The Life of an Internet Bedouin

I’ll spare you the traffic and the buildup of Christmas cheer and give you what you need to see. Namely, a LIT TREE and a 5 minute fireworks show. It’s a good one, so please…just sit back and enjoy from the comfort of your own home.

This video was taken on opening night when tweens swooned over an American Idol sensation. Fortunately for you, I live tweeted it so you didn’t have to be there.

I hate it when I click on someone’s profile and I see this:

I really don’t want to go copy and paste their latitude and longitude to try to figure out where someone is. So I made WhereBeYou, a simple way to check what someone’s Twitter location is set to.

Hit ENTER and voila you’ve got tha info:

NOTE: the geolocation stuff only works for the US right now.

This is literally a one evening hack built with Sinatra, the Twitter API, and the Geonames location web service.

In addition to this little app, I have a couple of other useful Twitter apps SnapTweet (almost 1300 followers) and DoesFollow. If you find these interesting, please feel free to follow me on Twitter and let me know if you have feature or new app ideas.

I set up all of my Twitter notifications to go to OtherInbox (awesome site–more on this in a future blog post) awhile back and I set all of the email addresses up like this:

twitter+damon @ something.otherinbox.com

This worked fine for awhile, but on November 6th (which I think corresponded to roughly the time that Twitter changed the “From” address for outgoing notification emails), I stopped receiving any notifications from Twitter. As the owner of multiple Twitter accounts, this was pretty noticeable. I finally decided to look into it about a week later.

At first, I thought that the problem may have been that OtherInbox was somehow eating the mails. I didn’t think this was the case because they actually adapted to the change of the “From” address with no problem, as I recall.

I switched the notification email to my GMail account and it worked fine. I then changed the email address to “Twitter-damon@” and those notifications went through as well. So it appears that it is currently inadvisable to use plus signs in Twitter notification email addresses. I put a support note in to Twitter, but I don’t really expect to hear much back.

Plus signs in email addresses are valid syntax, but many sites don’t support them properly (mostly because it’s just easier not to). If it really is true that Twitter is one of those sites that is intentionally not supporting them, then they need to adjust their profile save logic to disallow their use. It’s also possible that it’s just a bug.