Ian's dashboard

Ian started following the idea "Using twitter for recording diary entries" in happier.com.

Ian replied on September 09, 2009 18:21 to the question "Why can't Twitter username contain the word "admin"?" in Twitter:

Crystal, I have long wanted a username containing two words one of which is "admin". There is it seems no existing user with the name I want and yet I am told it is unavailable.

For another company I need a username which has long been abandoned by someone, can't get that either. It's not very good treating users this way, especially if they may become paying customers when the premium accounts are announced.

Ian replied on September 08, 2009 16:59 to the idea "Down with Registration" in happier.com:

I see more than half the features of the basic paid for account are with the free account. It annoys me that people are unwilling to give two minutes of their time for the time, investment and expertise that Happier.com puts into developing this.

The lack of gratitude from some people expecting everything for nothing and on their terms amazes me, then they still complain in my experience. I earn less than most unemployed people and I want to pay.

I am happy to register because I know it adds value to your business and shows prospective partners that others value your work and therefore help you develop feature to increase customers value for money, some of those features being given away for free.

Ian started following the question "Issue with HUD on Pokercopilot2" in Poker Copilot.

Ian started following the idea "How come I can't look at a list of my followers/following?" in Thing Labs.

Ian asked a question in Twitter on August 29, 2009 16:55:

How Twitter can just about stop spam dead.

In an effort to stop spam Twitter needs to improve it's privacy options. Every day I get replies/mentions from people I don't follow and who don't follow me, all they are doing is spamming and I'm tired of blocking them.

The best solution is for updates to be protected as they are now, but with the option of still being visible to users and bots, add to that the option of reply only being available to approved people. Companies can then get see tweets about them with a right to reply, but users are able to control who can reply.

Mere protect or unprotect is about as colorful (or helpful) as mere black or white, yes or no, there is no middle ground, no customization - just lots of spam.

There would still be the problem of who to accept as a friend or not but this can be improved significantly with a user rating system; spammers would get a low rating by people and when a minimum number of votes is reached they get automatically blocked or add to the list of "friend requests" depending on the blocked/followed ratio.

Users should also be able to whitelist others should they actually want to follow a spammer, though this should not influence the above mentioned ratio as spammers will just approve themselves with multiple accounts.
Doing the above will significantly increase the value of Twitter Inc. and allow the many other improvements users have been wanting literally for years.

Ian started following the question "Can an inactive Twitter page/username be removed by request? Or even a request be sent to the current inactive owner?" in Twitter.

Ian started following the question "Why does Search.Twitter.com hate me?" in Twitter.

Ian started following the question "Is there a desktop application for ping.fm?" in Ping.fm.

Ian asked a question in Twitter on July 03, 2009 18:02:

Improving Auto-Following via Twitter API

There are two issues here:

I get emails everyday about people following me, that's great and it really helps me to follow only those that add value, i.e. not selling me something I don't want. However most of those "new follower" emails are from people trying to sell me something. Can I one day block auto-following, perhaps with conditions for example, if the new follower has been blocked by others? That would help a lot in spam prevention.

Secondly, if I choose to auto-follow people and have been trying out a number of third party apps to do this, how can I then find out which is best? The only way is for Twitter to reveal which app initiated the new "follow". Recently I did find myself following new people, but I could not find out how as I forgot which service I set it up with. I did eventually find the service and am no longer auto-following due to the sheer number of network marketers.

Ian replied on June 22, 2009 11:46 to the question "Can I tweet to one account from 2 phones?" in Twitter:

If you want to update Twitter by a standard SMS text message, then you would need to buy another, albeit very basic mobile phone. If you are familiar with using the internet on your mobile, visit http://m.twitter.com/ and login to any account to update.

Also on your phone, visit alternative services designed specifically for mobile internet access such as http://www.twit2d.com or http://www.dabr.co.uk/

Ian replied on June 21, 2009 00:20 to the question "How do I stop using OpenID?" in twitterfeed:

Fortunately I was able to recover login details of my OpenID account with unexpected ease. The trouble with OpenID is that it requires passwords less secure than, for example, "ias7yoj4oib3i2o" which is provided by a password manager and such software depends on recognising the domain to provide the correct login.

It's all good, I just need to remember my OpenID usernames. I have one for business, one for personal, and another one for "miscellaneous".

Ian marked one of Mario Menti's replies in twitterfeed as useful. Mario Menti replied to the question "How do I stop using OpenID?".

Ian marked one of Mario Menti's replies in twitterfeed as useful. Mario Menti replied to the question "Help with identifying RSS feeds in the Dashboard.".

Ian replied on June 21, 2009 00:14 to the question "Help with identifying RSS feeds in the Dashboard." in twitterfeed:

Thanks Mario, I think you've done a great job with the changes to Twitterfeed following your well deserved investment. Maybe you should charge variable rates depending on the number of feeds.

I have named them now and it's all fine, however a good improvement is to enable renaming my clicking on the title, I think you can do this using AJAX although I've not seen it many times.

Ian asked a question in twitterfeed on June 20, 2009 13:53:

Help with identifying RSS feeds in the Dashboard.

I have ten feeds going to various Twitter accounts, how do I identify which is which and where it goes when all I can see is things like "http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=..".

This is not relevant or descriptive of the content or the destination Twitter account.

Ian asked a question in twitterfeed on June 20, 2009 13:49:

How do I stop using OpenID?

The new site design is fantastic, however it is now much easier for me to login using a regular username and password, so how do I stop using OpenID?

Ian asked a question in Twitter on May 26, 2009 14:01:

Tweet Twitter Blog Updates

Is there an official Twitter account to get Twitter blog updates sent to my phone? If not, can I create one? I've missed the most recent two blog updates (I do subscribe to the RSS feed) but with this idea, I'll get the blog updates texted to my phone. Thank you.

Ian replied on May 26, 2009 13:58 to the question "Can I tweet to one account from 2 phones?" in Twitter:

It is only one phone number per account. To use a second phone, buy one. Alternatively you can use as many accounts as you want with your mobile, if you remember login details, by using your mobile to visiting http://m.twitter.com/ Check the cost of data charges first, it's wroth £5 per month (in the UK) for unmetered mobile internet.

Ian replied on May 24, 2009 04:01 to the update "Decrease in followers: suspended accounts removed from followers pages" in Twitter:

Crystal, five months ago you say "suspended accounts are being removed from everyone's 'followers' pages". Recent checks of my followers on a number of accounts show this is not the case.