Jun/090
Twitter Name change, the name should reflect the spam
Hey I know, this post has nothing to do with the trend you were looking at when you clicked the link to get here. I tweeted there just to make a point, trends are broken and full of spam!
So I have been working on some bits of code to analyze the twitter trending topics. I figure it would be a great way to be aware of what is going on in the general social consciousness. So I developed some code to pull the current trends and also list the recent tweets for those trends to give them context. Over the last few weeks I have been monitoring my prototype and making tweaks here and there. One cool thing about it is that I am much more aware of what is going on in the world, at least the world according to twitter. This morning I was looking at the tweets for the Spain trend and over half the tweets were spam. The more of them I read the more I was getting turned off of twitter. Currently I don’t think twitter has any spam fighting systems in place at all, it sure does not seem to any way. It got me to thinking about how the spammers are actually altering the trends and that as they spam a trend it makes the trend artificially strong. So not only are the spammers junking up the stream they are also diverting it as well.
With FaceBook about to release public feeds; I think Twitter had better start working fast and furious on fixing the spam issue. FaceBook’s greater verification of people, and strong desire to take Twitter’s traffic could make Twitter’s traffic surge just a blip on the internet stat counters. Frankly I am torn between wanting FaceBook to be the main public stream and Twitter. FaceBook allows longer updates and integrates video and link sharing, but Twitter gives me all of the fresh stats, feels more mashupable, and is over all much simpler.
Any one have any suggestions on what we should rename twitter so that it reflects its new spammie nature? Spitter? Spameme?
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Plurk]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-plurk-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Yahoo Buzz]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-buzz-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Delicious]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-delicious-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Digg]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-digg-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Ping.fm]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-ping-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to Reddit]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-reddit-big3.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://www.sweetvision.com/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-big3.png){kind=icon}
Jun/091
jQuery makes me go hmmm
So I was busy looking into the ways to use jQuery in a prototype based object oriented fashion and was having a devil of a time geting it to work. I eventually turned to Goolge for help and I discovered this thread which is a discussion of sub-classing the jQuery object. It is mostly a back and forth between John Resig and Nate Cavanaugh covering Nate’s attempts at sub-classing jQuery. The long and short of the discussion is that jQuery has so many references to the global jQuery object that it cannot be cleanly sub-classed
So my initial concept was to subclass the jQuery object in my own objects to make new JavaScript objects with all of the functions of jQuery as well as my additions, but that is not going to work. That being said jQuery has a number of methods of adding objects and functions to jQuery; which is basically how plugins are developed. I will explore extending the jQuery and JQuery.fn objects with my own objects next.
This is part of my ongoing series of posts exploring the use of jQuery and object oriented JavaScripts, you might be interested in these posts as well:
Jun/092
jQuery is object oriented
When I first looked at the jQuery frame work, a few years ago I immediately discounted it as a viable framework. My whole reason for that decision was that it did not add a traditional class based object oriented layer. A little more than a year later I started reading about jQuery’s speed and small size. I decided that I would give it a full chance and start using it on a few projects. I found many advantages to jQuery but was still turned off by its apparent lack of object oriented features. I wrote a blog post to that affect and the response was rather vehement as many took my statement that “you should not choose jQuery if you wanted an object oriented framework,” to be a condemnation of jQuery. Some statements though were rather enlightening, specifically ones that pointed out that JavaScript is all ready object oriented and does not need a framework to make it so.
That last point was interesting as I all ready knew that JavaScript was an object oriented language, but since it did not do objects like I learned to do them in C++ and PHP it sort of slid under my obvious filter. Suddenly I realized I need to look into how JavaScript was object oriented, started learning about Prototype-based programming, and learn how JavaScript uses it. This began a cascade of shifting thought about how to program in JavaScript and how to use jQuery. So now I am exploring how to create objects in a JavaScript centric way and how to do object oriented jQuery development.
Some things to take away from this little post is that JavaScript is object orented, JavaScript is a prototype based language and jQuery is a prototype centric JavaScript library.
This is part of my ongoing series of posts exploring the use of jQuery and object oriented JavaScripts, you might be interested in these posts as well: