Bad news from Twitter and IFTTT

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

…All IFTTT Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will be removed…

That sucks! After all my trouble figuring out how to schedule favourited tweets via IFTTT and Buffer, it appears that this particular Recipe will be short-lived:

Source: the following email I recieved fom IFTTT on September 20, 2012:

Dear josschuurmans,

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine. Continue reading →

Can a favourited but protected tweet trigger an IFTTT action?

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

[UPDATE, July 5, 2012: It looks like the scenario I described below is possible. I have favourited a number of protected tweets and they have triggered IFTTT to send them to Buffer, which has scheduled them to be posted on my public Twitter account at certain intervals during the day.]

Considering to make my “shadow Twitter account” – the one with which I collect tweets for my buffer – private. Funny thing is, people are starting to follow and favourite tweets posted from that shadow account becasue it is (obviously) faster than my “real” account.

It wouldn’t be a big problem as such, but it becomes awkward when I reply to someone and they have no idea who/what the shadow account is.

But I’ll have to test if it is even possible to make the account “private” with myself as the only follower, and whether I can then still favourite those tweets, since that makes them “public”…

Twitter states: Continue reading →

If Gravity Twitter fodder Then Buffer (nearly there!)

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

By adding a “buffer filler” number to my tweets for a day or two, I learned that IFTTT does *not* re-send tweets to Buffer when new buffer space comes available after it had reached its max.

In other words, any tweets triggered by IFTTT after Buffer’s tank is full will not be posted.

So, in order to make optimal use of the two services, I should fill up the buffer at approximately the same pace as it puts out tweets. Currently in my case, my buffer seems to have a limit of maximum nine tweets. Continue reading →

Tweeting and scheduling with different levels of urgency

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

Taking advice from Michael Gray, I’m looking at combining Buffer‘s 9-or-so free scheduled tweets with scheduling tweets in Hootsuite.

So I’m thinking there are different kinds of tweets with different urgency and scheduling requirements:

Tweets concerning or responding to breaking news should not be scheduled but should be posted immediately.
Tweets in response to people’s questions or contributing to a real-time conversation are also urgent enough to be posted immediately.
Tweets broadcasting links to new posts on my blog can be scheduled with the Social 2.5 plugin for WordPress to be published at the same time when the post appears (preferably), or can be added to Buffer.
Original tweets, re-tweets and @replies, if not too urgent, can be scheduled with Buffer.
Re-hash tweets, i.e. from my Twitter and blog archives, can be scheduled in Hootsuite.

Browsing through ‘AllMyTweets‘ to look at candidates for the re-hash variation, I find surprisingly many tweets that are relatively timeless and could be scheduled to be re-tweeted any time.

Maybe I’ll split them into recent and ancient stuff

After my Buffer gets space again, does it fill up again with tweets from ifttt?

Posted on June 22, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

I’m wondering what happens with the favourited tweets that ifttt.com pulls in from my twitter account and forwards to bufferapp.com once my Buffer is full? When my Buffer gets emptier, does it automagically fill up again with those scheduled tweets via ifttt.com? Or are they lost forever? Or do I need to un-favourite and then re-favourite them again? Or what?

Waiting for Twitter

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

[UPDATE:

Support, Jun 26 03:19 pm (PDT):

Hello,

Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk. Unfortunately, it looks like your account got caught up in one of these spam groups by mistake.

I've restored your account; sorry for the inconvenience.

Please note that it may take an hour or so for your follower and following numbers to return to normal.

Thanks,

Support

(So this took 8 days...) ]

Still experimenting with ways to tweet from Gravity via Buffer, I created a second Twitter account yesterday. The account enabled me to tweet from my mobile phone under a different name than my own, so that I could then “favourite” those tweets with my @josschuurmans account. Favourited tweets trigger ifttt to forward them to Buffer.

It worked for a short while, until the second account got suspended byTwitter. The reason is probably the fact that I happened to follow some 75 other Twitter accounts, and then unfollowed them shortly after when I realized that I could instead subscribe to a Twitter list containing the same accounts.

I’ve asked Twitter support to un-suspend the account. Hope they will process my request soonly.

Gravity to Buffer, part 2

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

As I wrote yesterday, I’m trying to figure out how to schedule tweets that I create in Gravity to be published through Buffer.

Imperfect scenarios:

Create a trigger in my Twitter channel on ifttt, which sends a favorited tweet to Buffer so that it gets scheduled. (downside: this works for tweets I read and favor, but I cannot edit the tweet)
Create a trigger in my Twitter channel on ifttt, which sends a Direct Message to myself to Buffer so that it gets scheduled. (downside: first, I’m not sure I can send DMs to myself; second, it means that DMs from other people to me would get scheduled to Buffer, too)
Let any tweet (optionally filtered by a #hashtag) posted from Gravity be picked up by ifttt and forwarded to Buffer so that it will be posted a second time later. (downside: first, it will not remove the splurt of first-time-around tweets, i.e. many tweets within a short period of time; second, will this cause an infinite loop?)
In Gravity, copy tweet content to SMS, then send as email to gmail, let ifttt pick it up and send the content to Buffer. (downside: a bit more work than a simple fav or tweet, but it might do the trick?)
In Gravity, copy tweet content to SMS, then send as email to gmail, let ifttt pick it up and send the content to WordPress so that the tweet gets posted through the WP system (downside: not sure how the buffering on WP then pans out; and this scenario may be unnecessary once Twitter Tools 3.0 comes out of beta)
It would be great if one could send a Direct Message straight to one’s own Buffer account
In Gravity, when reading Google Reader, select the item’s URL, ‘Add to Instapaper’, then set up a trigger in ifttt to grab the Instaper headline and send it to Buffer.

What did I miss?

My All-Tweets Echo Chamber

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

Following my discovery of All My Tweets, I ran the full text of all my tweets through TagCrowd‘s word cloud generator. Continue reading →

All My Tweets (is awesome!)

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Jos Schuurmans

Looking for tweet archiving and wordpress integration options I ran into All My Tweets via an article on ReadWriteWeb.

This is so cool and simple! It downloads your 3200 latest tweets via the Twitter API and shows them as a list on a single web page. An export button would have been nice, but this works, too. I’ll paste my list here below, so now my tweets to date are easily searchable even when Twitter is down.

I may do the same again when I reach around 6000 tweets. Apparently, Twitter only keeps your latest 3200. (Someone please ping me if/when that limit changes!)

(Next, I’ll try to post a word cloud using TagCrowd, but I’ll do it separately as this page is already heavy enough. Let’s see if it’s small enough for the word cloud generator.)

BTW, I notice that a number of shortened URLs, mainly in the lower half of the list, point to completely irrelevant destinations. Seems that Ping.fm has turned into a caroussel, but I haven’t yet tested if all the others are fine. So much for URL shorteners!

Here comes the list: Continue reading →

Schuurmudgeon

Jos Schuurmans / josschuurmans.com

Category Archives: Twitter