twitter

...look no further than the comments on this TechCrunch post. Reacting to the scoop that Twitter is dumping Ruby on Rails (which almost immediately turned out to be wrong), more than 150 people decided to chime in about what Twitter's scaling problems are and how their own preferred web framework never would have encountered them. A whopping one person managed to refer to Twitter's custom message queueing software by name.

The rest presumably just like the (drag & drop HTML creation in Visual Studio|error detection in Zend|Google-enabled buzz surrounding Python), and have read "Rails doesn't scale" somewhere. I suppose their prattling is still slightly more meaningful than the yammerings of the web's legions of widget evangelists, social network triumphalists and self-proclaimed "SEO experts". But not by much.

At any rate, I think this is a good reminder of the signal:noise ratio facing our clients as they attempt to find technical help in a crowded marketplace. If you're not a technical person it's genuinely hard to tell the difference between someone who knows what they're talking about and someone who's simply regurgitating buzzwords. My rule of thumb when encountering bold pronouncements like the ones in that TC thread: ask "why?", then count the number of unexplained acronyms and buzzwords in the answer.

One of the things that I've learned over my years at EchoDitto — that's been hammered home again and again — is the importance of email. Twitter's cool, social networking is great, but your online strategy absolutely has to account for email. It's not glamorous, but it's important.

The same is true on the tech side of things. It's easy to forget: on a day-to-day basis, my wranglings with email generally include dealing with spam blacklists, ensuring that scripts don't function as open relays, and writing templating systems that'll be used to send mail. All of it's pretty boring. But it's worth keeping in mind that email, when piped to a script, can serve as the infrastructure for some pretty neat services, too.

I did this two years ago for SXSW, building an SMS app on the cheap by counting on the mobile carriers' SMS-to-email functionality. It worked pretty well, although it was a rat's nest of Perl scripts.

This week I took a pass at another application in Ruby (with a PHP frontend), and this time the resulting code is a bit less cringeworthy. The idea is simple: set your Twitter "new follower" email notifications to go to a custom email address. They'll be piped to a script, disassembled and the new follower's statistics analyzed. If it looks like the new guy is a spammer or bot, they'll automatically be blocked. If not, they won't be. Either way you'll get an RSS notification about it. You can try it out here, if you'd like.

It's not exactly going to set the world on fire, particularly since Twitter is expected to release similar functionality soon. But the project does serve as a pretty good template for how a piped email service can work.

It was too terribly long ago that I posted a simple Twitterbot here. I'm sure you'll be absolutely shocked to learn that it had a few, uh, shortcomings. If you're making a TwitterBot (and particularly one in Ruby), here's some advice:

I've written my fair share of fly-by-night SMS services. Not for clients, of course — when someone needs a mobile campaign we talk to folks who live and breath text messaging. But I've hacked together a few hobby SMS apps on the cheap. There was this one, for example, which used email-to-SMS gateway functionality to provide a rating system for SXSW panels. Before that was LastCall, a genuine (if not shortcoded) SMS app I wrote for DCist that allowed users to check subway times, query OpenTable for available reservations and perform a number of other questionably-useful functions.

The DCist mobile service was a nightmare to put together. I bought a cracked-screen cellphone off Ebay, an unlimited-SMS mobile account and went through a half-dozen USB-to-serial cables before finding one with a Linux-compatible chipset. The software I used to spool messages from the phone to the server was a bit flaky, requiring a ton of configuration. And then WMATA changed their website and something went screwy, sending tons of unwanted text messages to hapless subscribers. The whole effort took months. The moral was clear: rolling your own SMS gateway is a huge pain in the butt.

That's why I used the email-to-SMS approach for the SXSW service. It worked beautifully, but everyone knows it's a little unprofessional — the mobile carriers can always shut you down, and users get confused when asked to send a text message to an email address.

As you might've heard, Twitter has just announced a Canadian number for the service. If you're a non-Canadian, you may be wondering what you're missing.

Well, worry no more! Simply drag this bookmarklet into your browser's quicklinks bar:

twitter.ca

Then navigate to a Twitter feed page (the front page should work just fine) and click on the bookmarklet. The page will be automatically converted into a Canadian version of itself.

Consider this a fork of a project originally started by SCTV.