We hope you weren’t planning to find your Twitter friends outside of Twitter because pretty soon it will likely be impossible to do so.

Twitter has slowly but surely been cutting out major third-party sites, preventing then from offering a “Find Twitter Friends” search feature.

The latest third-party site to lose access to your Twitter contacts is, as Buzzfeed’s Matt Buchanan first noted, hosted blogging service Tumblr. Previously Twitter has cut off LinkedIn and, more recently, photo-sharing site Instagram.

Tumblr still offers a way to find your friends on the service by searching either Gmail contacts or Facebook friends.

Earlier this month Twitter put third-party application developers on notice, saying that the social network arguably built on the backs of third-party developers no longer needs them. Twitter has also been cutting off third-party social networks like Tumblr, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Twitter’s API rules aren’t entirely clear, but the company’s overall position seems to be that developers — including big third-party sites like Tumblr — should be putting their content into Twitter, but not taking anything back out.

That stance, along with the user limits on third-party client software, has soured many developers on Twitter. Thus far though there doesn’t seem to be a mass exodus of angry developers abandoning Twitter. That may simply be because, at the moment, there’s nowhere else to go, though, as always, the open web offers a solution.

Image: Transport for London

Lowell George’s girlfriend can’t make up her mind. How he describes it is what’s so cool. “She’s got one foot on the platform, the other on the train.”

And that’s the best strategy, right now, for a reporter or blogger using Twitter.

You can’t get off the platform, that’s where everyone is. But you need a Plan B, just in case you have to get off the platform. That’s the train.

You need a tool that allows you to publish to Twitter, and at the same time publish to an open system that can be connected to other open systems. So users can create their own Twitter, the same way they use Twitter to follow many sources, without having to go through Twitter.

Twitter is the platform. The feed is the train.

It might sound complicated, but it’s not.

If Twitter were to cancel my account, I would keep posting, and people who followed me on the train (following the analogy) would continue to get my updates. The people on the platform, however — would not.

It’s how we develop strength, and the power to choose, without leaving Twitter.

If Twitter Corp plans on being nice to us, then they should not have a problem with this approach. Their API permits it. It’s consistent with Dick Costolo’s edict that we should put stuff into Twitter, but not take stuff out of it.

It’s a way to preserve journalistic integrity even if Twitter hasn’t yet figured out if it’s in the business of providing a platform for journalism.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

Image: Twitter

Now Twitter is returning to tried-and-true server-side methods of building webpages. It turns out using JavaScript to do everything is not such a good idea, at least not if you want your website to be fast.

Twitter says that returning to traditional means of serving webpages “dropped the time to first Tweet to one-fifth of what it was.”

Even better news for those concerned about the future of the web and the longevity of URLs is the news that Twitter is getting rid of its hashbang URLs. The hashbang syntax was originally designed to allow Google’s spiders to crawl Ajax content — content loaded dynamically — but sometime in 2010 hashbang URLs started popping up all over the web, including at Twitter.

The hashbang syntax works well if you use it as it was designed, to surface Ajax content that would otherwise be missed by Google. But it was always an awkward hack, not a cornerstone on which to build a well-designed URL, and extending it beyond its intended use often proves disastrous (as sites like Gawker can attest).

Twitter will begin phasing out hashbang URLs in the coming weeks, starting with its tweet permalink URLs.

Much of the write-up about the new speed enhancements on Twitter’s engineering blog reads like a web development best-practices tutorial from 2001, but there are some new ideas lurking toward the end, where Twitter Engineering Manager Dan Webb outlines Twitter’s new module-based JavaScript loading methods, built around CommonJS.

“We opted to arrange all our code as CommonJS modules,” writes Webb, “This means that each piece of our code explicitly declares what it needs to execute.” In other words, each piece of code is aware of what other pieces it needs to work. That means Twitter can tune how it bundles its code, “lazily load parts of it, download pieces in parallel, separate it into any number of files, and more — all without the author of the code having to know or care about this.”

Webb doesn’t mention Twitter’s front-end toolkit BootStrap in his post, but rolling together CommonJS and Twitter’s own dependency builder — which Webb says is similar to the RequireJS optimizer — sounds like a great addition for BootStrap 3.0.

Photo: dark_ghetto28/Flickr

Twitter has embraced Google’s vision of a faster web and is now serving webpages over the SPDY protocol to browsers that support it.

SPDY, pronounced “speedy,” is a replacement for the HTTP protocol — the language currently used when your browser talks to a web server. When you request a webpage or a file from a server, chances are your browser sends that request using HTTP. The server answers using HTTP, too. This is why “http” appears at the beginning of most web addresses.

The SPDY protocol handles all the same tasks as HTTP, but SPDY can do it all about 50 percent faster.

SPDY started life as a proprietary protocol at Google and worked only in the company’s Chrome web browser. SPDY has since won support elsewhere. Firefox will have SPDY support when version 11 hits prime time in the near future [Update: As Mozilla's Chris Blizzard points out, SPDY is disabled by default in Firefox 11. If you're using the beta and want to give it a try, you'll need to visit about:config, search for network.http.spdy.enabled and set the value to true. If all goes well SPDY will be turned on by default in Firefox 13.]. Amazon also baked SPDY support into its Silk browser for the Kindle.

The IETF’s HTTPbis Working Group — the standards body charged with creating and maintaining the HTTP specification — is now considering adding SPDY to HTTP 2.0, which will improve the speed of HTTP connections.

Despite the web standards backing, SPDY still has a long way to go before it’s an everyday part of the web. With only Chrome and Firefox behind it, SPDY is still only available for about 40 percent of desktop users. But with large services like Twitter throwing their weight behind it, SPDY may well start to take the web by storm — the more websites that embrace SPDY the more likely it is that other browsers will add support for the faster protocol.

If you’d like to follow Twitter’s lead and get your own site serving over SPDY, check out mod_spdy, a SPDY module for the Apache server (currently a beta release).

Embed a tweet in any webpage

The new Embedded Tweet feature works just like a YouTube movie, offering a short HTML snippet that you can copy and paste into any third-party website. Unfortunately using the Embed Tweet feature from Twitter is somewhat awkward since it’s buried in the new interface. First you need to click on a tweet, then click “details” and then you’ll see the embed option.

The real benefit of the embed feature lies with third party platforms like Twitter’s two launch partners WordPress and Posterous. Users of both services can now simply paste a link to a tweet and it will automatically be converted to an embedded tweet, no cut and paste necessary. For example, just drop this code in your WordPress.com blog and it will automatically be converted to an embedded tweet:

[tweet https://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/133640144317198338]

If you’d like to implement something similar on your own site Twitter now has an OEmbed endpoint you can query to convert Twitter links to embedded tweets. Those not familiar with OEmbed can check out our OEmbed tutorial, but, in a nutshell, OEmbed is a standard format where you send a URL and the host site then sends back the necessary embed code.

There are three steps to Twitter’s OEmbed process:

1. Obtain an URL to or ID number of the Tweet you want to render.
2. Make a request to the GET statuses/oembed endpoint, passing the Tweet URL or ID as a query parameter.
3. Render the html property of the response, as well as a <script> element pointing to //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js, if you want the embed to be interactive.

If you choose to render the tweet using Twitter’s widgets.js, the raw HTML will be converted into an interactive tweet. The fancy embedded tweet script uses Web Intents to allow users to reply, retweet, or follow the user directly from the embedded tweet. See the Twitter developer site for more details on Twitter’s widgets.js and how to use OEmbed to embedded tweets to your website.

Twitter now offers inline previews for more services, like the popular Instagram.

Twitter has expanded the integration of third-party services on its website, adding five new photo and video sharing services to the growing list of what shows up as an inline preview.

Among the new services to secure a spot in the ever-expanding Twitterverse is Instagram, the current darling of the Twitter hipsters. The photo-sharing service has managed to build an impressive following even though it’s currently only available as an iOS app. The majority of Instagram fans use Twitter to post links to their artsy photos.

The other new services available as inline previews include videos from Blip.tv, music players from Rdio, slideshows and presentations from SlideShare and photos and videos from Dipdive.

The new inline preview feature, introduced in September’s make-over, shows a preview of an image or a video in the right-hand pane whenever somebody tweets a link to a supported video or photo site. At launch, that was Flickr, Vimeo, TwitPic and YouTube. Along with the inline previews, you also see associated conversations, recent tweets and mini bios of the people mentioned in the tweet. It’s a feature we really like — it takes Twitter beyond the 140 character limit to include photos, videos, maps and all sorts of other rich media.

While we’re happy to see Twitter integrating with more web services, the new web-based preview features highlight just how far behind the website the company’s official mobile apps have fallen. Neither the official Android client nor the iOS Twitter clients support any of the inline previews you’ll find on the web. Twitter’s mobile site doesn’t show them, either. For a richer mobile Twitter, you’ll need to turn to third-party mobile apps.

See Also:

• Take a Tour of the New Twitter
• Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh
• Twitter Puts Geotagging Tools in Place

Link shortening service Bit.ly has unveiled a new link bundling feature that allows you to group multiple links — up to 100 — on a single page and share that page with your friends with a single short URL.

If you’ve been looking for a way to share more than one link at a time with your Twitter followers — perhaps links to both sides of an argument, a collection of your favorite restaurants in New York, or collected coverage of some major, earth-shattering news event — a Bit.ly bundle fits the bill.

Link-shortening services such as Bit.ly have seen an explosion in popularity in the past few years thanks to the steady growth of Twitter, Facebook and other services which limit posts to bite-sized bursts of 140 to 420 characters. Bit.ly remains a powerful link-shortening service with over four billion unique URLs shortened. The company also offers some stand-out features like stat-tracking for each link, automatic QR Code generation, some open APIs and support for popular social web technologies like OAuth.

Now that you can wrap multiple links inside a single Bit.ly URL, it becomes even easier to squeeze more info into a single tweet.

If you’re thinking that a page of links would be pretty boring, well, Bit.ly seems to have had the same thought. The company has integrated media previews of images and videos, as well as any titles, descriptions and notes you want to add to your links.

Bit.ly bundles can also function as a group collaborating tool, your friends can comment on your bundles and even build their own based on your starting points. It also makes Bit.ly a more valuable service, rather than just a middleman of necessity standing between a URL and Twitter.

See Also:

• Bit.ly Pro Makes it Dead Simple to Create Your Own URL Shortener
• Twitter Plans to Launch its Own URL Shortener
• Bit.ly Is a Big Deal URL Shortener

OAuth is a great way to sidestep the dilemma of having to hand over passwords to third-party sites and apps to access user data. This is the primary reason the authentication method is fast becoming a de riguer part of today’s social APIs.

But while OAuth solves one problem, it creates another — it greatly raises the complexity of simple apps.

We’ve looked at the issue in the past, particularly with regard to Twitter’s transition to OAuth, which broke countless small scripts. The good news is that OAuth 2.0 is less complex than its predecessor and removes much of the headache for small developers. Unfortunately, OAuth 2.0 isn’t widely adopted yet, and it’s not quite ready for prime time.

But there is a solution for Twitter. SuperTweet was created by developer David Beckemeyer. The service sits between your script and Twitter, where it does the heavy lifting of OAuth for you. Even better, you don’t have to hand over your Twitter password to SuperTweet — instead, you create a password on the site, approve SuperTweet to access your Twitter account and then connect your script to SuperTweet.

The service isn’t meant for full-blown apps, nor does it support commercial uses. But for individuals and non-profits without the development resources to make the switch to OAuth 2.0, it can bring those simple Twitter scripts back to life.

Of course using SuperTweet means adding another potential failure point between your script and Twitter, but if you can live with that, using SuperTweet is easier than wading into OAuth’s waters.

See Also:

• Does OAuth’s Complexity Alienate Small Apps?
• Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh
• Gmail Now More Secure With OAuth Support

If you’ve ever wanted to archive your social network activity, store in your own database and pull all sorts of interesting visualizations out of it, then the new ThinkUp app is what you’ve been waiting for.

ThinkUp is one part metrics app — tracking which of your posts are most popular, for example — and one part cross-network aggregator. It offers features you won’t find on Twitter or Facebook, like a detailed “conversation view” of exchanges with other users. ThinkUp also acts as a backup for your social network data, pulling it into your own database. It even offers CSV files for creating your own spreadsheets.

Since it archives all of your activity, ThinkUp is an especially useful tool for those of us who like to maintain control over our own data. It takes stuff that would otherwise only live in the various networks’ silos and copies it to a database where we’re the administrator. So if we want to ditch Twitter or Facebook in some distant future where those companies start acting against our best interests, we don’t lose the massive stores of updates, links, photos and, most importantly, friend relationships we’ve already set up. And in the meantime, it lets us have fun with all the data it’s archiving.

Although ThinkUp is still a beta release, we took the code for a spin and found it to be stable enough to be useful. At the moment, it only supports Twitter and Facebook data, but ThinkUp plans to add additional social networks in the future, including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Google Buzz. If you’d like to try out the limited beta, head over to Github and grab the code. You may notice it’s a project published by Gina Trapani, the former Lifehacker editor who is now an independent author, blogger and programmer.

Installing ThinkUp is a bit like installing WordPress on your own server — you’ll need a MySQL database, PHP 5 and a public URL (at least to start, Twitter’s new OAuth system requires a public callback). A full list of system requirements can be found on GitHub.

Once you’ve unzipped and uploaded the code, just visit the URL where you plan to use ThinkUp and an automated install script will walk you through the installation process, just like WordPress. The only snag we hit was that our server didn’t support PHP’s mail() function, so we never got a confirmation e-mail. The solution is pretty simple: just head into MySQL and mark your user as confirmed.

Once you’re up and running, ThinkUp is pretty simple to use. It wraps your myriad of data in a nice-looking interface. Some of the information ThinkUp gives you for Twitter is available in the new Twitter interface, but there’s plenty of extra stuff that make ThinkUp worth having.

ThinkUp's conversation view

The big feature here is that ThinkUp tracks all of your Twitter interactions, showing your most replied-to posts, your most re-tweeted posts and, my personal favorite, threaded conversations with other Twitter users. But it also tracks everything your followers do as well. For example, ThinkUp catalogs all the links and images your followers have posted, displaying them all in one place.

See all your follower's posted images in a single view

There are dozens of features, like charts and graphs showing post counts, follower counts and @replies over time. You can also view all of your followers or friends on a Google Map.

While ThinkUp puts a tremendous amount of data at your fingertips, it manages to keep the interface simple enough that it’s never overwhelming. In fact, it can offer some insight into both how you use Twitter and how you might get more out of it.

If you’ve ever wondered why some of you posts are more popular than others, ThinkUp offers a window on what your followers like, how they respond to your posts, and how quickly they respond. ThinkUp is especially useful if you often post questions of your followers. Because responses tend to trickle in over time, finding them all can be difficult given the speed of Twitter. Thanks to the conversation view, ThinkUp makes it easy to see your question and everyone’s response in a single view.

As should be apparent when you set it up, ThinkUp is an entirely modular app — everything is a plugin. That means anyone can write plugins and expand the functionality of ThinkUp. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be repository of outside plugins. But should the app take off, we expect something of the sort will be available.

ThinkUp is still clearly a beta release and a little rough around the edges. Its biggest downfall is a lack of user documentation. There is however, great documentation for developers looking to extend the app. But even at this early stage, ThinkUp is well on its way to becoming a must-have tool for social media addicts — albeit ones with access to a personal web server and the smarts to use it.

See Also:

• Take a Tour of the New Twitter
• Twitter Moves to OAuth: The OAuthcalypse Is Nigh
• Using the Twitter API