Björn’s Blog

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Nicole Simon has brought to my attention that creating “Twitter This” links is not as trivial as it might seem. I hope to remedy the situation by providing a simple tool for creating such links.

What is a “Twitter This” link? Simply, a link that brings the user to the Twitter page with a prepared status text field. All the user has to do to tweet your prepared text is to click the “Update” button. For example, if you click this link, you should be transferred to Twitter with the prepared status message

A handy form for generating “Twitter This” links, created by @Fractality : http://bit.ly/twitterthislinks

(Following this link does NOT tweet the text, you still have to press “Update”. Why don’t you go ahead and just tweet it – thanks! ). It even works if you are not currently logged in to Twitter. After you login, you should also see the prepared status update form. Alas, it does not (yet) work if the user has no Twitter account yet and decides to sign up on the spot. After the signup process, the text is lost (but if the user clicks on your link again, it will then work).

In my opinion, this is the preferred way to encourage users to tweet about you. Many Twitter applications ask for the user’s login credentials instead and then proceed to post in the user’s name. Admittedly, sometimes that might seem more effective because users might not even realize it is happening at first – so they will tweet about you even if they never intended to do so. But I consider it a slightly dirty trick, which might alienate users in the long run. Also, personally I have never given my login credentials to a Twitter app (OK, maybe once or twice, but I regret that now), and many users might feel the same.

How does one create such links? It is rather simple: add a parameter named “status” to the Twitter URL, like this: http://twitter.com?status=your_message, where your_message is your message. The minor issue is that your_message has to be URL encoded. That means certain characters in the message have to be escaped, for example “<” becomes “%3C”. Most programming languages have utility methods to do this. For example you could simple paste the following snippet into your browser’s URL field and press return:

javascript: encodeURIComponent('a text that needs encoding');

(except you have to be careful about ‘ and “, so that approach is not 100% failsafe).

To make it easier for you, I have created a simple form for creating such URLs. Enter the text you want to be tweeted in the “Text To Tweet” field. In “Link Text” you can enter a text that should appear as the name of the link. If you then press “Create Links”, the “Twitter This URL” field should contain the “Tweet This” link. For your convenience the “HTML Link Code” field contains a full HTML link element you can Copy+Paste into your web site (make sure you copy all of it, I recommend right clicking into the field and choosing “select all”). “Link Preview” shows you how the link should look on your web site.

Finally, if you liked this post and/or find the link generator useful, please twitter this. Also follow me on Twitter @Fractality.

I have created a new Twitter bot: @OfficeWorkout tweets a random workout suggestions every 30 minutes. It should remind you to move your body occasionally if you are a screen worker.

I am looking for more suggestions for workouts that mesh well with office life. Best way to tell me would be to tweet them to @OfficeWorkout (“suggest @OfficeWorkout yourWorkoutIdeaHere”).

This idea sprang from my paranoia: sometimes I imagine walking down a lonely alley and being attacked by thugs. I wonder if I saw them from the distance and they looked suspicious, would I take some pictures of them? Would photographing them make them think twice about attacking me? On the other extreme, they might get angry and try to destroy the camera, not without hurting me beforehand.

It is probably not a good idea on relying on the ability to take a picture in an emergency situation like that. Nevertheless, since I just ordered a new mobile phone with GPS capabilities, I wonder about using it for a kind of emergency service. The idea is simple: in an emergency, take a picture and send it to a known address. A service at that address will notify emergency services. Since the picture has GPS information embedded, emergency services can find you easily. From the photo, they might get a good impression for the requirements of the situation.

Another possibility would be for existing photo sharing services like flickr to watch out for certain tags. That way the user would not have to remember an extra address for the emergency photos.

Thinking about it a bit more, some enhancements come to mind. Emergency operators could cooperate with phone network providers to call you back and determine your location even if you don’t have a GPS receiver (this could also work for calls and SMS – not sure if it is being done already). With modern mobile phones, it might be possible to make a life video connection to the scene of emergency and have somebody give you instructions through the phone (for example instruct you how to try to revive somebody). It might be useful to have a software and service that already integrates those features – in theory emergency services might be able to call you on your video phone just like that, but without a standardized way, it is probably too complicated in the actual emergency situation.

Sinister Aspects

While I am not sure how useful such a service could be in reality, some possible sinister aspects also come to mind:

• What if the pictures were open to the public? Some weirdos might be hanging out on the site watching for pictures of bad accidents. Presumably the site would have to be accessible for emergency services only.
• On the other hand, such a site would be a good source of pictures for newspapers and blogs. Maybe a healthy money could be made, which could be donated to a foundation to support victims that don’t have good health insurance.
• The worst: what if the service took off and people would start to photograph everything that seems somewhat suspicious. In no time, we would have a very bad police state situation, worse than fascism, were any activity that is ever so slightly out of line gets reported immediately. Not something I would want to be responsible for.

Since it relies on cooperation with emergency service, this idea would probably not make a good startup. But it might be worthwhile to pitch it to the authorities. Working on a contract that goes back to an idea of my own would still be better than working on something that has nothing to do with my interests whatsoever. Also, contracting with the government is probably a very good deal – after all, they usually don’t care about money, as it is only the taxpayers money they are spending, not their own.

Because of the complications, this is another throwaway idea I probably won’t tackle. But I would be interested in your opinions. If you think it might have some merit, I might change my mind about it.

Recently talked about this idea with a friend. I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing it.

The idea is simple: offer a service where people can queue songs into a playlist of an internet radio or audio stream by sending an SMS to some number. This could be used as a Jukebox in bars and restaurants.

The thought is not new, I remember pondering related ideas years ago, when Bluetooth was coming up. However, by now the conditions make it easier than ever to create such a service. I think making it based on a website would be best, because clients could easily put up a computer display somewhere to display the jukebox options. It is easy to sign up for SMS services, so that customers could pay small amounts of money to play a song. SMS is much more reliable and easier to use than bluetooth.

A fun side effect could be to create a playlist of “music you might like”, like last.fm, that would automatically adapt to the taste of the venues customers.

A problem could be that random people could send SMS and make the jukebox play nasty music, even if they are not at the venue. Probably there would have to be a feature where the owner of the bar creates a selection of appropriate music that people could choose from.

Another question would be if a website would be enough (customers would have to use the terminal to see what music is available), or if a mobile website would be called for that customers could browse on their phones.

The biggest problem is getting rights to the audio files, and paying appropriate taxes for playing music in public places. I know nothing about this. Maybe for a simple version music from Seeqpod or Skreemr could be used, or an online radio like Last.fm. It would be cool if there already was a service where people can create their own internet radio streams, that could be controlled from the service. Probably there is – if so, I estimate the SMS Jukebox could be programmed within weekends time

It is too bad that there is no wholesale for online music (that I know of anyway), so that people could create interesting services around music. As it stands, probably a lot of money has to be paid to lawyers to make deals with the music industry. Apple and Amazon could do it, but for smaller businesses, it is hard (I think). Or they just scrape by in the grey areas of unclear legitimacy, like the aforementioned seeqpod and skreemr. Not something I would recommend, although I applaud their chutzpah.

By internet search I found only one existing SMS Jukebox project, which seems to be provided by the mobile phones operator Orange in France. This is also a reason that I think my friend will not mind me sharing the idea.

Another caveat of the idea is that I have no idea how to market it to bar and cafe owners. Anyway, that is why I file it under “throwaway ideas”, because it is unlikely that I’ll tackle it myself for the time being. Older throwaway ideas of mine can be found at Cambrian House.

On the other hand, maybe I should just go around and ask in bars in my city if they would be interested. I am still looking for a nice project for the summer.