Fitting the battle of life

The Guardian is reporting that talks between Facebook and Twitter regarding a sale of the latter to the former have died out. Well, thank twit.

I think I completely agree with Jemima Kiss when she says in this article that

though it would undoubtedly take Twitter to a more mainstream audience (Twitter had 6 million users as of last month – Facebook has more than 100m) it would also dilute some of the early adopter power juice of Twitter among a community that is still experimenting with how to use it, rather than pigeon holing it as a lightweight friend updating service

I am a fan of multiple services that do single jobs very well. Facebook isn’t nearly as good as Flickr at photos. Facebook isn’t nearly as good as YouTube at video. Facebook statuses are just not as good as tweets – commenting on other people’s status just isn’t the same as an @reply.

Now, companies working together to integrate services – or preferably, letting people do this by opening up APIs – is something I like to see. Being able to show off your flickr photos or latest tweets on your blog or whathaveyou is a good idea. But yanking Twitter out of its (valuable) niche and forcing it into Facebook wouldn’t have been a good one.

Allow my tweets to appear as statuses, by all means (but looking at my profile recently, I’ve decided I might stop that due to sheer volume), but do it by allowing applications to use each service’s APIs. Too many technologies/webapps owned by one webapp to rule them all just doesn’t appeal to me.

Or, how I learned that the newest isn’t always the best.

Firefox got an upgrade last night, to beta 5 (the final beta before release later this month) – and my two favourite extensions – in fact, the only two I ever really use – are incompatible. Yes, AdBlock and Twitterfox are no longer my friends. This is bad for a few reasons:

• ads are evil, obtrusive and just plain annoying
• the web looks so nice without them (oh, I remember the singing ads on facebook…)
• I am getting addicted to twitter.

I look forward to seeing these fixed sharpish!

This one’s for Londoners: follow the tubinator for updates one which tube lines are currently playing up (updated every 15minutes). However, the short form of tweets means messages can be cut off, as in the current “Broken tubes: Circle (Part suspended), District (Part suspended), East London (Bus service), Hammersmith” – surely removing the ‘Broken tubes:’ bit would be sensible, as you’re reading the status for a reason. I might message the guy who created it; it appears to have surfaced earlier this month.

So, to recap my twitter treats:

• twitter from irssi,
• google calendar integration,
• follow the plotline of a short story (or at least, one strand of it),
• and now tube updates.

Is there anything twitter can’t do? Aside from make me another cup of tea?

Now that Evolution has (or at least, now I’m aware that it has) support for syncing with your google calendar, I’ve found (quite without looking) a handy way of adding events to your calendar via twitter.

By following gcal on twitter, and authorising twittercal to access your google account, you can send gcal a direct message to add events (e.g. “d gcal Birthday party tomorrow at 9pm”).

I’ve not found any privacy concerns on my (limited) googling yet, so it looks to be secure, unlike the G-Archiver app that surfaced a while ago – but of course, it’s up to you to trust it or not. (To be honest, I haven’t yet decided – just thought I’d put this tip out there for whoever might be interested.) There seem to be over 3,000 people following gcal on twitter at the moment. Once I’ve set it up I’ll report back.

(Setting up Evolution with your google calendar is as easy as File->New->Calendar, selectiong ‘Google’ from the drop-down box and filling in the relevant information.)

Update: I’ve now tried this, and 15mins later still no appearance of the events I was trying to create. Score -2 so far, not looking good for twittercal.

Following on from a previous post on this, I have worked out the easiest way to get this sorted. The instructions I had found didn’t work because I couldn’t figure out how to get the command ‘wd’ to simply run the script wd.pl wherever I’d saved it, and in the end it was a lot simpler for me to do the following:

Save the wd.pl script from here into ~/.irssi/scripts/

Create an alias for it in irssi by typing: /alias twit /exec ~/.irssi/scripts/wd.pl $*
It would probably be a good idea to /save as well.
This means you can run the script (with arguments) by typing /twit.

/twit will now display your friends’ latest updates.
/twit -sv Updating status from irssi! will change your status to “Updating status from irssi!”

Really not as difficult as I’d thought; I was just getting myself all confuddled.

[Update: You can't use brackets in updates unless you put the update into quote marks, like /twit -sv "Yay :)" - cheers to mgdm!]

Well, having read this blog post this morning, I wondered why on earth I should have yet another window open to update my twitter status. Twitux is all very fine and dandy, but so many more mouse-clicks away than I wanted. At times like these, Google is our friend.

There is are two relevant pages, this one which describes how to use a script from this site (to view updates and update your own status) in irssi. However, just downloading the wd script doesn’t work: it depends on a couple of packages I didn’t have. A little apt-cache searching reveals the following two packages with which it did indeed work:

libjson-perl
libdatetime-format-strptime-perl
(You’ll also need libwww-perl, but I already did)

Installing both of those let me run the wd script, showing my friend’s updates. At the moment for testing purposes I have the script in my ~/.irssi/scripts/ folder, and run it using /script load, but want now to be able to run it as /exec wd to follow the instructions on the first site. Hmm, guess that’ll mean moving it somewhere and creating an alias in the terminal?

(I will continue this once I get back from a booze run for a house party tonight!)