K-Squared Ramblings

Retweet Beta

The major problem I see with the new retweet feature in beta on Twitter is that (for now) the posts are invisible to API clients. Since I do most of my Twitter activity through Twidroid (on my phone) and Twhirl (on the desktop), that means if someone I follow retweets a post using the new feature on the website, I won’t see it.

Update (Nov. 20): That was fast! Twidroid has released a new version that supports the native retweet capability, so now I can see them on my phone. It also lets you choose whether to retweet the classic way (open a post pre-filled with the original, so that you can edit it) or natively. If you use the native version and have multiple accounts, Twidroid Pro is smart enough to use the one that’s following the original poster. I haven’t quite figured out how it decides which account to use when retweeting someone you don’t follow, though.

Working on a Twitter Tools Filter for #fb Tags

Since the normal Twitter/Facebook link stopped working, I’ve switched to Selective Twitter Status. Instead of importing all your Twitter status updates to Facebook, it only pulls in the ones that end with the hashtag #fb. I’ve thrown together a plugin that hooks into Twitter Tools and filters out that tag when building a daily or weekly digest. (It was complicated by the fact that the README didn’t provide any real detail for the relevant API hook.) I tested the function outside of WordPress, then set it up to run on Thursday evening.

Good: It worked! Every instance of the #fb tag was removed, and everything else stayed.
Bad: Twitter Tools posted four copies of the digest.

Well, Twitter Tools does that sometimes. I’ll frequently see it post 2 or even 3 copies, and while I’ve determined it’s not related to WP Super-Cache, I haven’t gotten around to seriously debugging it. So I don’t know if it has anything to do with my plugin. Actually, it probably doesn’t, since it runs within the digest-building code.

For what it’s worth, Friday posted only two copies of the digest. I only found one item worth saving, though. (Well, two, but I expanded the other one into this post.)

I guess it still needs some testing. When I’m sure it’s working properly, I’ll post the code.

App Wednesday

For the record: With Twitter I generally use Twhirl on the desktop and Twidroid on my phone. #appwednesday #

Line Items for 2009-10-02

• Why do people get take-out fast food, then sit and eat it in their car in the parking lot, idling with the AC on? #
• Cool! Butterfly Boucher’s “For The Love Of Love” is today’s Free Song of the Day on Amazon MP3! #
• Problem: Twitter trending topics are quickly flooded with in-jokes & spam. There’s no context if you don’t already know what they’re about #

What the Heck is a “Pilule?”

Spammers have been using misspellings, synonyms and malapropisms for years now. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Viagra/Cialis/etc. spam using the word “pilule” instead of “pill.” At first they’d just find misspellings for the drug name, but I guess some filters are blocking or scoring on “pill,” so they’ve substituted words for that…including the hilariously ironic “soft” as an abbreviation for “soft tabs.” (Comments on this post are going to give Akismet a workout, aren’t they?)

Anyway, I found it odd that so many different spams would use the same obfuscation, particularly since it looked like it was just adding letters. So I looked it up.

It turns out that pilule is a real word. According to Merriam-Webster, it entered the English language from French around 1543. Sadly, it doesn’t refer to a cute magical creature, but to a small pill — which means that (wonder of wonders) the spammers are actually using it correctly!

One question remained: was it simply an obscure word, or an archaic one? I did a search on Google Books and came up with mostly medical texts dating from the 19th century. Just about every match in the first 15 pages was either:

• An English-language medical text published between 1830 and 1930.
• French.

The few cases where I thought I’d found a more recent reference turned out to be reprints of older material.

So it looks like the word died out (in English, anyway) during the 20th century until spammers exhumed its corpse and pressed it into service.

Side Note: Twitterspam

On Friday, I posted the discovery to Twitter on @lol_spam, then retweeted it on KelsonV. Within 15 minutes, lol_spam picked up 45 new followers and KelsonV picked up 40. They were all obviously bots:

• From the time that the second post was made, each of them followed both accounts, making it obvious they were automatically following based on a keyword search.
• They all used the same scheme for the user name (first name + first 2 or 3 letters of last name + short number).
• Many of them shared name components, as if a random generator were taking a list of first names and a list of last names and mixing them together.
• None of them had posted a single tweet. I suspect that if I’d been foolish enough to follow any of them back, they would have started spamming me with links via direct message. (I caught a subtle one last week: someone had posted a series of inane tweets for the first couple of weeks, then switched to all tooth-whitening links.)
• Several profile photos appeared on more than one account.
• Many of them were following upwards of 1,000 users. (After the first few, I stopped looking at the numbers.)
• All of them claimed to be women. (A majority? That I could believe. But every single one of them?)

I will give them credit for using ordinary-looking snapshots of women with a wide variety of appearances, rather than going for the lingerie, downblouse, outright nude (the spam filters are going to be busy, aren’t they?) and other sexy (or “sexy”) poses that usually show up on these. They actually looked like photos real people might use on their profiles.

Nice try, spambots.

@LOL_Spam: Sometimes You’ve Gotta Laugh

Sometimes you’ve just got to laugh, you know?

I remember getting my first piece of spam in college, in the days before anyone bothered with filters because spam was so rare, and thinking, “this could get bad.” Talk about the understatement of the decade! Since the mid-1990s, recipients and sysadmins have come up with more and more elaborate ways to block the annoyance, and the spammers have developed ever more convoluted ways to get around our filters.

And sometimes, those convolutions are frakking hilarious.

Weird word substitutions, funny misspellings (deliberate and otherwise), utter nonsense, creative euphemisms and more lurk in the world’s junk mail folders. Half of the spam category on this blog isn’t serious commentary — it’s examples of clueless or unintentionally funny quotes from actual spam.

All-New Spams Just For You!

These are all quotes (mostly subjects) from spam I’ve seen:

• Pirate spam: first ten picks of the day in the marrrrrket
• Ghost spam: Reeeeeeegaiiin your yooooouth with Humaaaaaaan Grooooowth Hoormooooooone!
• Crazy spam: I’m looking for a good trans_universal transportation unit.
• Recipe spam: The Zucchini Loaf recipe is not for me
• Auto-spam: Sincerely, Random Name
• Euphemism spam: Make your love torpedo drive all the way to her tanker.
• Word Salad spam: Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.
• Not-What-They-Meant spam: The way to her heart is through her wrist
• Random Star Trek spam: trill boxing
• Book Quote spam: Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken. [Believe it or not, this is not the only The Wheel of Time spam I've seen!]

A few weeks ago I realized most of these were really short, and I’d been posting them to Twitter. Why not set up a dedicated account for spam humor? So I set up @lol_spam and started posting the funnier subjects I came across, usually with a comment.

I was definitely inspired by the webcomic Spamusement, but I can’t draw worth beans. A line of snarky commentary? That I can do! And I was almost certainly influenced by artist Linzie Hunter’s Spam one-liner postcards, though I’d somehow forgotten about them until someone posted a link to the set yesterday.

How I Got 6 Followers on Twitter! (And You Can Too!)

Where am I getting the spam quotes?

• Spam sent to me (most of it in the discards, fortunately).
• Spam sent to the postmaster/admin accounts where I work.
• Spam sent to our spamtraps.

I see a lot of spam, and I don’t want to simply flood people’s Twitter streams with, well, more of it, so I’m using FutureTweets to spread things out to a more manageable 1 or 2 posts per day. At the moment I’m almost 3 weeks ahead.

I’m also keeping an eye on a twitter search for “spam subject” and retweeting the funniest ones.

Bringing the Funny

So if you use Twitter, take a look at @lol_spam. Who knows? You just might laugh!

Open Video, Watch Spam, Weird Al & Twidroid

• RT @openvideo: Help open video spread at SXSW— check out our proposals, vote for them, and tell your open video amigos #
• RT @lol_spam: Spam subject: “With our watches precious minutes will go slower.” So it’s a selling point that they don’t keep time correctly? #
• Aha! My $6 of Amazon MP3 Store credit lines up perfectly w/ Weird Al Yankovic’s $5.99 “Internet Leaks” EP! #

Twitter Apps

• Ugh. New Twidroid hides tweet button behind menu. I hated that in other Twitter apps. It’s like they took away the Easy Button. #
• What I like about Twidroid: streamlines common tasks (less so in 2.5), custom notifications per type. #
• Also: Just realized the “busy” animation in the ada titlebar is actually a miniature game of Pong. #

Tweet Cleanup in Progress

Following through on my thoughts on blogging with Twitter, I’ve started going through and cleaning up the imported Twitter digests made over the past 10 months. Some of the things I’m doing:

• Rewriting titles to be more meaningful than “Line Items for YYYY-MM-DD”
• Rewriting post slugs for the same reason. (WordPress will remember the old URL and redirect it, so it won’t break incoming links.)
• Adding tags and categories
• Reformatting single-item lists as very short posts.
• Reformatting links and expanding shortened URLs (which I’ve been doing for a while now).
• Pulling the “Powered by Twitter Tools” link from the shortest posts, generally those with only one or two items, so that it doesn’t end up dominating the related-posts data.
• Removing redundant items. No need to keep, for instance, a link to an article when it’s followed by a post with detailed commentary on the same article. Or a link to a phone photo that’s followed by a post embedding the same photo, or one of the same subject taken with a better camera.
• Removing really trivial items. Though I’m not always sure where to draw the line.
• Fixing, replacing, or just dropping dead links.
• Update: Uploading photos to show them inline instead of linked. Especially when the original link is dead.

I’ll be updating a few posts at a time for the next week or so, but it should be manageable once I’m caught up.

Meanwhile, I’ve separated my LiveJournal from my Twitter account. There’s no sense in maintaining two archives of ephemera, so I’ve decluttered my LJ: Any “Line Items” that didn’t have comments are gone, and the few that did now have proper titles, tags, userpics, etc.

Raptors and Snow Leopard

• Dreamed I was looking at photos of seagulls by @brionv, who kept joking about how velociraptors were a lot smaller than they used to be. #
• Hmm, the $4 I saved ordering Snow Leopard through Amazon almost covers the $5 for Twidroid Pro due the same day #

Hero, Twidroid, Headlines & Spam

• Just learned “Holding Out for a Hero” is cowritten by Jim Steinman. Explains why it keeps turning into “Good Girls Go to Heaven” in my head #
• Yeah, I’d be willing to spend $5 for the additional features in @Twidroid Pro. #
• Writing for Twitter via @NNgroup #
• Spam vs SPAM. I suspect it’s way too late to close the barn door on this one. Kinda like “hacker.” #

Mars, Twitter Stats, TTW etc.

• RT @lol_spam Irony: Someone just sent me email spam plugging the spam control features of their Twitter client. *headdesk* #
• Very cool! RT @ThisIsTrue COOL pic: Mars Orbiter gets photo of Mars rover, including tire tracks. #nasa #
• Interesting: graphs of your Twitter usage by hour, day, replies, retweets, etc. tweetstats.com #
• Kinda wanted to see Time Traveler’s Wife, but ad campaign & insistence that it’s not scifi are pushing me away. Low tomatometer not helping. #
• Note to self: No more light chocolate syrup. 50% less calories/carbs doesn’t help if you have to use twice as much to match the flavor. #

Rethinking the Twitter/Blog Connection

For most of a year I’ve been using Twitter Tools to link my blogs to Twitter, both announcing new blog posts on Twitter and creating digests of Twitter posts on the blog. The benefit of announcing blog updates on Twitter is obvious. Some of the reasons to pull things the other way include:

• It reminds your blog readers that you are on Twitter.
• You still have something new even when you can’t write a new post.
• You have your own archive, in case Twitter goes out of business, loses its data, or just won’t let you search old posts.

In cleaning up old digests, though, I’ve come to realize that some tweets just don’t offer much value as blog entries. Sometimes it’s redundancy, and sometimes it’s just that what’s posted just doesn’t stand up by itself.

Not Worth Blogging

Some examples:

Blog post announcements. – The actual content is already on your blog, so you don’t need an extra post linking back. Twitter Tools already filters out the ones it generates itself, but every once in a while I’ll make an “in case you missed it” tweet.

Conversation fragments. This is sort of like preserving half a phone call.

Pre-blog posts. – Sometimes I’ll post a brief thought on Twitter, then later that day (or week) I’ll expand on it. There’s not much point in keeping both the rough draft and the final.

Dead Links. – I’m really not sure what to do with these. The worst ones are the photo posts, since Phodroid seems to have either taken down or moved all its old content. When I post links to the blog I can usually add some commentary that’s worth preserving, but with Twitter you often don’t have room for both description and commentary, and you have to pick one. “This looks interesting” followed by a 404…isn’t interesting. Update: I realized I have the photos on my computer. So I just tracked the photos down by date, looked to see what fit the description, and uploaded the photo to the blog post.

Decisions

At first I figured I’d switch this blog from a daily digest to a weekly one (like I do at Speed Force) so that the Twitter posts don’t clutter up the blog too badly. Then I realized that a daily digest does have an advantage: at the rate I usually post to Twitter, a daily post is more likely to consist of posts on a single theme.

I briefly considered adopting the weekly link round-up format used by Great White Snark: manually-selected highlights. It requires a little more work, but in the end it’s probably more valuable to blog readers than a full record of everything I’ve posted on another service.

For now, I think I’ll keep things the way they are both here and at Speed Force, but be a bit more aggressive on cleaning up the auto-generated digests. Here, that’ll probably include deleting the occasional post.

Twitter Homepage Redesign

New Twitter home page: good move emphasizing conversation & search over “What are you doing?” & soup. #

Looking for a Good Android Twitter App

I’ve been having trouble trying to find a good Twitter app for my Android phone.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I’m extremely happy with Twidroid, which I’ve been using since I got the phone. The problem is that I need a good second app, because I have two accounts I want to use.

I ♥ Twidroid

I keep going back to Twidroid for two main reasons:

• It lets me do everything I want to do with Twitter on my phone.
• It makes the most common tasks as streamlined as possible.

That second item is really the key. Most other Twitter apps I’ve tried tend to get in the way. Want to post something new? Hit the menu button, then choose an item from a pop-up toolbar. Want to open a link? Press and hold, then select from a big long menu.

With Twidroid, buttons for posting a new tweet, showing replies, posting/viewing direct messages, and refreshing the view are right there at the bottom of the screen. One tap and you’re posting. One tap and you’re pulling in new messages. One tap and you’re looking at replies. And you open links by tapping a message, not pressing and holding.

It’s like the “easy button” from the Staples commercials.

Twidroid also ties in to the Android OS, making it easy to share a link directly from the browser, or share a photo directly from the image gallery.

Another nice feature is that it can break down background notifications by category. If I want it to check for replies and direct messages and sound an alert, but not worry about general posts until I look, I can tell it to do so.

I Tweet

I Tweet ($2.99) is very close, and I’ve been using it as my secondary app for several months. It ties into the OS, does photo uploads and URL shortening, lets me customize notifications, etc… but it has a tendency to get in the way. The user interface is pretty, but cluttered. The things I want to do most often require multiple taps (or worse, press-and-hold, like opening a link).

The worst part is that if I don’t let it check periodically for new messages, I can’t tell it to pull in new ones when I launch it… and it won’t always retrieve older posts. If I post something before hitting refresh (which is hidden behind the menu button), it won’t pull in anything further back than the post I just made.

Trial and Error

At this point, I’ve got my personal account @KelsonV set up on Twidroid. That’s the one I have linked to this blog and to Facebook. I’ve got @SpeedForceOrg running on I Tweet. I’ve been using it a lot lately with the lead-up to Comic-Con International, and those few problems have started really bothering me.

So I tried a bunch of others this weekend.

• Twitli – I used this one for a while a few months ago, but it was kind of buggy. The last straw came when I was trying to upload a photo during WonderCon, and I switched the account to Twidroid for the duration of the con. I only gave it a glance this time around.
• Loquacious – nice w/ multiple accounts & photo integration, but incomplete. No notifications, can’t share a link from browser — heck, no settings at all other than login+password and filters. Either that or the demo is crippleware in addition to being time-limited. Also, suffers from press-n-hold syndrome like I Tweet.
• Twitta – too basic.
• Twit2go – Photo uploads worked decently, and it was able to do notifications the way I wanted, but it didn’t hook into the OS as well as Twidroid or I Tweet. And it was yet another case of press-and-hold to open a menu that includes opening links. I decided to stick with it for a few days, though, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it did pull new messages automatically when opened, so I wouldn’t have to worry about missing anything. Gave up on it when I tried to retweet a post that ended up being too long, and rather than let me edit it down to size it just cut off the end…which happened to be the link.

So I’m back to Twidroid and I Tweet for now. I’ll probably end up swapping the accounts again and putting SpeedForceOrg on Twidroid, since that’s the one I’m likely to be using most during the con. *sigh* Why do I have to make things more complicated for myself than they have to be?

Update: A few months after I wrote this, Twidroid released Twidroid Pro, which adds several features on top of the free version…including multiple accounts!

Twitpocalypse Tweets

• Blaming Twitter for the #twitpocalypse is like blaming the Gregorian calendar for Y2K. #
• The Twitpocalypse Explained, in layman's terms. #
• Twidroid seems to have survived the twitpocalypse #
• Schadenfreude: amused that #twitpocalypse hit iPhone's @twitterrific but not Android's @twidroid #
• Oh good, updates are done! I can go home now! And put on some music to get Avenue Q out of my head. #