Tag Archives: twitter

Embed only the video from another post on X or Twitter

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Twitter has a new-ish feature that lets you embed only the video from another post or tweet in a post/tweet of your own (without quote-replying the source tweet itself). Only the video is then embedded in your post, and a small attribution appears at the bottom identifying where the video came from:

In the screenshot above, Sarah is sharing a video that was originally shared by Luc, but she’s not embedding/quoting Luc’s tweet itself – only the video. This post will cover how to do that yourself, both on the desktop/web and in the iOS Twitter app on iPhone.

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Regarding Twitter’s “new login from unknown device” alerts…

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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One nice thing that’s come about from the increased scrutiny that online security has been receiving is that it’s gone from being considered paranoid to becoming completely expected to be notified regarding incidents such as new logins, password changes, failed 2FA attempts, and other security-related activity. But any time a metric gets noticed, it also gets gamified and either decreases in value or ceases to be relevant altogether – a principal first documented by British economist Charles Goodhart and now known as Goodhart’s Law and demonstrated in this wonderful Sketch Plantations depiction:

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Twitter search results truncated after downtime

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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It seems that after yesterday’s extended downtime for Twitter (which no one really raised much of a fuss about, since it’s just another routine day for tweeps worldwide — unlike, say, Skype) has some (severe?) repercussions: search results are being limited to the past ~6 days for low-volume queries.

A quick search for “git tower” on Twitter returns results limited to the past six days, only. (A quick shout-out: Tower.app for OS X gets our award for best Mac development tool of 2010!) And the same goes for searches for “NeoSmart” or “EasyBCD.” (Unfortunately, none of these topics are anywhere near “trending” on twitter, and the low volume of search results serves to prove the point).

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Is Twitter Actively Censoring Human Rights Activists in Palestine?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Quick background: earlier today, IDF soldiers stormed a relief flotilla/convey headed towards Gaza carrying food, medical supplies, and other relief materials in an attempt to bypass a blockade of the Gaza territories. The raid on the flotilla resulted in the death of 16 aid workers.

A post on twitpic earlier today asks

Can’t get why #flotilla is not trending; censored, why?

and articles on the web search for explanations, since it’s very clear that flotilla is indeed a trending topic, going by the trendistic results (see below).

Some are saying that twitter needs to manually approve trending topics to prevent abuse, etc. but there’s something that doesn’t add up: why is twitter actively blocking searches for #flotilla?

You can check it out for yourself: for the past hour or so, searching twitter for #flotilla turns up the dreaded “Something is technically wrong” page but searching for any other #topic works!

As they say, the proof is in the pudding (images after the jump):

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Verified Accounts: Twitter’s Next Attempt at Making Money?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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How much would you pay for people to know you’re really you? That the updates coming in every 2 minutes on that twitter page come from yours truly and not someone else… someone else pretending to be you?

If you’re like most people, the answer is not much. But there are people out there that really care, and with good reason. If you’re the FBI, Oprah Winfrey, or one of the million other celebrities currently on Twitter, you probably don’t want someone out there passing themselves off as yourself while posting fake updates to an account literally millions are watching.

Some people to whom money is not an issue already pay thousands of dollars for meaningless SSL certificates – something tucked away in the corner of your browser window that no one pays much attention to. But imagine if Twitter were to start offering “verified accounts” that have been authenticated as belonging to a particular person or institute… how many of these celebrity accounts would suddenly turn into cash cows for Twitter?

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Facebook’s Staggered Maintenance Procedure

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Facebook has one of the world’s largest server farms and for good reason – with all that traffic no amount of servers can be considered too much. While Facebook’s uptime is a lot better than many most of the other “Web 2.0” services, we’ve been seeing a lot of maintenance-related downtime recently (see possible reasons below).

You’ve got to hand it to the Facebook team though, they have scaling and uptime perfected down to an art. For instance, when servers are due for updates, the maintenance is performed in a staggered manner, updating one set of servers at a time as attested to by the unavailability of certain Facebook accounts while others can still be accessed.

If your account is on one of he servers being serviced/maintained/upgraded, you’ll see a message like this:

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The Real Reason Twitter Will Fail

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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Twitter is all the hype right now, you don’t need us to tell you that. For some odd reason, something as simple and basic as a one-liner blog site has captured the minds of the online world. For two minutes, put aside whatever feelings you may have on the matter. Good or bad, just set them aside for a couple of minutes and look at it from a different point of view.

Let’s take the best-case scenario here. Twitter continues to increase in popularity, and can handle any and all problems that come up with their system. Let’s assume Twitter keeps on booming. What happens next?

As with all other social networks, the goal of Twitter is connections. NeoSmart Technologies connects ideas, Twitter connects people. Now there are a billion people on Twitter: they check out each other’s profiles, and get to one-another. What then? They head off to each person’s blog, Facebook, or even MySpace to get in touch: leave one another messages, check out their friends, share ideas, photos, and videos.

At the end of the day, people are going to be leaving Twitter to go to their friends’ blogs and sites, and hooking up with them there. The point is, Twitter isn’t filling the void. It fills up a small portion of it, but not enough to satisfy. If at the end of the day, people are going to leave it for other sites, they’ll stop going back.

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