Twitterfall's Blog

Embracing HTML5

twitterfall — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:26:00 +0000

We’ve been busy at Twitterfall, and we’ve got some new features for you. These features are all the work of x5315 so be sure to send him some thanks if you like them!

More geolocation

For a while Twitterfall has supported filtering search results by location, and since then Twitter have enabled the ability to add location data to tweets. In Twitterfall you can now view this location data by clicking the small pushpin that appears in the tweet.

What about if you want to add your own location to tweets? Using the W3C geolocation specification (not supported in all browsers) you can now add your location to your own tweets right from Twitterfall!

Improved storage of settings

Continuing the HTML5/W3C trend, Twitterfall will now use Web Storage to store your settings if your browser supports it, reverting to cookies if it doesn’t. This means you can clear your browser cookies and keep your Twitterfall settings.

More settings are saved, too. Now your list colours and your panel positions (expanded or closed) are saved.

Bug fixes and aesthetic changes

We’ve made plenty of other changes too:

Removing a list removes the tweets from the queue too.
We’ve reexamined most of the links in the right hand sidebar and added new content to them.
We have a new notification system. Instead of alert boxes or a modal box that forces your attention away from what you’re doing, a bar appears across the top of the page. We’ve also made it more verbose about what is going on. You can dismiss the bar by clicking it if it’s getting in the way.
Lots of internal optimisation.

One More Thing

Twitterfall has a lot of features. So many in fact, that we’ve made a page dedicated to all the features it has. It’s called the Twitterfall Feature Page. Check it out, you might find out about a feature you didn’t know Twitterfall had.

Twitterfall Settings Usage

twitterfall — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:22:52 +0000

This post is a mirror copy of Twitterfall Settings Usage.

Recently on Twitterfall, we’ve been removing certain settings due to lack of use or their expendability. Removing settings also means that we don’t have to test as many options as well as support different features. Often when we do this, we get several complaints that someone’s favourite feature is missing.

In the next series of updates, more settings have been removed. However, this time we’re going to show you numbers to at least give a good idea as to why these specific settings had been removed. These results are based off random sampling and the sample size is 6 figures.

Animation

The animation setting has been completely removed. The setting had turned into a boolean field (containing only two options) and we found that very few people actually used the non-default setting, as shown below.

You may notice that the setting pertaining to the showing of retweets is also a boolean field, and you may ask “Why has that not been removed?”. The usage of the retweet setting is very similar to that of the animation setting as seen below. However, we believe that this is a piece of core functionality and therefore should remain.

Speed

In the following chart, smaller numbers refer to a faster speed. We’ve decided to remove the 3000 option, and have renamed the other options to Default, Fast, and Faster. 3000 refers to a tweet being shown every 3 seconds, therefore it may be more beneficial to use the hover-pause system,

Text Size

Text size is a setting that requires a lot of testing, due to the layout change when it is reset. Therefore, removing any of the following settings would give us less work to do.

Therefore, we’ve decided to remove the Small setting, which is only used in 1% of cases. The new settings are Default, Large, Larger, and Largest.

Fall Size

The fall size setting has been cut down to the following three options: Default, Large, and Larger. If you look at this chart, you’ll see the use of different sizes as they’re currently distributed:

As you can see, the majority of use is in the default value of 20. The second largest distribution is for 200 and the third seems to be a tie between 50 and 100. The new settings are 20, 75, and 200. While the usage of 75 isn’t that high, we believe that 75 offers something to both the users using 50 and users using 100.

In conclusion, it’s plain to see that many of the options we provide aren’t greatly used and hence are expendable. This allows us to concentrate on new features without being bogged down in tests and support.

Just a bonus – this is the distribution of languages as used in our sample.

What’s new on Twitterfall?

twitterfall — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Check out x5315′s video covering these new features:

Themes removed

We’ve removed the selectable themes in an effort to simplify both Twitterfall and the maintaining of Twitterfall. At the same time, we’ve refined and unified the main theme.

Exclusions are now saved

This speaks for itself, we’ve refined our settings-saving, and so Exclusions are now saved between visits to Twitterfall.

Activity Indicator

People often have ‘problems’ with Twitterfall that are actually just problems with Twitter, so this activity indicator should help indicate that Twitter is slow getting back to you and also give an indication of what is going on behind the scenes.

New UI

Previously we used to have 6 different icons for the different actions you might want to perform on a tweet (Reply, Retweet, etc.). Now, when you hover over a tweet you see an arrow. Hovering over that arrow presents a new radial context menu which makes interacting with Twitter a lot clearer and easier.

Retweet API

Twitterfall now supports the new retweet API. We’ve observed all the conflict around this controversial API change so we’re doing it a little differently. Retweets will show up in your Twitterfall just like they used to, with the retweeters avatar and the complete text of the tweet – no confusion over different avatars or any UI changes. You can also retweet using the new API simply by clicking ‘Retweet’ as normal, and then not changing the content of the tweet. If you want to add your own comment, you can, and the system will use the old style of retweeting.

Lists support

Finally, we’ve added support for Twitter lists. This hasn’t been fully bug tested, so we appreciate any feedback if you encounter any problems

Overall, we hope you like the new features. If you have any feedback or suggestions, be sure to send us an email!

Replies Is Back and One More Thing…

twitterfall — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:10:00 +0000

In late August, we released our Reply Search API at http://replies.twitterfall.com. We had some issues with databases, and keeping hold of the stream, so we had to re-engineer it.

For developers and users, the API is the same and so is the site. On the backend, we’ve increased our input, so we should get even more replies for the most followed users.

While re-engineering the system, @jalada managed to make a lot of the system more open. This has allowed to reconfigure our Streaming Demonstration to include even more tweets.

While the demonstration isn’t very practical, it shows the massive potential of push technologies for rapid data consumption. So we hope you enjoy the Replies API and the new update demonstration.

Hastags, Images, Retweets and more.

twitterfall — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:00:00 +0000

We’re pushing out lots of new features today on Twitterfall. We’ve got more in the pipeline, but we wanted to get some out to you that we’ve been sitting on for a while now. Most of this is the hard work of @x5315, so be sure to send him a thank you tweet if you like these new features.

Persistent hashtag for conversation

If you’re taking part in a Twitter conversation around a hashtag, for example #designchat or #frys, click New Tweet, then click ‘Stick’ to open the tweet box at the bottom. In the bottom box you can add a hashtag to be appended to every tweet (actually, it fills in the box for you, so you know what your tweet is going to look like).

Presentation mode image

You probably already know that you can add a heading to our Presentation Mode. Now if you type in a URL of an image, that image will load in place of the heading (see above). Great for adding your own branding to a Twitterfall on a projector.

Twitterfall resizes based on your screen

You may not be able to tell from the above image, but Twitterfall will now widen your tweets when you widen your display to make the most of wide monitors. They don’t get too wide though, we’ve chosen some sizes that we feel work.

‘Project Retweet’ support

(it was @chartier‘s fault it came through 4 times)

Though you wont see it yet, we’ve added support for Project Retweet, Twitter’s plans to change the way retweeting works on Twitter, once Twitter switches it on, it’ll work. Retweeting within Twitterfall does not support this yet because it has not been enabled yet.

“What’s that trend?”

Thanks to the whatthetrend.com API, you can now find out what trends mean by simply clicking the little ‘i’ that appears when you hover over a trend. The information is retrieved and displayed for you right within Twitterfall.

Lots more

If a tweet contains your username, it will be highlighted as a mention, regardless of where it has come from (timeline, search, etc)
Long urls don’t break the layout any more.
Tidied up some wording.
Added support for Google Chrome Frame, which we suggest to users of Internet Explorer.
Added some answers to some Frequently Asked Questions.
Fixed issues with umlauts and other accents for searches.
Other bug fixes and performance improvements.

And finally

We’re thinking of removing some of the theme choices because we get the feeling no one uses them. Let us know on Twitter or in the comments if you do, otherwise they’ll be gone soon!

See who’s replying – right now.

twitterfall — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:58:00 +0000

Today, we’re announcing a new service called Reply Search at http://replies.twitterfall.com.

So what does Reply Search do?

Have you ever seen your favourite celebrity ask a question, and you were wondering about the answer too? Or have you ever been taking part in a competition and been wondering who else was entering?

The Reply Search service allows you to view replies to tweets based on their ID, or based on a username.

How do i use it?

When you’re looking at a tweet’s URL, it may look like this: http://twitter.com/mileycyrus/status/3505525382. So you take that last number “3505525382″ and enter it into the search box on the site. This will then show you the replies to that tweet.

Or alternatively, you can enter a username, and select one of the last 5 tweets of that user.

The API

We have an API which can be seen at http://replies.twitterfall.com/api.html. The API has several calls:

Lookup Replies – Lookup Replies allows you to access all direct replies to the particular tweet.

Top Replies – Top Replies allows you to view the top 20 most replied tweets within the last day.

Spider – Spider allows you to view all replies and recursive replies based on a particular ID. That is, if i reply to @mileycyrus and @jalada replied to me, then this would appear.

Stream – Want real-time access to the replies? Here you go. Given a particular set of IDs, the stream will give you the replies as they come in.

The API has been added into Twitterfall, and will be appearing soon.

Limitations

Due to limitations placed on us by Twitter, our service is not an entire data set. This means that we may not have a reply even if there is one. This is not an error with the system, but a limitation from the beginning.

Demonstrations and Libraries

We hope to get more demonstrations showing up on the site soon, currently we have one. We also have several wrapper libraries. If you’d like to submit a demonstration or a library, feel free to get in touch.

Fighting back spam and unwanted tweets with Twitterfall

twitterfall — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:09:00 +0000

We believe it’s very important to use our own product, that’s why both of us use Twitterfall every single day as our main Twitter client. We also believe it’s very important to listen to what people have to say about Twitterfall, and that’s why we both do a search for ‘Twitterfall OR twfall’ all the time in Twitterfall.

We’ve heard a lot of people and media talk about how spam is a big issue on Twitter. We’ve noticed it too; when it comes to trending topics we see hundreds of spam tweets all the time, making it very hard for trending topics to be as useful as it used to be.

Twitter has a very simple spam reporting process, you just have to send a direct message to @spam with the name of the user in question. But now if you use Twitterfall it’s even easier. When logged in, simply click the small ‘Report’ link above the users name. You will receive a prompt confirming you want to report them, and then Twitterfall will do the rest (it will even follow @spam for you if necessary).

Sometimes the system lets you down and you need to be able to filter your tweets yourself to remove the garbage. That’s why we’ve added a new ‘Exclusions’ filter which allows you to filter tweets beyond the simple syntax of Twitter Search.

Our exclusions filter is case insensitive, supports simple ‘from:’ syntax, and filters ALL of the tweets falling down your page. We use a clever search algorithm which means you can have as many exclusions as you like without causing problems.

Right now exclusions are not saved when you leave Twitterfall. We know that this is important, and we’re going to be working on it as soon as possible. We just really wanted to get these features out so that people can start using them and giving us feedback on them.

These are the two biggest new features for Twitterfall, and we’re really pleased with them and hope you are too. However the new features don’t end there!

You can now perform Geolocation searches without a custom search! This means that you can view any tweets about anything in your area. We’ve had loads of requests for this, and we’re really pleased to be supporting this now.

You can now edit searches inline. This means you don’t have to delete the search and read it any more, which should make using Twitterfall much easier.

When you visit Twitterfall for the first time (or have nothing saved) Twitterfall no longer defaults to ‘All Terms’. Instead, you receive a welcome message explaining some of the things you can do. This makes it much easier to set up Twitterfall for the first time with your custom searches, login, exclusions, and so on. This is a bit of an experiment and if we feel it’s working out we’ll be working on improving the ‘initial launch’ experience to help people get off to a great start with Twitterfall.

We now support Mentions. Previously we told people just to search for ‘@username’, but of course this means you miss out on private tweets, so we’ve included support for the mentions API call. Worried about using up your API? Don’t worry, because Twitterfall is a web-based service, using it does not use your API for other applications such as Tweetdeck.

Your browser tab just got more useful. Now when you’re not viewing Twitterfall, the browser tab will update showing you what new tweets you have (it will say if they are timeline tweets, search tweets, and so on). Note that support for this is varied. It works fine in Firefox, but in Safari you have to be using a different window in order for this to happen, not just tab. We’re hoping that Safari and the WebKit team solve this problem soon.

Got a Mac? Get ‘Twitterfall For Mac’ by clicking ‘Twitterfall for Desktop’ on the right hand side. This is a packaged up Site Specific Browser using the Fluid framework, correctly set up to support Twitter oAuth (which by default, Fluid doesn’t support as it opens a new window when you try to login). We’re hoping to include information about making Site Specific Browser’s for Windows and Linux soon.

Improved Presentation Mode. Now you can include a heading at the top of the Presentation Mode (a selectable theme). Great for use on a projector (for example, you could have ‘Include the hashtag #twitterfall to get your tweet up here’).

We think you’ll agree that this is a lot of new features. We hope you enjoy them all. We’ve also fixed a few bugs here and there, notably:

- Searches with long words don’t wrap any more

- Setting a large fall size works now

- Countless performance optimisations

Let us know what you think about all these new features by leaving a comment, or getting in touch with us via Twitter.

Twitterfall for iPhone version 1.05

twitterfall — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:01:24 +0000

After a month of waiting on Apple, the first major new update to the Twitterfall for iPhone application has been released. The new features are outlined on iTunes, but for reference and in more detail:

You can now search for people directly and follow them. When you open the application, just tap the user icon and type in a username to get a quick drilldown of information about that user. We added this feature because sometimes we find we just want to quickly look up a Twitter username – and then follow them – without have the distraction of anything else.

You can now add a default search term. Simply go into the Settings application on your iPhone, tap on Twitterfall, then type in your default search term. Whenever you load Twitterfall, this will appear by default in the search box when you tap the search button.

You can now turn profile images and retweets on and off. Turning retweets on and off is a popular Twitterfall feature, and turning profile images off makes the view a bit more streamlined.

You can now change the text size. This is useful for seeing more in one screen, or showing tweets to someone else (for example).

You can now set default settings in the Settings application. This is fairly self-explanatory.

We've also altered a few UI features, and fixed some bugs.

We're continually working on and refining the iPhone app, so let us know what you think by providing feedback in iTunes, or on Twitter to the @twfall account.

Presentation mode, shortening URLs, and more!

twitterfall — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:55:00 +0000

In the Apple spirit (Snow Leopard) we have been working on refining Twitterfall recently, improving some of the backend, optimising the code, and improving some of the user interface and experience. We have a few cool things to share with you today.

Firstly, Presentation Mode. We try to focus on all use cases when improving Twitterfall, and we know that a lot of people love to use Twitterfall at conferences to display the back channel, but sometimes ‘Hide Panels’ just isn’t enough – you want to show JUST the tweets, in big text, and nothing else. That’s why we’ve added ‘Presentation Mode’ to the list of themes, which automatically hides the panels, removes the top panel, and makes the text nice and big. Perfect for projecting onto a big screen.

Next, and possibly the most obvious, we have revamped a lot of the default theme. Now we have new icons, a cleaner look, and we’ve removed the performance-sucking translucent PNGs that were really reducing the visual performance of Twitterfall. Now, by default, everyone can enjoy a much smoother Twitterfall experience. We’re open to suggestions and comments about the new theme, and of course all the old themes are still present (minus ‘Simple’, which this theme is replacing). Transitions to the new theme should be painless.

My favourite new addition, is the built in URL shortener. Now when composing a new tweet, reply, DM, or retweet, you have the option of shortening your URLs for maximum tweet-length efficiency, and without having to leave Twitterfall! The replacements are performed ‘in-place’, which means you just have to type your tweet out as normal, and then hit ‘Shorten URLs’. We’re considering this in ‘beta’, as we’re still ironing out any bugs, but we’re really excited to provide this feature, and hope you find it useful. Currently we support is.gd and have no plans to support any others, but we’ll see how it goes.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Finally, there have been numerous little bug fixes and adjustments:

- General optimisations, our CSS selectors are now way more optimal.

- Added a ’200′ fall size as per request

- Links to both screencasts when you click the ‘Screencast’ link.

- Reduction of the top panel for a more streamlined view

- Optimisation of removal of tweets from the bottom of the page.

Don’t forget if you find any bugs, let us know via email, or the @twfall Twitter account. Enjoy!

WWDCfall

twitterfall — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:50:09 +0000

Today we’re announcing (a little late) a special version of Twitterfall for WWDC tomorrow. We call it ‘WWDCfall‘, and here’s why it’s the best place to go for Twitter coverage tomorrow:

We have two sources of tweets for WWDCfall: people who will be live-tweeting the conference, and everyone else. Live tweeters have priority in WWDCfall, and as such they are bigger so you can notice them easily. To avoid them being drowned out in the mass of public tweets, you will only receive a subset of public tweets, to give a taste of what people are saying about WWDC without endlessly repeating the same information over and over and over again.

These content features, plus a great simple UI, and our classic ‘fall’ effect, mean that WWDCfall will be a great place to watch the events of tomorrow’s conference unfurl, via Twitter!

Finally, so far we only have a few people we believe are live-tweeting, and would love to add more! So if you know of anyone else live-tweeting WWDC, lets us know, and we’ll add them to the list