Twitter engineering blog, Twitter Text library in C#

Dewald Pretorius came across and shared on the Twitter dev-talk list the recently created Twitter engineering blog. Interesting engineering stuff to be read there, and not necessarily Twitter-specific by any means.

One of the entries mentions Twitter Text libraries for Ruby and Java. These libraries allow external consumers to, in theory, parse tweet text for URLs, screenname mentions and hashtags the same way Twitter does.

I grabbed Matt Sanford's twitter-text-java and created a quick C# port, NTwitterText. It looks like one or two of the URL regex patterns need some tweaking, but otherwise all functionality ported over pretty easily and cleanly.

Quick stop in: Tweet Cloud

What a crazy month!

Four projects going full-steam, and a trip to Charleston to visit Blackbaud the first half of last week. Surprisingly, pre-Thanksgiving travel wasn't the horror I expected.

Created a Tweet Cloud based on a year's worth of my tweets, pretty cool:

Twitter Continues Trademark Push

In addition to some C&D letters sent to various application developers who use the name "Twitter" or "Twit" in their app name or URL, I've noticed Twitter now calls "updates" "Tweets" on user pages. "Tweet" is a term that we USERS created and made popular. Twitter has trademarked it. If they do anything to enforce that trademark that negatively impacts users or developers, then let me say it now: SHAME ON THEM.