This was presented at Devnest 9

Developers of Twitter probably heard of @Anywhere when it was launched at Chirp, it includes componants which will enhanch a web page. Which for twitter increases the engagement for their users. These componants are cool, but hardly anything to get excitited about. @Anywhere contains a fantastic secret underneth it’s hood and thats a fully JS-API. Thats right a method to interface with the Twitter API entirely in JavaScript. This is because @Anywhere provides the means to authenticate a user via OAuth using their new Twitter Connect window.

Authenticated users can achieve a lot more using the API, therefore the JS-API now lets you practically do anything that the regular API can. This is really exciting because it means that i can finally turn TweetTabs into a fully Twitter client built entirely in JavaScript.

Here’s a quick example of how easy it is to post a status update using @Anywhere:

twttr.anywhere(function(T) {
if (T.isConnected()) {
T.status.Update(‘hello world’);
}
});

You can find a lot more information regarding @Anywhere over on the @Anywhere dev page. You can also get a full list of support methods.

TweetTabs

So how does this all fit in with TweetTabs? Quite simply TweetTabs was never quite finished, i always intended it to be a fully Twitter Client and not just the search client that it became, this is because Twitter at the time of writing TweetTabs didn’t support any methods of OAuth through JavaScript. But now it does, so i’ve implemented it.

You can check out a very alpha version (which is my proof of concept) at http://beta.tweettabs.com. Please give feedback, I fully intend on integrating @Anywhere fully into TweetTabs.

Downsides

The real big problem with the JS-API part of @Anywhere is that it is not supported (at all), there is very little documentation and most of it has changed since it was released. So it really is down to trial and error!

Slides

Here are the slides from the talk.

Next week I will be presenting the first, of what I hope to be many, presentation on what I do. This one will be focusing on Tweettabs and integrating @Anywhere support. It should be a interesting talk with lots of surprises.

Tuesday 6th July, 6pm-9pm

The Guardian
King’s Place
90 York Way
N1 9AG London
United Kingdom

Come along and check it out, you can get tickets here and find more information about the event on their website.

The TweetMeme button is one of the most successful social media buttons, it is served to millions of websites around the web. One of the more unusual points about the TweetMeme button is it’s height, 61px. This height has now been adopted by facebook and digg.

Why 61px?

“Cause everyone knows that 61 pixels is such a normal dimension in the world of social networking – I mean everything’s 61 pixels, right? Cause it’s…a prime number!”

- Twittown

I would like to say that it was due to lots of research and investigation, but it was more of a accident. The button was originally designed to be 60px high but in the quest to fit an extra digit onto the button the font size was decreased and the button height was increased to 61px.

The Standard

The TweetMeme button had a massive adoption rate, and was installed on millions of sites across the web therefore it became the one to beat! Large sites have now put pressure on the other social media sites to produce their buttons to the new standard. Therefore the 61px standard (if you have a better name let me know) is now the default for all social media buttons on the internet.

At the end of September I was invited to a shoot for the UK edition of Wired. It was a shoot based around the twitterati of the UK and included some big names like Iain Dodsworth. The shoot was based at the old BT museum, which became defunct when their archive went online. You can see me and the other 24 people in Wired’s December Issue, on sale from today.

Can you find me?

It has been a long time since I have touched my personal blog. I have been preoccupied with other projects which mostly lead nowhere, i seem to have a strange passion to constantly redesign everything. Well my new years resolution is to stop!

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