• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Twittering TAM7

Geek Goddess said:
I signed up Friday or Saturday. I may not follow it until closer to TAM, however. I get a lot of email on my phone, all day long, that are work related and don't need any more volume.
Click to expand...

Exactly what GG said.
 
The only way something will come through on the TAM7 feed is if someone sends a direct message to it, and there shouldn't be much more of that prior to July.

That said, I'm not a regular Twitter user and I'll likely not look at it much between now and TAM. If someone starts sending a bothersome amount of tweets to the TAM7 group, let me know via a PM and I'll silence it.
 
Okay, so. I signed up for Twitter and within a day was being "followed" by an old co-worker that I don't particularly care to keep in touch with. He found me through my email address, and I see that any Yahoo contact I have (and I have a lot of them) can find me this way. Don't love that, and don't love the idea of people from my everyday life knowing my internet handle, which I have to use because I can't Twitter at TAM without using the Saganite handle. I'm not Saganite anywhere else but my skeptic boards and a few other internet boards I used to frequent but don't anymore.

How to avoid this? Do I have to cancel my account, then create a new email address and sign up for Twitter again through that?
 
saganite said:
How to avoid this? Do I have to cancel my account, then create a new email address and sign up for Twitter again through that?
Click to expand...


This would certainly work, but you need to be careful about one thing. If you just went into Twitter right now and deleted your account (which you can do through the Settings page), you would not be able to re-signup under Saganite. This is because Twitter essentially locks that ID out forever and ever... this is actually a good thing from a privacy standpoint, but it can screw you over if you're not careful.

Instead, you can go into your settings and choose a new username... it can be gibberish, because you're about to delete it. Save the settings with the new username then delete the account. Then, set up a new account with a new email address, but with the preserved Saganite name.

DISCLAIMER >> I've never actually done this, so I can't guarantee it. Everything I just wrote is based on my understanding of how Twitter works but has not been confirmed by double-blind tests. Your mileage may vary. Void in Guam.
 
Saganite, there are two things you can do, separately or in concert, to improve your privacy on Twitter.

The first is you can change the settings on your account to make your updates "protected". That means you will have to approve anyone who follows you, and you can just refuse follow attempts from coworkers. I'm not sure what happens when you switch an open account to protected, i.e. whether it then lets you "approve" your existing followers. I would assume so.

The second thing you could do is click "block" on the coworker's account to prevent them from seeing your updates.

Either one of these things runs the risk that the your coworker will notice and be offended.
 
Last edited:
saganite said:
Okay, so. I signed up for Twitter and within a day was being "followed" by an old co-worker that I don't particularly care to keep in touch with. He found me through my email address, and I see that any Yahoo contact I have (and I have a lot of them) can find me this way. Don't love that, and don't love the idea of people from my everyday life knowing my internet handle, which I have to use because I can't Twitter at TAM without using the Saganite handle. I'm not Saganite anywhere else but my skeptic boards and a few other internet boards I used to frequent but don't anymore.

How to avoid this? Do I have to cancel my account, then create a new email address and sign up for Twitter again through that?
Click to expand...

A couple people I never heard of were following me, so I just blocked them
 
Geek Goddess said:
A couple people I never heard of were following me, so I just blocked them
Click to expand...

Sounds like the easiest way. I have absolutely no problems offending a guy I worked with for literally four months, 11 years ago, who for some reason still has my email address. Thanks for the suggestions, Krelnik and Desktop Icon.
 
I set up a similar conference backchannel on Twitter for the skepticamp events.

Presently it's GroupTweet-based like @TAM7, but I'll switch it to a more responsive direct-message-forwarder should I find one.

You can follow it at http://twitter.com/skepticamp to get a taste of what the @TAM7 one will be like.
 
Warning: this is server config stuff. All 'normal' subscribers of the TAM7 or skepticamp feed can ignore this message!

After I set up the @skepticamp backchannel feed with GroupTweet, I found myself annoyed at having to manually click the 'follow' button on all the new subscribers so they could post to the feed through DMs.

So I went in search of more automation and found that a combination of a gmail filter plus TweetLater could meet my needs to auto-follow any new subscribers, thus allowing them to post.

It's a bit obtuse layering two services plus gmail atop twitter, but this should be acceptable for now.
 
Reed said:
...a combination of a gmail filter plus TweetLater could meet my needs to auto-follow any new subscribers, thus allowing them to post.
Click to expand...



Nice... that's exactly what I need. I was concerned about having to monitor two separate Twitter accounts -- one to follow the TAM7 chatter and the other to ensure that everyone is signed up properly -- and this will make things much easier.
 
More arcane server automation knowledge. Basic users can skip this!

I was having mixed-results with TweetLater where it was taking hours to auto-follow the new subscribers to @skepticamp.

I may have discovered why. As of the 21st of this month, Twitter is throttling its API usage (see here and here) which may account for the delays.

I've switched over to Socialtoo to see if it can do a better job.
 
More arcane server automation knowledge. Basic users can skip this!

As far as I can tell, the new 20,000 req/hr Rate Limit imposed on 1/21 has hobbled the high-volume services built on Twitter (GroupTweet, Tweetlater, Socialtoo, etc.)

Assuming we'd want to stay on Twitter, several options that I can think of:

1. Be patient. There's speculation that Twitter will announce pay service plans that will allow these services to come back online, albeit passing along the charges to us.

2. Find a service that can provide the backchannel services we need in a reliable way that doesn't hit the Rate Limit problem.

3. Discard the automation entirely and not have a backchannel account, instead using conventional Twitter-centric means of spreading the word (hashtags, retweets, search, etc.)

4. Write our own service that can work within the 70 requests per hour Rate Limit for individual accounts. It might monitor search.twitter.com and retweet posts that used a #skepticamp hashtag, for example.
 
I like option 4. Has anyone open-sourced their solution, that we could just grab? I'm sure Terry or Ducky or someone has a server we can abuse during TAM to keep the thing running 24/7 for the week or so that we need it.

As for the auto-follows, seems like this is fixable with a combination of telling people to follow TAM7 well in advance of the show and a little manual intervention on the TAM7 account. (I.e. log into TAM7 a few times on Thursday night and Friday morning of TAM and manually follow anyone who needs it and hasn't gotten caught by the bot yet).
 
krelnik said:
I like option 4. Has anyone open-sourced their solution, that we could just grab?
Click to expand...

Not sure, but there are libraries for Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, etc. that can hit the Twitter APIs to build one's own solution.

However, I'd propose another, easier, approach that works well within the restrictions and which can scale well: option #3, where one uses a client that can hit search.twitter.com where one would simply visit:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=tam7+OR+#tam7

to find the new messages. Note that hashtags aren't strictly necessary.

To post, you just do your normal Twitter post with the 'tam7' keyword or #tam7 hashtag.

The @tam7 user might then be used for other purposes, such as for the big announcements.

For a current example of this approach, monitor

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=skepticamp+OR+#skepticamp

this coming weekend.
 
The JREF is now a-twittering at @jref.

I'm not sure exactly what they have planned to do with this new tool, but would expect it to serve as a fresh new way for JREF leadership and staff to interact with the skeptic community. It should complement our conference backchannel efforts as well (using @TAM7, etc.)

To get started create a Twitter account and follow @jref
 
Reed said:
However, I'd propose another, easier, approach that works well within the restrictions and which can scale well: option #3, where one uses a client that can hit search.twitter.com where one would simply visit:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=tam7+OR+#tam7

to find the new messages.
Click to expand...

Just to play devil's advocate, the downside of that is it leaves out folks who only have SMS (text messages) as their way to monitor Twitter on the fly.

But maybe that's a vanishingly small group now that even non-smartphones have decent browsers on them?
 
krelnik said:
Just to play devil's advocate, the downside of that is it leaves out folks who only have SMS (text messages) as their way to monitor Twitter on the fly.

But maybe that's a vanishingly small group now that even non-smartphones have decent browsers on them?
Click to expand...

Do these phones have feed readers, or can we find an SMS bridge to the feed? See the TAM7 Atom feed or TAM7 RSS feed.

I'm very pleased to see how well the search.twitter.com approach worked for your ATL #skepticamp event.

.
 
krelnik said:
Just to play devil's advocate, the downside of that is it leaves out folks who only have SMS (text messages) as their way to monitor Twitter on the fly.

But maybe that's a vanishingly small group now that even non-smartphones have decent browsers on them?
Click to expand...
Nope. Since my phone is hosted in Australia, it is not possible for me to receive SMS updates from Twitter. I can't remember the exact words on Twitter.com, but they don't send SMS updates to Australia and I still have to make an international call to update from my phone.

Ultimately, it is far from being a worthwhile exercise for me - at least until they get a non-international number for Australia.
 
arthwollipot said:
Nope. Since my phone is hosted in Australia, it is not possible for me to receive SMS updates from Twitter. I can't remember the exact words on Twitter.com, but they don't send SMS updates to Australia and I still have to make an international call to update from my phone.
Click to expand...

Well, one thing you can conceivably do is to get a $20 pre-paid phone when you arrive in the US, use Twitter in that phone during TAM and discard the phone later. My wife and I did that last year, as we would be doing different things and wanted a cheap way to stay in touch (we got models that allowed for free SMS between phones of the same company), and I will be using the same phone this year - although probably with a new SIM card.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom