Twitter places launches but breaks everything else causing major outages

Posted: June 15th, 2010 | Author: Chris Norton | Filed under: General Twitter, Twitter Apps, Twitter Tool | Tags: , , , | 2 Comments »

As you probably already know the Tweasier team has been busy rolling out the beta of our Twitter application this week. It has been a bit of a bumpy ride due to several Twitter outages over the last week or so (not the best timing) and a few speed issues which the team here are working on.  We have had some great feedback from our users and we will be sending out more invites as soon as we have fixed everything.

Well whilst we have been busy, so has Twitter, as it is currently rolling out a new feature to help meet the demand for location tagging. Unfortunately, we are lead to believe this feature has lead to a few outages of its own. Twitter has now fixed these problems so hopefully everything should be fine and we won’t be seeing the Fail Whale anytime soon.

Twitter Places was launched earlier this week and it allows users to tell their followers where exactly their tweet is coming from. It has used the example of world cup stadiums in South Africa which could be tagged to inform individuals if they are actually at the stadium.

Twitter Places

People can click onto a Twitter Place within someone’s message to see all the other tweets that it has been used for.

The Twitter blog revealed several other features of this launch including: 

    • Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as "Ritual Roasters," you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.
    • API: We are releasing API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications. 
    • Support for more browsers: Now, you can add location to your Tweets from any browser—Safari and Internet Explorer, in addition to Chrome or Firefox.

You need to look out for the "add your location" box as it unveils the new addition in 65 different countries. We are pretty excited that it is set to launch another API to allow Twitter Places to be used with Twitter applications (like ours), so you may well see this feature cropping up in Tweasier soon too.

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The Twitter API – Expression Tracker

Posted: December 8th, 2009 | Author: Paul Crouch | Filed under: Tweasier, Twitter Apps | Tags: , | 1 Comment »

Hi, I’m Paul, I’m going to be writing a few guest posts on the Tweasier blog, and this is my inaugural post so please be gentle with me.

I thought I’d make my first post about my favourite, and most colourful, use of the Twitter API; the ‘expression tracker’ We feel fine. (to get on to the tool click

We feel fine

‘interactive version’ on the We feel fine homepage).

We feel fine searches Twitter for any mention of a range of emotions from ‘abandoned’ to ‘Zippy’ and puts them into thousands of tiny balls bouncing around your screen. Just click on a ball and you can see the tweet inside it. You can filter the tweets to only include certain emotions, tweets posted when it’s sunny or tweets by people in their twenties. You can even select tweets about being nervous by people in their thirties on rainy days.

We feel fine isn’t particularly useful but it is very creative and fun so I thought I’d point it out to anyone who hasn’t had the good fortune to stumble across it yet.

You can read my blog here.

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