Generation Twitter 2

Posted on September 8, 2009. Filed under Concepts, Media. No Comments »

How does a web developer have any use of Twitter? Well one you have the potential of finding people with similar coding styles, two you could gain knowledge on a daily basis by following thousands of people, or three you could market yourself to either obtain a job or find business for your freelance/independent work. Knowing how to use the Twitter API also helps in increasing your work. Take a look at (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia)’s website owned by FX.

http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/sunny/

They completely dominated their site with Twitter. Is it a good thing? Of course it is! Think about it, user feed back increases which means more people are going back to their site for videos, pictures, and exclusive content. Because Twitter is real-time they took the advantage of the example of a real-time stock ticker and transformed it into a real-time Twitter ticker. One of many ways to make Twitter unique.

To the point…Twitter is a business companion and also an advantage for web developers. Knowing how to utilize the Twitter API and also knowing the business advantages of using Twitter for marketing purposes is a enormous plus for your resume and a great way to attract clients (for you web freelancers out there). But remember, if your going into marketing, you need to know all the aspects of social media to really be “hip” in today’s trends. Customers want to relate to something, don’t be Twitter only because there’s a large statistic somewhere stating X amount of people have no idea what the hell Twitter is. Just take advantage of Twitter in most of its many corners.

Future

Everyone that’s computer savvy knows about Twitter now so what does that mean 5, 10, or 15 years down the road. Will there be a company that will buy out Twitter or will Twitter be the centralization of all real-time social data? My blog (http://mattloinfo.com/) already is using Twitter to bridge real-time contacting to my phone. CNN is using the Twitter to communicate with its viewers and at the same time informing the public. Iran recently used Twitter to voice their opinion in a dictatorship nation. So what’s the future of Twitter? In my perspective, its going to turn into what we saw happen with the .com and internet shopping. Stock up on ideas and names because down the road, everyone will know Twitter and it will be a custom to life. Facebook is already the best site to communicate between friends and family. Because Twitter is more public, it will lag in its popularity due to the factor of openness and lack of “pretty features.” Applications already tie Twitpick, Twitter, and other applications but it’s still easier using Facebook. So how will Twitter progress to the younger non tech savvy crowd? Time. Celebrities, news, weather, and friends will make Twitter be a foundation Web 3.0 and a reality for all communicative devices. So again, if you have ideas in how to use this flexible way of communicating, be curious and look into your ideas. One day some team will become millionaires because they invented a method of using Twitter with a non price related variable to attract customers in a positive way that can be dependable. It’s like the lotto for web developers. Gear up with your knowledge of PHP and start inventing already. Tell me your thoughts on Twitter @matt_lo.

P.S. the @ (at) sign is already mainstreaming into the web as a form of meaning (Twitter contact). When we see example@yahoo.com we know its an email, eventually @example would mean its a Twitter account.

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Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 API Simplified

Posted on May 28, 2009. Filed under Coding, Random, Scripts. 1 Comment »

If your looking to gather data from Geometry Wars 2 from your Microsoft Xbox Live Gamertag but can’t seem to find the source or can’t figure out how to decipher the source look no further as I’ve provided a class that does all the work for you.

http://mattloinfo.com/source.php?file=class.leaderboard.php is the source file (I named it leaderboard because its based on the data of their leader boards).

Simpler than SimpleXML extension

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<?php
include("class.leaderboard.php");
$r = new leaderboard('php developer');
$define = $r->data('evolved', 'king', 'sequence');
if($define !== false) {
	// testing
	echo '<pre>';
	print_r($define);
	echo '</ pre>'; // had to add a space due to glitch in the WP plugin :\
} else {
	echo 'Invalid Gamertag';
}
?>

$r->data() is versatile! You can provide 1 or all 6 game types in the game and it’ll spit out an array filled with them.

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$define = $r->data('pacifism');

or…

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$define = $r->data('deadline', 'king', 'evolved', 'pacifism', 'waves', 'sequence');

Any improvements you see please comment back. Also remember to cache your data. I’m releasing a small application that utilizes this feature and is cached every hour to prevent over usage of the API. Unlike twitter’s API I don’t think there is a call limit (or its not addressed anywhere), so please be courteous and cache your data whether it’s every 2 minutes or every 2 hours, it always helps to reduce over usage of an API (and improves loading time in between).

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