5th Week of Class: Step 1: Tweet, Step 2: ..., Step 3: Profit!

I was skeptical of Twitter when I first heard about it. 140 characters is too short to be useful, right?

But then I stared reading stories about different entities using Twitter on Consumerist (over time, not specifically for this assignment). It sounded silly at first, but some of them had good ideas about how to use Twitter. Now I don't even blink when I hear that another group or business is using Twitter. In fact, even a few of my employer's clients use Twitter. Los Angeles Federal Credit Union has a Twitter feed (and a Facebook page and a YouTube account). So does Mobiloil Federal Credit Union.

Stories that changed my mind about Twitter

Boston Police Department: We Will Let You Know When The Zombies Come
OK, the headline is funny but the BPD Twitter feed has information that's not just useful, but the kind of information you'd actually want sent to your phone. Police departments using Twitter means that they can do what I've been saying the Amber Alerts should be doing which is to send people text messages when a child goes missing.

TweetCongress Lets You Succinctly Shout At Your Congresspeople Online
This is actually a collection of Twitter feeds by people in Congress. I imagine it's mostly interns updating it but it's still a way to know what they're doing. (I'd love to know how this turns out. Better have a moderator.)

Comcast's Twitter Reps Save The Day...
OK, so it would be better if their normal customer service representatives had been able to handle it but in general having an alternate way of contacting customer service is a good thing. If you don't want to wait on hold to report that your Internet connection is kaput you can send a tweet instead.

As the above examples show, organizations can use Twitter to alert their followers to recent news and changes as well as resolve issues. It's also a good promotional tool: Many congresspeople send tweets about when and where they'll be speaking to their constituency next. Businesses can tweet coupon codes, contests, and sales information. Non-profits can tweet their progress in fund-raising goals.

5th Week of Class: Twittering About

I did not have a Twitter account before this assignment. (No podcasts, no RSS feeds...you might be wondering if I even spend any time on the Internet!) I'd heard of the character limit and some people and groups using it but I didn't know any of the details about using it.

Signing up was easy. They even check your username for availability when you stop typing in the text field for it.

What to Tweet

The video on the first Help page tells you, "In general...tweets answer the question 'What are you doing right now?'". The character limit is to keep messages brief. They also suggest tweeting links, questions, and reactions.

Types of Tweets

A normal tweet is public to everyone. You can change your privacy settings so that only people following you can view your tweets. A direct message will send a private message to one person.

You can write a reply to what someone has said by beginning your tweet with '@[username]' (ex. '@bob'). This is called an '@reply'. If you put the '@[username]' anywhere else in the tweet it is considered a 'mention'. An @reply, unlike a direct message, is public to everyone.

It is a convention on Twitter to place the letters 'RT', short for retweet, somewhere in a tweet that quotes an existing tweet. This is not an official function of Twitter or even a rule but probably a good idea so that people don't think that others are trying to take credit for something they said.

Limits on Tweeting

While you can delete a tweet you can not edit them. If there's something you want to change you'll have to remove the whole thing and retype it. HTML is not allowed for security reasons but they'll change an URL to a link for you.

What not to Tweet

There's the obvious things that are banned everywhere: Spam, phishing, malware, illegal activities and the promotion of illegal activities, violent threates, private/confidential information, impersonation, copyright violations, and trademark infringement.

You may not use the 'Verified Accounts' badge without Twitter's approval.

The only potential surprise in what you may not do is that Twitter's definition of 'private and confidential' is a bit broader than other companies' definition. A street address falls under the category of private/confidential on Twitter whereas on other sites they might just say, "Hey, it's in the public domain".

This is clearly to prevent harassment. They do not want people blasting someone's contact information along with the message "Get 'em!" Unfortunately, they do not state how this is enforced. They may not mind people tweeting an address for anything other than a private residence but they might not want street addresses on Twitter at all.

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NEWS: Twitter eliminates certain kinds of users with a Terms of Service update

4th Week of Class: Storage Options

I need to correct something I said about the assigned weekly in my first post. I said that the required weekly post would be about "topics discussed in class or reading material". In fact, the requirement for the weekly post is that it be about something we learned that's related to our Internet Technology classes.

This news came the RSS feed for the W3C, one of 25 I subscribed to through Google Reader as part of last weeks assignment.

The Rich Web Client Group recently released Working Drafts: one for Web Storage and one for Web Database. (Learn about W3C Activities) Each is related to storing information on the Internet.

The Web Storage Draft defines an API that will hold information similarly to how a cookie does, in key-value pairs, but seeks to overcome some of the problems and limitations that cookies have. The draft gives a couple of examples of the problems that can happen with using cookies and I have had the issue they point out in the airline ticket example happen to me before.

The Web Database Draft defines an API for adding and accessing information in databases. This draft shows some example code at the beginning. It never names a language so maybe they intend for it to be language independent.

Each will be dependent on HTML5* and WebIDL, neither of which are finished yet. I guess I shouldn't expect to see either finished anytime soon.

*The review comment form on this page is nifty.

4th Week of Class: A Libretto and a Musical Score

We're going to have an Opera Evangelist as a guest speaker in our class this week. As such, we're all doing some research into the Opera Software Company.

Opera Software ASA is a public company that was founded in 1995. It is headquartered in Oslo, Norway but has offices in other countries including the USA.

Products
Their first product was their web browser, Opera, currently in version 10. Users had to pay for the early versions of Opera after 30 days. This was changed to an ad supported model in version 5. In 2005 ads were dropped completely in version 8.5. Google currently pays Opera to be the browser's default search engine.

Opera Mini: A web browser designed for cell phones, this product is currently in version 4.2. The company is working on getting video to work on more phones but the feature is available on some Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones.

Opera Mobile: A web browser designed for smartphones and PDAs. Version 9.7 is in beta. To quote the product page this was "the first mobile browser to bring the full Web to the small mobile screen". The browser makes it possible to view full web sites on mobile devices.

In addition to this Opera offers browsers for all kinds of other devices from the Nintendo Wii to refrigerators.

Opera Dragonfly is listed on the company web site as a separate product but it's included in recent versions of the browser. It's an open source debugging tool. It works even in smaller devices and you can set breakpoints in your code.

Opera Unite: this turns the Opera web browser. I really hope the guest speaker talks about this because it sounds very interesting.

Ideas

The Opera Software company doesn't just create products and call it a day. They do a lot of work in promoting web standards. In fact their CTO, Håkon Wium Lie, is the person who came up with the idea for Cascading Style Sheets. The company regularly has tours and seminars on web standards and even has a Web Standards Curriculum. The curriculum is not yet finished; there are 10 articles on JavaScript that have not been published yet.

The Vision page on the company site states their beliefs about what the Web ought to be and how a company should be run but the one that stood out to me was their statement on accessibility. What makes it stand out? That it's even there. Most web sites don't say anything about accessibility much less explain how they intend to make it work. If they do anything they usually just have a text only version of the site. (J.K Rowling's site is the only exception I can think of but I don't know how accessible Flash can be.) Opera intends to make their existing site accessible and even stated what their goal is as far as how accessible the site should be.

I admit, I thought the statement was going to be about encouraging other web developers to do the same thing but that might be part of their standards curriculum.

News

CNet has a review of Opera Mini 5 beta

The NY Times recommends Opera mainly because of it's Turbo technology

4th Week of Class: Editing Wikipedia

The first part of our homework for this week is to become an editor for Wikipedia and make a change to an existing article. (BTW, Wikipedia made a major change in how certain articles will be edited.)

I decided to check the Wikipedia article on knitting and did find something missing that I could add. Only one word but I was surprised it was missing. The sentence in question also had a grammatical error. I would say exactly what I changed but Wikipedia recommends against using your real name there. Saying what I changed in a blog that does use my real name would defeat the purpose of using a pseudonym.

I clicked on the edit link for that paragraph expecting to be taken to a login page but it turns out that you can edit Wikipedia without creating an account. They will however publicly log your IP address. Creating an account prevents this.

I follow a link on the Edit page to the Create an Account page. This quickly became the page I wished I could edit. First, although the page puts the things you must do to create a user name a password before the form fields, it puts the things you should consider regarding your privacy after the form. You know that some people filled that form out without scrolling to the bottom of the page first. In my opinion, the submit button for a form should come after everything the end user should read before they actually hit the button.

The second problem I ran into is that you can not check to see whether a user name is available before submitting the form. Having to retype passwords and CAPTHA text just to find out the user name you picked is already taken is annoying. If you sign up for a Windows Live account it lets you check for availability of a user name without submitting the main form. I tried one of the CAPTHA phrases but it was also taken.

My third attempt is successful. I get the Login successful page and wish I could bookmark it since it contains a list of the first few things I should learn about Wikipedia. I bookmark the individual links for the policies I should learn first.

Doing the actual edit and preview was simple enough. I checked the links at the bottom of the page before saving my changes and it was a good thing I did. They always want an edit summary and what's pre-populated in that field is not sufficient. Their definition of a minor edit is also more narrow that what I would have assumed. Adding even one word can be a major edit if you are adding content and not just making a grammatical change. However, not all changes have to be cited only ones that may be challenged and quotations. I doubt my change will be challenged but I decided to watch the page just in case.

Doing a small change was not too difficult or time consuming but I would definitely read the guidelines and policies before making a change larger than this one.

3rd Week of Class: Underutilized Code

Part of our homework for MIST 7500 has been HTML tutorials. At one point in the tutorial for this week the voice over says that the code for tables they're about to show is underutilized. With the exception of regular frames, I think the same could be said about all of the code in this tutorial when it comes to my own web development experience.

I had completely forgotten about cols and colgroups. It's been a while since I've had to build a table from scratch but I still can't recall why I stopped using colgroups. Is it a deprecated tag? No, it isn't deprecated. I couldn't think of why I'd stopped using it.

Then I checked the lab assignment in Firefox.

Firefox recognizes the width attribute in a col tag but not align. Align is deprecated so I try an inline style and it still doesn't work. I'm not sure if that's why I stopped using them but I'd love to know why Firefox doesn't support this.

I thought for a second that Firefox didn't support accesskey either but I figured out that if you use ALT + SHIFT and the letter it works. I haven't noticed many sites using accesskeys.

Although I've seen and used variables in mailto links it seems like most people don't want anything pre-filled, at least not in a normal link.

2nd Week of Class (8/27/2009): Who's In Charge Here

*A note on writing style: It will probably only be my classmates reading this but since this blog is open to the Internet at large I'm going to be writing as if the person reading it is not in the class.

*A second note: I can't seem to comment on my on posts. Anyone else having this problem?

In our first class we talked about computer network protocols. We broke into groups to look up and then discuss different parts of the OSI Model, the TCP/IP Model, and how they differ. Our next class began with a scavenger hunt.

It was much less exhausting than the last scavenger hunt I was in (running around downtown during the summer) because it was online. We all looked up information to answer questions about how the Internet works and who makes it work.

I found this question to be the most difficult:
Aside from the W3C and WaSP, list two entities that help govern the web.

Because really, how do you look that up if you don't already know the names of the groups? It seems kind of like using a dictionary to find out how to spell a word. You have to be pretty close to the answer for that to work. If you don't know that pterodactyl begins with a 'p' you're out of luck.

I mean it's not like you can just ask 'Who is in charge of the Internet'...oh, apparently you can.

Still, it was the only question without an obvious search query and I'm curious as to how people who didn't have an organization or two in mind for the question went about searching for the answer.

We also watched a video called (warning: page plays sound) Warriors of the Net. It explains how information is transmitted over the Internet by showing the journey of one packet of data from one computer to another. The video really does an excellent job too. It doesn't have any techno babble; any technical term it uses it explains and it doesn't use any more technical terms than strictly necessary. It doesn't get bogged down in details or go off on tangents. Most importantly, in my opinion, it doesn't assume that the audience knows anything about this beforehand.

This may sound obvious and unremarkable. You might be thinking, "Shouldn't it do all that if they're explaining something? What's the big deal?" However, it has been my experience that it doesn't always happen that way, especially when it comes to things related to computers or the Internet. If you think I'm exaggerating go to the bookstore and look at all the titles in the computer section that are manuals for specific programs. The Missing Manual series even refers to itself as "The book that should have been in the box". Well, why wasn't in the box?