Postcards From My Life

Dear Reader,

[UPDATE: This contest is now over. Thanks to my friends at SQLYog for the licenses and congratulations to the winners.]

My buddies over at SQLYog asked me the other day what they could do to help spread the word about the Enterprise version fo SQLyg and how cool it is to the PHP community. (For a detailed description of how cool it is, see my recent post “SQLYog – A Superficial Review“) I told them what I tell everyone, free is good!
(more…)

Dear Reader,

More specifically,

Dear reader thinking that it is a good idea to write a twitter bot that automatically spews tweets without regard to anyone else because everyone obviously wants to know what your bot has to say,

I guess because Oprah is now on twitter, things are exploding. Today alone, I’ve noticed 5-7 new bots on twitter polluting my search time lines spouting drivel and polluting them to the point of almost uselessness.

How I use twitter

I guess first, I should explain how I use twitter since different people use it differently. One of my jobs at Ibuildings is to be a PHP Community Evangelist. It’s the awesome part of my job and I love it. My twitter persona revolves around that aspect of my life. I try to make most of my tweets valuable to at least someone. (ok, my recent rants against #skype were just therapeutic for me.) My general rule of thumb is that most of my tweets need to inform or amuse.

I like finding people asking questions tagged #php and helping by answering them when I can. I like finding new blog posts about #php and helping spread the good ones. The rise of using search and hashtags has really expanded the usefulness of twitter for me…until now.

Rise of the Spewbots

Over the past few months I’ve seen an increasing number of bots tweeting. I have coined the term spewbots because for the most part, these bots spew forth data that I can easily get elsewhere should I want it and they add very little to the conversation. These bots break down into four categories.

Accidental spewbots

Today I got 6 svn check in notices from a spewbot. Now honestly, I’m sure they weren’t trying to pollute anyone’s time line. However, because they use the Zend Framework, I get their notices. I’ll refrain from ranting about the stupidity of tweeting svn check in notices, if that’s your thing and it doesn’t affect me then hey, go for it. Please let me make one request though. Protect your account’s timeline. A simple check of a box on your account’s settings and your tweets won’t go out into the public time line. Anyone who wants can follow your bot and once you approve them, can can partake of your spewy goodness.

Hashtag repeaters

I really don’t understand why some people feel the need to automatically re-tweet things that people tag. @hashwordpress is an excellent example of this. If anyone wants every tweet that has the #wordpress hashtag, all they need to do use search.twitter.com, twitterfall.com or any of a hundred ways to get these tweets; re-tweeting them helps no one.

Can we please just get rid of these? If you are the owner of one of these bots, please either shut it down, protect it’s time line so that you are not a spewbot, or leave me a comment here telling me why I’m wrong and they are really a good thing.

Bot testing spewage

All of a sudden on Friday, my entire twitter time line was replaced by a series of tweets from a single account. Each of them were just random words and the #php hashtag. In my frustration, I tweeted to this bot to please stop polluting my time line. Much to my surprise, I got an email about 20 minutes later from the owner of the bot asking what the problem was. I explained to them that their testing was polluting the #php hashtag. I asked them to replace the # with another character and they wouldn’t be bothering anyone. Much to my surprise, they agreed and I haven’t seen a tweet from them again.

If you are testing, there is no need to tag your tests. You are monitoring them and can tell if your bot is working. If you refuse to protect your bot’s time line during testing at least don’t tag the tweets, please?

…and the rest

There’s not really a way to classify the rest of the spewbots. Most of them that pollute the #php time line are job related. If they only tweeted one or two tweets a day it probably wouldn’t annoy me so much but you get bots like @fresh_projects, @freelance_jobs and @joomlajobs that tweet multiple tweets at a time several times a day.

I really don’t have a good way to handle these. To be honest, they are like like Democrats, they piss me off but they’ve got as much right to be here as I do. I really wish my client of choice, twhirl, would let me right click on an account and tell it to never ever show me a tweet from this account again. That way they are free to pollute, but I am free to ignore them. Actually, this would be an awesome feature to implement in twitter itself but since it takes 30 days to get a response from them on a simple bug report/request these days, the chances of that happening are slim. So for now, I’ll just have to put up with them.

If anyone has a good idea for how to cleanse the #php search timeline of these parasites, I’d love to hear it. I tried building a Y!Pipes filter to filter them out but Pipes won’t check the feed often enough to pickup all the tweets.

Conclusion

Until we find a permanent solution to the problem of spewbots, I’ guess we just have to put up up with them. I filter the most egregious of the spewbots with the -from: option in search.twitter.com but there’s a 140 limit to the search query so I have to constantly have to re-evaluate which ones I filter and which ones I put up with.

I’m open to ideas on how to combat the problem of spewbots, especially the last group of them. For now though, I’m out of ideas.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Sometime recently I was surfing around and came across a blog post where a user wrote a PHP script – fully OO, it was very pretty – that would pop the top line off of a file and tweet it, that struck me as odd. Actually, first it struck me as stupid since all twitter.com needs is another mindless bot spewing lines from a file at regular intervals, once I got past stupid it struck me as odd.
Update: ‘tweetFromFile’ PHP Class is the original blog post.

I used to have a friend named Michael Chaney. (I’m pretty sure he and I are friends but we’ve not spoken since June.) Michael once posted in an email that one of his hobbies/quirks was that he would try and find ways to condense complex tasks into a single line of bash script. (I’m paraphrasing) I thought of that email when I read the “Tweet a line from a file” post. It just strikes me that it’s a bit overkill to fire up PHP for a simple task like this.

Before you ask, no, I’m not falling out of love with PHP but it’s a “right tool for the job” issue. PHP can be used to do this, but it’s not really necessary. So, if we are going to ignore the web’s all-purpose sledge hammer, what can we use? How about the tools that come with Linux?

Source Material

First, you are going to need a file to tweet. Now if you are using this to do something stupid like tweet UTC every minute or the status changes of your dorm room lamp then stop right now. I do not want the powers I’m going to teach you used for evil. However, if you are planning something like tweeting the “Dead Parrot” skit one line at a time, read on my friend and make sure you ping me so I can follow you. Either way you will need a file full of single lines less than 140 characters each. For my testing, I started with a Unix fortune file “bofh-excuses”

If you are on CentOS?

yum install fortune-bofh-excuses

If you are not on CentOS, figure it out on your own.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the user to figure out how to strip out the cruft from the file or just create your own file of wit ready for tweeting. Whatever you do, name the file tweets.txt and put it in your working directory.

Twitter Account

Yes Sparky, you will need a twitter account to play with this code. No Sparky, you can’t borrow mine. If you don’t have one or you don’t want to bother your followers with inane test messages, I suggest registering a new one. Grab one nobody would want. (Not that I did, my test account is @elePHPant)

The Command

Here it is in all its glory for those too anxious to wait for my explanation.

head -n 1 tweets.txt | xargs -r -s 140 -I {} curl -s -d "status={}" -u twitterAcct:p.ass.word  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json > /dev/null ;sed -i '1d' tweets.txt

For those of you who see line noise from an old modem, let’s go through this line by line. Note: broken up like this is will not work, if you are copying and pasting, use the one above.

1
2
3
4

head -n 1 tweets.txt
xargs -r -s 140 -I {} 
curl -s -d "status={}" -u twitterAcct:p.ass.word  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json > /dev/null
sed -i '1d' tweets.txt

1. This command returns the first line from the tweets.txt file.
2. This command helps us build a command to execute using the output form line #1. The -I {} is critical here as it’s what tells xargs to take the input – in this case coming from stdin – and replace every instance of {} with it. For safety’s sake, the -s 140 makes sure we don’t send twitter anything over 140 characters. Finally, the -r makes sure that it doesn’t call curl if there is no line to pass in.
3. This is the heart of the command, a call to curl.
   • -s, tells curl to run silent. This does not prevent output but it suppresses curl’s normal output. Anything coming from twitter will still be output.
   • The next option, -d specifies the string of data to be POSTed. Since we need this to be POST instead of GET, we have to specify the data string this way. The string following the -d command is the data to be sent. This is normal HTML name=value pairs separated by ampersands.
   • -u allows us to specify the username:password pair. Twitter uses basic authentication so it’s easy to authenticate simple tools like this. It is also highly insecure since you have to actually type your username and password into the cron script. This is one of these don’t try this at home things.
   • The next parameter is the url to call. If you have questions about how to call twitter’s API, check out the twitter API page for details.
   • Finally, because this command will return data, the final portion of this command will dump anything twitter sends back, in our case, JSON, to /dev/null. There is no error checking on this command, it either works and you see the tweet, or it fails and you don’t.
4. This command pops the first line off the file using sed, the Serial EDitor. The -i command tells sed to edit the file in place. the ’1d’ says delete the first line. The final parameter to the sed command is the name of the file.

That’s it, drop all of those into a cron job that runs every 10 minutes, place 100 lines tweets.txt that advertise your blog, weight loss, male enhancement or a porn site and you too can reduce your followers to just the other bots who are following you in hopes that you will follow them so they can spam you.

I really don’t expect anyone to find this useful but it was an interesting exercise in bash, a tool I don’t get to use nearly as much as I would like to.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

p.s. If you don’t follow me on twitter and want to, I’m a real person, not a bot. Follow me at @calevans.

Some Related Content:

Related articles by Zemanta

• basic Linux Bash cheet sheet for cold days (idojava.blogspot.com)

Dear Reader,

Of late I’ve watched several companies start to use twitter without a clue or a strategy. Here are my Five Twitter Rules of Engagement that will help companies get the most value out of twitter. (or at the very least keep them from embarrassing themselves.)

1. Do not ask for advice that you are not willing or unable to act on.
   I see a lot of companies asking “Tell us how we can make it better”. If you say that, really mean it. If you ask me how to improve your cell-phone design and I tell you it needs to be 1/2 its current size for me to like it, don’t argue with me about it, you asked my opinion. If you can’t make it’s 1/2 the size or worse yet, if you have no intention of making substantial changes in the product based on solicited feedback, just don’t ask.
2. Be sincere
   This is closely related to #1. When someone criticizes your product, sincerely thank them for taking the time to review your product. Even if all they say is “I f’n hate product X” At least they took the time to look at your product. If you really want to know why, ask them but ask sincerely. If you know why and are already fixing it, let them know. If you know why and can’t/won’t fix it, ignore them. You will not change their mind by arguing for your product in 140 chr. bites. Just let it go, you can’t please everyone.
3. Engage with a purpose
   Again, closely linked to point #1, make sure that you have a reason to engage someone publicly before engaging. Defend your product and its honor when necessary. However, don’t feel the need to engage or even acknowledge every public tweet. Engage someone when you can make a positive difference in the situation.
4. Do not argue
   Nobody who seriously wants to engage with your company is interested in arguing with you. If you argue publicly there are really only two outcomes.
   1. The person you are engaging bests you and you look like a fool
   2. You best person you are engaging, they feel like a fool, and they never do business with you.

   If I am your customer and I say your product sucks, don’t argue the point with me. Obviously, I have a reason for thinking this and you need to engage me constructively to find that reason and see if you can correct it.

5. Move it off-line quickly
   This one is the most important of them all. When someone says that your customer service sucks, don’t publicly acknowledge it, privately acknowledge it and ask how you can help. If you can’t find an email address or IM account for the person, then publicly reply asking them to follow you so you can DM them. Get it out of the public timeline and engage the person one-on-one. If you can solve the problem, do so. Once it is completely solved and you’ve made a new friend, then if you are comfortable with the person, ask them to tweet that they got the problem resolved. Chances are, they are so surprised that they have already done this but you need some closure on the issue publicly. If they don’t feel comfortable announcing the resolution then you can but it has more impact if they do it.

None of this is rocket science so it always astounds me that companies don’t know this stuff. PR departments already know these things but the line level employees don’t. Here’s a clue, the responses from line-level employees are much more effective than the ones being regurgitated out of the PR/Marketing department. Don’t try and clamp down on these people, train them, teach them how to respond and teach them who to go to with issues. Most importantly, teach them these rules of engagement.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Most of you who know me know that I spend way too much time on twitter.com. During all that time, I’ve learned a lot about twitter and the twitter community. I’ve seen companies succeed using it to talk to their customers and seen companies fall flat on their face. I even recorded an episode of Sixty Second Tech on the subject and even wrote a blog post about it.

Recently I started wrapping everything I’ve learned up into a single document. By the time I finished, it was 20 pages long. I sent it off to several reviewers, marketers and others, took their feedback and refined it over time and am really happy with the results.

So if you’ve ever wondered what works and what doesn’t when marketing on twitter, “Twitter for Marketers” is for you.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Over at the Small Business Idea Forum, Staci asked about twitter and I replied. This, along with a couple of other things today are pointing me towards a blog post and possible a podcast this weekend.

Twitter has gone from WTH to ZOMG to “Hey, I can use this for my benefit!” I like any tool that hits that last stage.

Three things have come together today to prompt me to write this post.

First, my friend and editor Elizabeth Naramore tweeted today:

someone explain to me the reasoning behind a company “following me” on twitter; are they just hoping I follow them too?

She’s not the first person that has noticed this trend, just the latest. The trend of following everyone on twitter because a lot of people automatically follow you back is growing. The obvious benefit is if you follow 10,000 people on twitter and 10% follow you back because they don’t know any better, when you post, 1,000 people see your post. So as a side note to this blog let me jsut advise any twitter user out there, don’t auto-follow. When you get a twitter “follow” notice, check out who it is. If it’s not someone you know then it’s twitter spam. Don’t bother to follow them. (You don’t have to block them though, let them artificially inflate your follower number.)

Then I saw this post from Michal Arrington. (Whom I do not follow because I do not know and usually don’t care to hear what he has to say outside of techcrunch.com.) It was an A-Ha! moment for me. I do a lot of scanning with Google Alerts but his point is very important.

Twitter is the place where conversations are exploding well before they even make it to mainstream blogs.

It’s not enough these days to just monitor the web via Google alerts or some paid clipping service. Blogs are a trailing indicator these days. To be on top of your brand you have got to take it to the next level. tweetscan.com lets you do just that.

Finally, a forum post over at the Small Business Idea Forum again mentioned twitter and my reply there got me thinking.

Twitter started as a way to connect friends but is fast becoming a powerful marketing and business intelligence tool. I cover the former briefly in my forum post and on Sixty Second Tech but it’s the latter that I really want to talk about.

tweetscan.com

tweetscan.com is just what you think it is, a search engine for twitter. Yes, Google indexes twitter but these days that just not fast enough. Thankfully the guys and gals behind tweetscan solve that problem for us. It looks like they database and index the public feed. I don’t know where they get their resources but I hope to god they stay alive because this is something that twitter really needs.

If you have looked at their page by now and can’t figure out how to use it, please turn in your Internet secret decoder ring and shut off your modem. If you did figure it out, bully for you, you are as smart as a fifth grader! A couple of notes. If you read their blog and wiki (these people are on the web 2.0 ball!) then you know that they support OR and “-” operators. This makes life ever so much more interesting. GO ahead, play with a few queries like cats OR dogs. Hopefully they will add AND and NOT in there soon.

So, you can scan for topics. That’s kind of cool but other than replacing google egosurfing with twitter egosurfing what’s the pint, right? Here’s the point. Search for your brand! In my case I have searches for “Cal Evans”, Zend and ZF. All fine and good, as Arrington points out, I can now see things before they happen as twitter is a leading indicator. But who wants to go visit their page every so often and execute a series of searches?

FEED ME!

Thankfully, the people behind tweetscan are fully Web 2.0 compliant and they provide me with a custom feed for each search I execute. This means I can plug the RSS feed of the above search for “Cal Evans”, into ANY feed reader and voila, instant ego surfing!

Now, I use Google Reader as my primary feed reader and it does a wonderful job. However, these feeds (I’ve got 8 now) are much more important to me than anything I have in Google Reader. I almost need them to be push. The next best thing to push is pull in a program I already use. I did NOT want to have to install yet another piece of software to make this whole thing work. (Que Attensa to enter stage right) I used to use this Outlook plugin back when I was at Jupiter Hosting. It’s a great way to add RSS feeds into Outlook. It’s made some progress since 2005 and now is very unobtrusive.

Wrap It Up

So, to summarize; tweetsearch.com + Attensa’s outlook plugin = quick and easy business intelligence. Don’t forget to add feeds for your major competitors brands as well!

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=
So,

Dear Reader,

Those of you who follow me on twitter already know this but I’ve been reticent in blogging this. My latest project is to move all of my poetry to a new site, Cyrano’s Apprentice.

If you are into poetry, well, you probably want to steer clear of it. However, if you didn’t know that I wrote poetry, it’s good for a giggle.

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=

Dear Reader,

Ok, yes, I’m a twitterhead, thanks to the magic of programs like flock and Spaz I tweet daily now. However, Twitter, like any good web 2.0 application, is finding new uses like ioubeer and other innovative ideas.  At DevZone we are starting to experiment with using twitter as a reply mechanism for our podcast PHP Abstract and I know others are starting to work in this area.  Basically to me, twitter is an API to instantly contact, by whatever means they want, anyone who wants to share their attention with me.

Using PHP Abstract as an example, right now, to get people’s attention that we have posted a new episode on DevZone, I post on dzone.com, digg.com, and facebook.com. Now however, for the past 3 episodes, I’ve also been posting on the PHP Abstract twitter account. So if you want to know that there is a new episode, all you have to do is follow phpabstract. While that is cool, one of the problems we seem to be having is that people don’t listen to PHP Abstract siggint at their computer, while on the DevZone page.  This means that people can’t easily reply to a podcast.  However, now, thanks to twitter, starting next week (doesn’t work yet, don’t bother) people will be able to tweet @phpabstract and the comment will go back to DevZone and be posted. So we now have a two-way API to talk with our listeners.

I think that going forward we will see more and more uses come forward for twitter. it reminds me of the recent Cisco commercial where the producers of a movie want to contact everybody about a sequel. (oh yea, my heart skips a beat because the producer of a movie has figured out how to rehash all the jokes in the first movie and re-package it as “fresh” content)  The producer enters the message into his phone and it calls one person, emails one and TXT messages one.  Well, we don’t need Cisco or an expensive phone system to do that now, we’ve got twitter. I can enter a message into twitter, everyone who is interested in what I have to say can follow me and respond. Instant API into my attention sphere.

Now what would be cool is twitter groups…

Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
=C=