Pakzilla » Twitter

Class of 2011: If Social Media Were a High School

Tahir Akram — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:06:26 +0000

What if a social media were a high school. Find out where is your favorite one.

Some dirty little secrets of Twitter you should know

Tahir Akram — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:26:50 +0000

There are many things that we don’t know about Twitter. I want to share a infographic of some dirty secrets about Twitter. You will find them interesting.

[via]

Let’s help Firefox users on Twitter. Join Army of Awesome.

Tahir Akram — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:33:45 +0000

Mozilla has launched a support program, providing help to those people who tweet their Firefox problems.

This support program is called Army of Awesome. You don’t need to be a Firefox expert to reply. Just pick the tweet that you think you can provide help over it. Its a nice way to support open source and free software. I appreciate this move by Mozilla. And I will give some time to it.

I read on their blog:

Happy tweeting! And remember…good things come to those who tweet!

And I found a tweet on Firefox twitter page distributing T-shirts for Army of Awesome participants. A good thing. Lets help.

Fetch Twitter friends or followers through REST API in Java

Tahir Akram — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:08:18 +0000

I was playing around with fetching Twitter followers and friends with Twitter4J. But it was taking time to do that. So I code it with using REST urls given by Twitter. It fetches all your friends or followers. Depending upon your application that you want one list or you want to use paging. But I did it in one go. Performance wise, it will be trouble of fetching say 2000 followers or friends.

I used JDOM to parse XML.

import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.DataInputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import org.jdom.Document;
import org.jdom.Element;
import org.jdom.input.SAXBuilder;

public class Twt {

String urlFlwrs= "http://twitter.com/statuses/followers/YOUR_TWITTER_SCREEN_NAME.xml?cursor=";
String urlFrnds= "http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/YOUR_TWITTER_SCREEN_NAME.xml?cursor=";

List followers = new ArrayList();
long cursorCounter = -1;

public static void main(String[] args) {
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
new Twt().readFollowFriends();
System.out.printf("Total Time: %d secs",
(System.currentTimeMillis() - start)/1000);
}

void readFollowFriends(){

try {
StringBuffer followersData = new StringBuffer();
// use urlFrnds as a parameter if you want to fetch friends
URL url = new URL(urlFlwrs+cursorCounter);
URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(
urlConnection.getInputStream());
String inputLine;
while ((inputLine = dis.readLine()) != null) {
followersData.append(inputLine);
}

SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();
Document document = builder.build(new ByteArrayInputStream(
followersData.toString().getBytes()));

Element root = document.getRootElement();
Element usersElm = root.getChild("users");
Element nextCursor = root.getChild("next_cursor");
List users = usersElm.getChildren("user");

for (int c = 0; c < users.size(); c++) {
Element user = (Element) users.get(c);
Element name = user.getChild("name");
// now you have every thing, the information of a user
// here you can populate followers list
}

if (nextCursor != null){
cursorCounter = Long.parseLong(nextCursor.getText());

if (cursorCounter != 0)
readFollowFriends();
}
} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

But you will also get following HTTP 400 error. Due to API limits by Twitter. For this we want to whitelist ourself.

java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 400 for URL: http://twitter.com/statuses/followers/YOUR_TWITTER_SCREEN_NAME.xml?cursor=-1
at sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection.getInputStream(HttpURLConnection.java:1133)
at Twt.readFollowFriends(Twt.java:32)
at Twt.main(Twt.java:22)
Total Time: 7 secs

Download Gravity, a Symbian S60 Twitter client

Tahir Akram — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 06:27:29 +0000

If you are an avid Twitter user and addicted to use it from your phone. Then you should try Gravity. Its Symbian S60 based Twitter client. Which has very cool and usable interface. I have also tried Snaptu and TweetS60, which are free. But Gravity gave me great experience. I am using it on my Nokia 5320 Xpress Music.

You can download Gravity v1.2 from here.