to:

<blockquote cite="http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/66835851316957185">Blogging about a Blackbird.</blockquote>

and styling to maintain the current visual presentation.

Separating links

When viewed with CSS disabled, the tweet’s actions (“Reply”, “Retweet”, “Favorite”) run into each other.

Screenshot showing links with no spacing, when CSS is disabled

To improve accessibility and usability, either add white space between them, or, better, mark them up as a list, styled to display in-line, unbulletted, again looking like they do at present.

White space

There is more white space above then below the embedded tweet, above. A little more padding below it would improve readability.

COinS

Finally, consider adding COinS mark-up, so that details of the cited tweet are emitted as metadata.

Invitation

I hope the authors of the plug-in, Themergency.com, will appreciate and act on these suggestions. I’ll be inviting them to read and comment on this post. And I’ll be happy to help with developing any of the ideas suggested above.

Everything at your postcode – proposal for a new website

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Over the last few weeks, I have been imagining a website for UK citizens and visitors; where they can enter their postcode and be served a page or pages of hyperlocal links about everything to do with where they live. This post is me continuing that thinking out loud; comments — including the constructively critical — are actively solicited.

Links could be almost anything, from local government services (via DirectGov and OpenlyLocal) to public transport information; from maps to fun things. They would either link to sites which use postcodes as as an argument; or would be built using the target site’s postcode-lookup API.

The site would avoid the need for each hyperlocal website to compile its own list of such links.

Here are a few such links, based on a randomly-selected postcode, B23 6UH (I simply opened a local newspaper and picked the first advert that used a Birmingham postcode). Note that the first link is computed; the rest use the postcode directly.

User would also be able to suggest additional links if they find a good web service which takes a postcode as a locator — for now, please feel free to do so in comments on this post, and I’ll add them to the above list. Purely commercial links, like individual chains’ store locators, would be excluded (a few paid for links, clearly identified as such, might generate enough revenue to cover hosting costs).

As can be seen from the above, the site wouldn’t actually store or generate content; just links. The links could be clustered under headings, or on sub-pages, like “maps”, “local services”, and “fun stuff”.

It might also be possible for the site to determine the user’s nearest postcode, using their browser or device’s GeoLocation feature, or by selection from a map. The site would also accept partial postcodes, such as “B”, “B23” or “B23 6”.

The service could perhaps be “widgetised” for inclusion on other sites. And of course, it would be possible to link to the site using postcode as an argument.

The site would, of course, make data available in RSS, OPML and open data formats; and use microformats.

Unfortunately, though be willing to collate and maintain the links and code some HTML, I lack the programming and graphic-design skills to make such a site, which means that I must rely on the good will of others. Can you help? Should I organise a hack event (a day, or an evening) at a Birmingham venue, to work on this collaboratively?

Or does such a service — curated, rather than spammy — already exist? Would it belong better as an adjunct to an existing service like OpenlyLocal or DirectGov?

Over to you…