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"@" on Twitter

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Re: "@" on Twitter

#41

Post by zaxomi »

donttrack wrote: post #13
geuis wrote: post #9

How big is twitter’s engineering department? Their mobile website doesn’t even load the content of the tweet. Yesterday it was throwing an error that the api was rate limited. For their own site! They’ve been systematically destroying their own foundation by alienating the developer community for years and they can’t even get their own product to work reliably.

... And they literally just have to show you 280 characters. Thank God they are not building flying cars..

And to show you that 280 characters they need to download about 6 kbyte css, 4 kbyte javascript, 17 kbyte Google analytics, 26 kbyte jquery, 1.5 kbyte favicon, and some images... Total about 100 kbytes.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#42

Post by Born_Again »

testplzignore wrote: post #15
geuis wrote: post #9

How big is twitter’s engineering department? Their mobile website doesn’t even load the content of the tweet. Yesterday it was throwing an error that the api was rate limited. For their own site! They’ve been systematically destroying their own foundation by alienating the developer community for years and they can’t even get their own product to work reliably.

I've seen the rate limit message a lot. Almost seems like it always happens when there is a Referer header. If you refresh after the error, it usually works. Not sure why they would punish people for linking to tweets...

It's definitely because of the Referer header. It has only happened to me when I am linked to a tweet from somewhere else and refreshing always solves the problem. I think Twitter wants you to download their app instead of using your phone's web browser.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#43

Post by CommieBobDole »

wpietri wrote: post #40
enthdegree wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could such an account have been created?

I asked somebody who used to work there, and the answer I got was that there are a bunch of accounts from back before validation was as tight as it is now. Which seems reasonable to me. At-replies were not something that Twitter started with, but instead were community-driven with software support added later: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2008/how-replies-w... It's a good reminder that it's always easier…

If I recall correctly, when Google Plus was new and people were excited about it, a whole bunch of companies flocked to the site to set up accounts for their businesses. But Google hadn't launched the "business account" functionality yet, so they banned them all.

I guess Google Plus and Friendster are good examples of how that mindset works out.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#44

Post by Gigablah »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #43
wpietri wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked somebody who used to work there, and the answer I got was that there are a bunch of accounts from back before validation was as tight as it is now. Which seems reasonable to me. At-replies were not something that Twitter started with, but instead were community-driven with software support added later: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2008/how-replies-w... It's a good reminder that it's always easier…

If I recall correctly, when Google Plus was new and people were excited about it, a whole bunch of companies flocked to the site to set up accounts for their businesses. But Google hadn't launched the "business account" functionality yet, so they banned them all. I guess Google Plus and Friendster are good examples of how that mindset works out.

Because nobody could conceivably impersonate a business and cause all sorts of legal and PR issues.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#46

Post by lostlogin »

c22 wrote: post #25
lostlogin wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Useless’ isn’t a strong enough word. The way it’s broken Google image search puts it way into negative a value.

Try adding -site:pinterest.com to your search query. Edit: Just tried it myself, might want to add a -site:pinterest.co.uk as well.

I get that I can exclude results, but it’s a little like “you’re holding it wrong”. On mobile it’s prticularly horrible. Maybe this is exactly what a clipboard manager is for.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#48

Post by weberc2 »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #38
ClassyJacket wrote: post #20

Slightly related but very interesting: the 2010 Twitter bug where simply tweeting "Accept [username]" would automatically force them to follow you. My understanding is that for the sake of simpler interfaces such as SMS, which they let hold the whole service back for a long long time, they had a "follow [username]" feature - and if the person had to approve follow requests, it would send one to them. To accept the re…

A similarly lulzy but much more sinister-looking bug happened at Facebook, where an index into an array of users was mistakenly treated as a user id, so the message intended for user 4 in the array ended up going to the user with ID 4, aka zuck.

That sounds like a pretty PHP-specific bug.

Downvoters: most programming languages don’t silently convert strings (i.e., usernames) to array indices. Even Python doesn’t do this. While this particular bug probably wouldn’t be possible in most other languages, I’m only commenting because it’s rare and amusing to see bugs that are so language specific. I’m not making a generic “lol PHP” joke.

Re: "@" on Twitter

#49

Post by donatj »

rasz wrote: post #37
cromwellian wrote: post #16

Reminds me on the old Commodore 64 Quantum-Link service (former version of AOL), there was a hack called 'Q-Armor' where you could get a username of all spaces, and no sysops or any chat room managers could kick you, or do anything to your account.

people griefing in online games (hacks/aimbots) often run with nicks like ||||||||||II||I|||||||||||||II1111|||||||IIIIIIIIII||||||||||||

My friends AIM account back in the day was essentially this. He basically had to find you.
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