Aug 1
Fighting back spam and unwanted tweets with Twitterfall
We believe it's very important to use our own product, that's why both of us use Twitterfall every single day as our main Twitter client. We also believe it's very important to listen to what people have to say about Twitterfall, and that's why we both do a search for 'Twitterfall OR twfall' all the time in Twitterfall.
We've heard a lot of people and media talk about how spam is a big issue on Twitter. We've noticed it too; when it comes to trending topics we see hundreds of spam tweets all the time, making it very hard for trending topics to be as useful as it used to be. Twitter has a very simple spam reporting process, you just have to send a direct message to @spam with the name of the user in question. But now if you use Twitterfall it's even easier. When logged in, simply click the small 'Report' link above the users name. You will receive a prompt confirming you want to report them, and then Twitterfall will do the rest (it will even follow @spam for you if necessary).
Sometimes the system lets you down and you need to be able to filter your tweets yourself to remove the garbage. That's why we've added a new 'Exclusions' filter which allows you to filter tweets beyond the simple syntax of Twitter Search.
Our exclusions filter is case insensitive, supports simple 'from:' syntax, and filters ALL of the tweets falling down your page. We use a clever search algorithm which means you can have as many exclusions as you like without causing problems.
Right now exclusions are not saved when you leave Twitterfall. We know that this is important, and we're going to be working on it as soon as possible. We just really wanted to get these features out so that people can start using them and giving us feedback on them.
These are the two biggest new features for Twitterfall, and we're really pleased with them and hope you are too. However the new features don't end there!
You can now perform Geolocation searches without a custom search! This means that you can view any tweets about anything in your area. We've had loads of requests for this, and we're really pleased to be supporting this now.
You can now edit searches inline. This means you don't have to delete the search and read it any more, which should make using Twitterfall much easier.
When you visit Twitterfall for the first time (or have nothing saved) Twitterfall no longer defaults to 'All Terms'. Instead, you receive a welcome message explaining some of the things you can do. This makes it much easier to set up Twitterfall for the first time with your custom searches, login, exclusions, and so on. This is a bit of an experiment and if we feel it's working out we'll be working on improving the 'initial launch' experience to help people get off to a great start with Twitterfall.
We now support Mentions. Previously we told people just to search for '@username', but of course this means you miss out on private tweets, so we've included support for the mentions API call. Worried about using up your API? Don't worry, because Twitterfall is a web-based service, using it does not use your API for other applications such as Tweetdeck.
Your browser tab just got more useful. Now when you're not viewing Twitterfall, the browser tab will update showing you what new tweets you have (it will say if they are timeline tweets, search tweets, and so on). Note that support for this is varied. It works fine in Firefox, but in Safari you have to be using a different window in order for this to happen, not just tab. We're hoping that Safari and the WebKit team solve this problem soon.
Got a Mac? Get 'Twitterfall For Mac' by clicking 'Twitterfall for Desktop' on the right hand side. This is a packaged up Site Specific Browser using the Fluid framework, correctly set up to support Twitter oAuth (which by default, Fluid doesn't support as it opens a new window when you try to login). We're hoping to include information about making Site Specific Browser's for Windows and Linux soon.
Improved Presentation Mode. Now you can include a heading at the top of the Presentation Mode (a selectable theme). Great for use on a projector (for example, you could have 'Include the hashtag #twitterfall to get your tweet up here').
We think you'll agree that this is a lot of new features. We hope you enjoy them all. We've also fixed a few bugs here and there, notably:
- Searches with long words don't wrap any more
- Setting a large fall size works now
- Countless performance optimisations
Let us know what you think about all these new features by leaving a comment, or getting in touch with us via Twitter.
Comments (2)
Aug 19, 2009
DavidDMuir said...
Improved presentation mode. Brilliant. Just what I asked for. :-) (See http://blog.twitterfall.com/presentation-mode-shortening-urls-and-more)
Aug 19, 2009
DavidDMuir said...
Curses! The URL in the previous comment acquired an extra ) and there seems to be no way of editing it out. :-( Try again: http://blog.twitterfall.com/presentation-mode-shortening-urls-and-more
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