How to activate 280 characters limit Tweet

Update: Twitter has blocked this. It was fun though.

Twitter is currently testing to extend the current 140 characters limit to 280 for a single tweet. This feature is said to be available to a small selected group of users only but there is a way to get this 280 characters extension activated.

Developer Juliette Pretot has published a method to activate the 280 character tweets. I have personally tested it and it is working as expected.

Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!! Long tweet > 140 characters!!!

— Hon Chun (@hongjun) September 27, 2017

Guide to Writing Great Headlines on Twitter, Facebook and Your Blog

An insightful article written by the Buffer on how writing great headlines on Twitter, Facebook and your Blog.

Twitter Photo Filters

How to hide your tweets from Google search?

Ever wanted to remove one unwanted tweet of yours from Google Search? Even if you delete the tweet, Google will still keep the tweet in their cache.

To remove the tweet immediately, Twitter has this suggestion:

1. Copy the Twitter URL you'd like removed (if you already deleted the tweet just follow Google's URL).
2. Head over to Google's Content Removal page.
3. Paste in the Twitter link that you copied in the first step and submit your request.

» How to Hide Your Tweets from Google | Lifehacker

Infographics: Which Social Network Should You Use — and When?

Twitter able to block tweets and accounts but tweets must still flow

Twitter announced on Thursday that it is now able to block tweets and accounts from appearing in specific countries to comply with governments' request to censor information. Before that, Twitter can only block globally.

As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

From Twitter, it will not block tweets and will stay reactive. It will review and will withhold specific content when requested and necessary.

When an account is blocked in a specific country, users of that country will see that blocked profile as below:

And when a tweet is withheld instead, the tweet will be seen as below:

What If Twitter has misidentified your country? You will then have to update your country in the Account Settings.

For more information, read Twitter's policy.

» Tweets still must flow | Twitter Blog

Facebook, Twitter and MySpace launch "Don't be Evil" bookmarklet

Social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and MySpace together launched the "Don't be Evil" bookmarklet in response to Google including its Google+ pages in its search results. Google+ integration into search results has been criticised by competitors that it is not displaying the most relevant social network for an individual, and rather, it's simply promoting their (often less relevant) Google+ page.

The "Don't be Evil" bookmarklet attempts to put focus back to the user, looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+, and showing them instead.

There are two methods to trying out the "Dont' be Evil"

1. As a bookmarklet
   
   Go to Focus on the User (www.focusontheuser.org), click on the "Try a More Relevant Google", and then drag the "Don't be Evil" bookmarklet to your browser's bookmark toolbar. Next time you perform a search that displays social results, click the bookmarklet for improved social results.
   
   
2. As a Chrome extension
   
   Install this browser extension to automatically run our bookmarklet every time you go to google.com.

Watch walkthrough here.

» The Don’t Be Evil Bookmarklet Makes Google’s Social Results Useful Rather Than Simply Promotional | LifeHacker

Twitter keyboard shortcuts

Below is a quick how-to guide on the keyboard shortcut keys for Twitter.

Twitter keyboard shortcuts

Actions

F     Favorite
R     Reply
T     Retweet
M     Direct message
N     New Tweet
Enter Open Tweet details
L     Close all open Tweets

Navigation

?     This menu
J     Next Tweet
K     Previous Tweet
Space Page down
/     Search
.     Load new Tweets

Timelines

G H   Home
G C   Connect
G R   Mentions
G D   Discover
G P   Profile
G F   Favorites
G M   Messages
G U   Go to user...

Hit the ? key on Twitter any time to show the keyboard shortcuts.

Twitter Redesign - Yours to Discover

Twitter launched a redesign of its entire site including mobile app for both iOS and Android. Twitter called it Yours to discover - A faster, simpler way to stay close to everything you care about.

Some of the new features include three brand new buttons at the top of the page — Home, @Connect and #Discover.

@Connect - The new Connect section is where you get in on the conversation. It’s the place to see who has followed or mentioned you, retweeted or favorited one of your Tweets.

#Discover - Discover lets you tap into a stream of useful and entertaining information, customized just for you.

Another major difference is that tweets now appear at the right side instead of the left. It now occupies less real estate than before.

Twitter also launched a new program for brand pages - similar to Facebook pages.

Follow me on twitter now @hongjun.

Twitter API JSON - Returning wrong ID of tweets

Twitter recently updated its API to enable the new Status ID generator - 'Snowflake'. With that, the new unique Tweet IDs are now 64bit unsigned integers, which, instead of being sequential like the old IDs, are based on time. The full ID is composed of a timestamp, a worker number, and a sequence number.

The implications of this change is that some programming languages like Javascript cannot support numbers with >53bits. To allow javascript and JSON parsers to read the IDs, a string version of any ID is now included when responding in the JSON format. What this means is Status, User, Direct Message and Saved Search IDs in the Twitter API will now be returned as an integer and a string in JSON responses. This will apply to the main Twitter API, the Streaming API and the Search API.

For example, https://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/hongjun.json?count=5 now returns you both "id" and "id_str". We should now be using "id_str" instead.

The following code in complete will display tweets using JSON method.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Tweets</title>
    <style type="text/css">
    body { font-size: 12px; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #666; }
    ul, li {margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 10px; font-weight: inherit; }
    ul { list-style-type: circle; }
    li { padding-left: 5px; line-height: 140%; padding-bottom: 4px; }
    a:link { color: #00f; text-decoration: none; }
    a:visited { color: #00f; text-decoration: none; }
    a:hover { text-decoration: underline;}
    a:active { color: #00f; text-decoration: none; }
    </style>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<span id="spnJson"></span>

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
    function relative_time(time_value) {
        var values = time_value.split(" ");
        time_value = values[1] + " " + values[2] + ", " + values[5] + " " + values[3];
        var parsed_date = Date.parse(time_value);
        var relative_to = (arguments.length > 1) ? arguments[1] : new Date();

        var delta = parseInt((relative_to.getTime() - parsed_date) / 1000);
        delta = delta + (relative_to.getTimezoneOffset() * 60);

        if (delta < 60) {
            return 'less than a minute ago';
        } else if (delta < 120) {
            return 'about a minute ago';
        } else if (delta < (60 * 60)) {
            return (parseInt(delta / 60)).toString() + ' minutes ago';
        } else if (delta < (120 * 60)) {
            return 'about an hour ago';
        } else if (delta < (24 * 60 * 60)) {
            return 'about ' + (parseInt(delta / 3600)).toString() + ' hours ago';
        } else if (delta < (48 * 60 * 60)) {
            return '1 day ago';
        } else {
            return (parseInt(delta / 86400)).toString() + ' days ago';
        }
    }

    function getTweets(username, cnt) {
        jQuery.getJSON("http://twitter.com/status/user_timeline/" + username + ".json?count=" + cnt + "&callback=?", function(data) {
            var tweet_html = 'Follow <a target="_blank" href="http://www.twitter.com/' + username + '">@' + username + '</a> now<br />';
            tweet_html += "<ul>";
            jQuery.each(data, function(i, tweet) {
                if (tweet.text !== undefined) {
                    tweet_html += '<li>';
                    tweet_html += '<a target="_blank" href="http://www.twitter.com/' + username + '/status/' + tweet.id_str + '">';
                    tweet_html += tweet.text + '</a>';
                    tweet_html += '  ' + relative_time(tweet.created_at) + '</li>';
                }
            });

            document.getElementById('spnJson').innerHTML = tweet_html;
        });
    }

    getTweets('hongjun', 5);
//-->
</script>
</body>
</html>

Google+, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn - Time to reach 50 million

Link your Facebook Page to Twitter

Facebook is adding a new feature to allow posting updates right from your Facebook Page to Twitter. Status updates, links, photos, notes, and events are allowed to be shared with your followers on Twitter.

To start, go to https://www.facebook.com/twitter/.

It appears this feature is designed to keep Facebook users within the service as much as possible, doing everything all in Facebook and keeping them from other social networking service.

Introducing Twitter Web Analytics

Twitter announced Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations i.e. their buttons are being used on their sites.

Quoting from the Twitter Developer blog:

Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.

See the full announcement in the video below, courtesy of TechCrunch:

» Introducing Twitter Web Analytics | Twitter Developer Blog

Social Media Analytics for Facebook and Twitter

SimplyMeasured’s competitive analysis tool compares engagement across competitors’ social media profiles.

Twitter, faster than earthquakes video is lame

Twitter released a short promotional video that showing it’s faster than the Virginia’s 5.9 magnitude earthquake, which travelled from the Washington DC to New York City. 30 seconds is all it needs to inform someone around the world what's happening around you to prepare for it. The man featured in the video lifted his cup and continued reading after receiving a warning message on Twitter of the quake.

One strange part of the video caught my attention was the guy at the far back. The whole place did not certainly seem to be experiencing an earthquake except the guy in focus. Lame video!

Publish Sync - Cross post Google+, Facebook, Twitter posts

Publish Sync is yet another useful Chrome extension to perform cross post of Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Plurk statuses, all within individual sites.

Publish Sync configuration from Chrome

Cross post from Google+

Cross post from Facebook

Cross post from Twitter

» Publish Sync | Chrome Web Store

Related readings on cross post:

• Cross post Google+ posts to Twitter
• Agent G: Cross post from Google+ to Facebook and Twitter
• Update Facebook from Google+ without extension

Twitter allows image uploading now

Micro blogging site, Twitter, has finally allowed the ability to upload an image right from its Twitter page, without having to use alternatives like Twitpic, etc.

Learn more on image uploading on Twitter here.

Cross post Google+ posts to Twitter

About 2 weeks ago, I posted an article on using Agent G to do cross post from Google+ to Facebook and Twitter and updating Facebook from Google+ without extension. There is now yet another method to cross post from Google+ to Twitter but this time using ManageFlitter.

All ManageFlitter needs is you providing them with your Google+ profile URL and allowing Twitter account access. There is no need to include anyone agent/bot into a circle when making a post; what's needed is to make a post to Public (I see this as a limitation). The tool also provides an option to cross post only if #twt hashtag is included. Though ManageFlitter only does cross post to Twitter, there is always a workaround to get it to Facebook by using Selective Tweets but this means wasting yet another few characters in the limited 140 characters Twitter message space.

Related Readings:

• Publish Sync - Cross post Google+, Facebook, Twitter posts
• Agent G: Cross post from Google+ to Facebook and Twitter
• Update Facebook from Google+ without extension

Agent G: Cross post from Google+ to Facebook and Twitter

It is possible to sync your Google+ posts to Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook without having to install extensions. This works by simply sharing your post with +Agent G. To do that, simply follow instructions from here.

I have successfully bridged the link and tested it to work. Enjoy!

» Sync Google+ to Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook | +Agent G

Related Readings:

• Publish Sync - Cross post Google+, Facebook, Twitter posts
• Update Facebook from Google+ without extension
• Cross post Google+ posts to Twitter

Twitter new follow button

Twitter recently released a new follow button allows anyone to follow you with just a few clicks.

Follow @hongjun

To learn how to embed the new Twitter's follow button, visit Follow Button resource page now.