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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Just hover the date on your page and up pops the reminder. Full data is still available in the table lower down.

Well one obvious thing is to link it up with your blog to display your lunching habits, show off your diligent training regime, or … you get the idea.

On your collection pages, lower right corner, is the new widgets area.

The first widget is live - one for my coffee preferences shown below. Just copy and paste the code anywhere on your site, in a post, in the sidebar et… and it will keep up to date and show a little slice of your life.

The code even survives posting in wordpress! Clicking on the image brings you to your full collection overview page.

my coffee datatoy

Suggestions

This is just the first widget and it’s a one size fits all. I’ll be adding color options, size options, and all that stuff in due course.

If you’d like a different datatoys widget for your blog / facebook / whatever that uses your datatoys data - let me know below what you’d like it to do and I’ll see what can be done!

Frustrated no more…

By placing the “yesterday” before the *lunch collection marker we make sure that you don’t look like you’ve been eating “yesterday sandwiches” - whatever they might be. It also works if you put it in the comment like this

*lunch prawn sandwich !at john lewis with fee yesterday

Either style simply enters the prawn sandwich into your collection with yesterdays date.

More time shifting codes to come if this goes down well.

The subdued tones may have something to do with my accompanying music: