Occasionally I come across a situation where it would be interesting to know if a certain Twitter user is following some other Twitter user. I couldn’t find the right combo of search terms to find such a thing via Google or Bing, so I thought I’d just make one. Thanks to TweetSharp, it was incredibly easy. Here’s the ASP.NET MVC Controller code:
[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]
public ActionResult Check() {
return View();
}
[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]
public ActionResult Check(string follower, string target) {
string response = FluentTwitter.CreateRequest()
.Friendships().Verify(follower).IsFriendsWith(target)
.Request();
response = Regex.Replace(response, @"<\/?friends>", "");
bool following = false;
bool.TryParse(response, out following);
return Json(new { result = following });
}
The view is a simple Spark file with some jQuery that posts to the Check() method above and displays the appropriate result based on the JSON returned.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
Here’s another boring meta post, but with a valuable lesson.
When I first set up this blog, I created a Feedburner feed to give me some idea of how many people were subscribing to my feed. To direct people to the feed, I edited my template and added hard links to the Feedburner feed URL. Since then the subscriber count has slowly grown to about 200 subscribers.
While I was creating my new blog theme the other day I noticed that not all the links were pointing to my Feedburner feed. Most notably, the <link> element in the <head> of the pages that causes browsers with RSS support to “light up” was still pointing to the old feed. That made me wonder how many people were subscribing directly to my feed and how many were subscribing to the Feedburner feed.
When I recently set up a WordPress blog for my wife, I downloaded and installed the FD Feedburner Plugin which worked well for her blog. I installed it on my blog, removed all the hard links from the template files and waited to see what would happen. The plugin works by issuing a 301 permanent redirect to the Feedburner URL for all incoming requests to the built-in feed URL, unless those requests come from Feedburner in which case it serves up the raw feed.
Two days after installing the plugin I went back and checked my subscriber count and was shocked to see it had jumped up to 384. Not a bad jump for such a small change.
I read most blogs through my RSS reader so I never see when they update their designs. I suspect both of the readers of my blog do the same, so as a service to you two, I’m announcing a new blog design! Here’s a screenshot so you don’t even have to visit the site:
This is an original design that I cooked up. I tried to focus on just the bare minimum needed. I’d consider it about 84% done. There’s some polish I’d like to add if I can find more time to work on it.
Enough with the boring meta stuff. I promise more posts soon. Here’s what I’ve got in my drafts queue: SubSonic 3, Windows 7, my Azure experiment, Managed Assembly updates and more.
I frequently come across developers that scoff at Twitter as a waste of time and a cesspool where productivity goes to die amongst the social media “experts.” Yes, it is definitely those things, but it doesn’t have to be. Here is how I use Twitter to maximize its professional value.
Unfollow/don’t follow people whose tweets bother you.
The great thing about Twitter is that relationships are one-way. You’re in total control of what content you subject yourself to. You should never feel obligated to follow someone that follows you or is notorious.
When I look at someone’s profile trying to decide if I should follow them I look for a few things:
- Mostly original content. Frequent retweeters that don’t add value or insight are out. If I see more than ~25% of your recent tweets are retweets, I’m likely to skip following.
- Content relevant to my profession. If you are using Twitter as a platform for your political/religious/other viewpoints, I’m probably going to pass. I’ve got my views, you’ve got yours and we’re probably not going to change each other’s minds so lets just stay away from it.
- Using Twitter where Facebook would be better suited. Related to #2, if you’re using Twitter to give me the blow by blow of your day and I don’t know you personally, you’re not providing much value to me. Facebook is great for this kind of stuff and if you want to know more intimate details of my life (and you don’t, trust me), add me as a friend there. Twitter isn’t the ‘what’, it’s the ‘why’.
- People who prefix replies. This is particularly a problem in the .NET community. I understand people are disappointed Twitter removed the option to view all replies but prefixing only makes the issue worse. I can’t click on a link to the replied-to Tweet to follow the conversation so now you’re just cluttering my stream with portions of a conversation I can’t expose the rest of. I’m probably the most lenient with this rule especially with more prominent people.
Put the tools to work.
Once you start following a lot of people, the web interface and simple clients like Twhirl, Witty, etc. just don’t scale to handle the workload. I needed a way to extract the most relevant tweets from the people I follow. In the latest version of TweetDeck they added groups that you can sync with the iPhone version. This makes a huge difference.
From the people I follow, I’ve selected a subset of them to be included in my main reading list. This list contains the people I follow who consistently tweet high-quality content. I read it frequently throughout the day. When I have a little more time to browse, I scroll over to the ‘Everyone’ list and see what else is going on. As I start to recognize consistently high-quality tweets in the Everyone list, I move them over to the main list. This lets me loosen up a bit on my rules for following AND follow conversations. It’s sort of a compromise between viewing all replies and viewing just those to people I follow.
Best of all, TweetDeck syncs the groups to my iPhone so I get the same reading experience on my two primary devices. TweetDeck has a lot of deficiencies and UI quirks, but the sync’d group settings are such a killer feature that I’m willing to deal with those issues.
I never used to think I’d be able to follow more than 30 people and get any value out of Twitter but the combination of a well-curated follower list and the proper tools I’ve been able to ramp up the number of people I follow while maintaining a good signal-to-noise ratio without any additional time commitment.
Related: How to not abuse your Twitter followers
