VPSC74H
Advanced Web Based Projects: Deconstructing TWITTER
Tesssah Heckbert | February 25, 2010
Twitter 2.0
Earthquakes! Protests! Education! Relationships! Politics! Culture! and more...
FUN FACT:People have used Twitter to report world disasters fromt forest fires in San Diego to earthquackes in China's Sichuan Province before any other media source.
reTweet
A retweet is a repost of another user's message.@ reply and Mentions
This function is user created and was later built into the Twitter interface (see resources). Basically an @reply is any Twitter update that begins with @username. This tag allows users to talk back and forth to one another. It's as simple as typing @+username+message to designate their message as a reply to another person. These tweets will appear in a person's replies tab. This feature will automatically be created if a user chooses to reply to a tweet via the reply option underneath the tweet.Mentions are any Twitter update that contains @username in the body of the tweet. These are different then a reply because the @ symbol is not found at the beginning of the tweet. These messages also show up in the replies tab.
#tag (Hashtag)
A hashtag is basically the Twitter equivalent of metadata on a message. If a user wants their website or blog to be easily found in the search engines, they would add metadata in the website headers which will then be picked up by the Google spiders when they visit. A hashtag is basically the Twitter equivalent. If the user wants their message to be easily tracked by someone interested in what they are saying, they would add a hashtag next to the keyword.For example they want to talk about the latest article on MakeUseOf. Well, they would obviously want other people who are also interested in talking about MakeUseOf articles to find their message and respond to it. So when writing a 140 character message, the user would also enter #makeuseof. Whenever someone then enters the keyword makeuseof into the Twitter search engine, your message would be included in their search results.
There’s a website which tracks hashtags called Hashtags http://www.hashtags.org/. This tracks all the top hashtags and trends of the moment and is extremely useful to use if you want to see what people are talking about right now. To have YOUR hashtags tracked on the site, you first need to follow their Twitter account - http://twitter.com/hashtags.
API (Application Programming Interface) & Apps
| These are regularly being developed that build on that platform. Early tools let users add Twitter functionality to their desktops. Some newer applications add location information to Twitter data, letting users not only read what people are doing but see where they are. An application called TwitterCamp lets users display tweets in large-format displays, such as projectors. Other applications let users post short audio tweets—an idea that seems to introduce the notion of “micro-podcasts.” These and other applications built on Twitter will come and go, with the community of users determining which ones last and which ones don’t. Facebook has become a place where users share considerable amounts of information, and the site offers a wide range of options for restricting how much and what kinds of information you see. Likewise, as Twitter grows, it will likely add more (and more detailed) filters to balance the amount of available content. Understanding API's > AS DEFINED BY WIKIPEDIA: "An application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, much in the same way that a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers. APIs are implemented by applications, libraries and operating systems to determine the vocabulary and calling conventions the programmer should employ to use their services. It may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes and protocols used to communicate between the consumer and implementer of the API. When used in the context of web development, an API is typically a defined set of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request messages along with a definition of the structure of response messages, usually expressed in an |
Extensible Markup Language (XML) or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. While "Web API" is virtually a synonym for web service, the recent trend (so-called Web 2.0) has been moving away from Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) based services towards more direct Representational State Transfer (REST) style communications. Web APIs allow the combination of multiple services into new applications known as mashups. Use of APIs to share content: The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing of content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the web. 1. Photos can be shared from sites like Flickr and Photobucket to Social Network sites like Facebook and MySpace. 2. Content can be embedded, like embedding a presentation from SlideShare on a Linked-In profile. 3. Content can be dynamically posted. Sharing live comments made on Twitter to a Facebook account for example is enabled by Twitter and Facebook's APIs. 4. Video content can be embedded on sites which are served by another host. 5. User information can be shared from web communities to outside applications, delivering new functionality to the web community that shared its user data via an open API. One of the best examples of this is the Facebook Application platform." |
FUN FACT:
About 70 percent use "Twitterers" use these free programs that sit at the edges of their screens (or run on their cellphones, especially iPhones) all day. They have names like TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl and Twitterific. (Pogue)
See below: the faces of some iPhone Twitter apps.
