A quick update to acknowledge the slow updates you might be experiencing during the aftermath of the much publicised DDOS attacks on Twitter which happened last week.
Many Twitter Apps are suffering from a range of issues, and we are among them. The usual ~5 minute maximum delay between tweeting an update and it being reflected in your charts has from time to time stretched to as much as an hour as the number of updates we can request is being limited.
I’d expect this situation to pass fairly quickly - so please be patent with us. Thank you.
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Slow responses
admin
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Oauth chart manager now live
admin
Some new features go live today.
Manager
If you hit datatoy.net/manage (or click Manage in the datatoy header) you’ll be asked to authorise datatoy to connect with your Twitter account. Do this and you’ll get access to the collection manager.
This has been the single biggest piece of feedback since datatoy went live, “how do I remove collections, remove mistaken tweets, and generally move things around?” Well now you can.
At the moment it’s very simple stuff - show and hide collections, and remove mistaken tweets from your collections - that’s about it. But over the coming weeks this will become a full function manager for your tweets. All nice and secure through Twitter API Oauth goodness.
Just so you know - datatoy won’t be sending any tweets on your behalf, we just need to make sure you only edit your own collections.
Links
Tweets often carry links. Photos of the top of the hill you just climbed, links to the book you just read, or to people you just met. We’ve been storing these for a whort while, but not displaying them. We now display links in a few areas on your profile and your collections.As twitter clients tend to use shortening services which obfuscate the target of the links these lists looked a little random. Enter the LongURL project and an excellent JQuery plugin to let you see where you’re going before you get there. Just hit the wee ‘expand’ buttons to see the end url.
There’s more fun URL stuff in the works, like thumbnails for image and video links, direct link to hashtags etc…
Activity
And finally for today, a more focussed Recent Activity chart has been added to your profile pages, along with a links list - both showing recent additions across all your collections.As ever, feedback appreciated!
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totals, not counts!
admin
Another small change went live today. Looking at my training charts it struck me that it made little sense to log 12Km runs if the chart only displayed that I went for 1 run.
12 is a bigger number than 1, so I want to see that 12 on my chart.
The other side effect of this is to make the overview chart on your profile page more interesting if some of your collections run small numbers and others large numbers.
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Hiding a collection
admin
Some feedback around collection management has highlighted the need to remove charts and collections which aren’t needed, were typod, or are dupes - “eat” and “ate” for example.
A lovely new browser based interface to help manage collections is in the works. While you wait for that you can hide a chart from your profile by tweeting something like:
d datatoy *coffee ?hideme
This removes the collection from your own pages, and from any group pages for that term. As the “hideme” suggests - you will still be able to submit to this collection, and view it by typing the url directly into your browser.
A ?purge marker will be released soon allowing you to fully remove a collection and all it’s associated reports and data.
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Dev update
admin
It’s been a while since the last dev update. A few small changes were pushed live today:
Time spans
The early users of datatoy now have datapoints older than the default 14 day view would allow to be seen. Reports like the overview chart for activity now span the life of that collection - so if you have 3 days or 3 years of data you’ll now be able to see it all in a single view.Caps alert
The report routing was failing a little for the past few days for collections with capitalisation - I’m such a lowercase addict I sometimes forget other people are aware where the Shift key is. Should be working properly now - even for old collections you thought were broken.URL capture
There’s some interesting stuff coming relating to urls within your tweets. Send a *eats update with a twitpic URL and we’ll use the thumbnail in certain reports. We’re capturing the data already - but the reports won’t show anything fun for a wee while. -
Nice bit of press
admin
This may be self regarding nonsense, but it’s always nce to say thankyou. So thankyou to twtbase, twitip and twitdom for giving datatoy.net a bit of coverage among the other fine twitter apps - our user numbers jumped bit this weekend.
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collection update
admin
A few small updates to the datatoy collection page were released today - trying out some alternative ways of communicating the data held therin.
Tag clouds are so 2006. But they work if used well, and hopefully this is a nice start. Inactive as the action is non obvious at this point. These are entries in a collection, so data around them will be minimal until we scale a bit. Eventually in the same way that we share “other people tracking ‘eats’” it will be interesting to share “other people who ‘eats’ ‘tofu’“. This is an obvious place to link to that content.
A couple of new charts show the overall and individual inputs for the past couple of weeks to the collection. The ‘past month’ and ‘all time’ equivalents are ready to roll - but given our oldest data is less than 2 weeks old they are a little dull at the moment.
Feedback request
One of the objectives of datatoy is to keep the tweet commands “natural”. That is, they should be readable and sensible to a human aswell as a script on a server. The comments which accompany commands have no direct impact on data being added to your charts - but add a richer “feel” to your collections. Occasionally however they get mistaken for the actual content, and you might see odd things appear on your collections.
For example, in the coffee example above we see “costa latte”. Should we store “costa” or “costa latte” or both? If we take both we can relate “latte” from “starbucks latte” or “costa latte”. Some tweeking is needed here.
If you think any of your tweets have been interpreted oddly do let us know by tweeting @datatoy a link to your collection, or by commenting on this post.
Feedback feedback feedback!
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profile layout update
admin
Some experimentation with the colors of collections (feedback suggested they were a little too subdued), the layouts of the summary chart, and the overall layout of profiles for busier users go live today.
Colors. The old colors were a bit wintery portishead. These should be a little more suited to the summer sun. They will change again, and if there is demand you will be able to set your own colors at some point.
Overview layout. The timeline on the profile page is useful, but for users with a good number of collections it was getting very cluttered. The colors now match the other charts for each collection, which helps hugely. Another change moves the legend out of the way a little more effectively.
Finally - the overall layout shrinks the later collections to make the page a lot more manageable.
Feedback welcome.
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datatoy gets all social
admin
So far all the interesting datatoy stuff has centred on the individual. Today things get a little more social.
On your collection page you’ll see to the right a panel displaying other people tracking this title. Click on the avatars to see the individual collection pages, or click on the “Group page for …” link to see the new group page.
One great use for these pages would be for your running club to all track their training by sending tweets like this:
*abdnrunclub 10km training run
These would then be collected into a single page at datatoy.net/group/abdnrunclub. See who trained yesterday, who hasn’t trained for a week, etc…
This is very much a preview release of the groups page - a lot more will be happening on the goups page over the coming weeks.
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admin
Another wee change to note. Although the views within the collection page aren’t ready yet datatoy is collecting any URLs you include in tweets to your collections. It doesn’t matter where you put them. For the time being it’s only URLs in tweets which include a *collection code which are collected.
admin 11:47 am on May 13, 2009 Permalink
A quick note on privacy in light of the release of groups.
Sometime soon you’ll get a HIDE *COLLECTION command to hide your collections individually from the groups and other public areas.
The effect of HIDE *COLLECTION will be to block access to your collection page to everyone but the authenticated twitter account owning the collection. I expect the default will remain public, but hiding will be an option.