The Twitter v1 API is being switched off on Tuesday, May 7, 2013. After the experience I had with Catfood Cleat I decided not to waste any more time in Twitter API development and so I’m withdrawing my two remaining products that depend on Twitter.
Catfood Follower was a popular tool for automatically following new friends on Twitter and helping with the process of removing traitors.
Catfood Twitter Screensaver showed random public tweets in a Windows screensaver. It’s the first fun thing I ever did with the Twitter API.
Both products are no longer available for download. I’ll help with any support requests before the May 7 shutdown but I’d recommend that you uninstall and look for an alternative tool before the v1 Twitter API is retired.
Note that Twitter will be running blackout tests before the full shutdown where they temporarily disable the v1 API so you’ll see occasional failures even before May 7.
I’m sad to have to withdraw support for Catfood Cleat, my command line client for Twitter. Twitter disabled Cleat last week and won’t reply to emails asking for an explanation and so I have no choice but to stop providing this free tool. Much more here. If you have used Cleat I’d recommend uninstalling it.
The death of Windows Mobile is inevitable and so less sad but I no longer use a Windows phone of any sort and so there just aren’t going to be future updates or support for Tracker, TextShips or NPR Station Finder. If you still use any of these products this won’t affect their continued operation but I will no longer provider support or updates.
I’ve just released a small update to Catfood Cleat, my command line client for Twitter. 1.10 supports geolocation (you can include a longitude and latitude with the tweet) and timestamps (current date and time appended to the end of the tweet).
Mashable published an article by Christine Erickson today on whether small businesses should automatically follow back on Twitter. The article and comments just cover the extreme positions, automatically following everyone or manual follower management.
Some companies can get away with not following anyone, or maybe just following related accounts, but in most cases a business wants to engage with their followers.
Catfood Follower provides a third way thanks to integration with Klout. You can automatically follow anyone with a high enough Klout score. This helps weed spam and bots out of your stream (and following list) while ensuring that you follow authentic and influential accounts.
I’ve just released Catfood Cleat, a tool that tweets from the Windows command line.
Use cleat to automate tweets from Task Scheduler, tweet from batch files, or just when you want to share without leaving the console.
Cleat supports multiple Twitter accounts and will automatically shorten tweets to 140 characters if necessary so you don’t need to worry about the exact length when using Cleat for automation.
Download Cleat and let me know what you think.
Catfood Follower 1.40 is now available for download.
Follower is now integrated with Klout, a service that measures the influence of Twitter users with a score ranging from 0-100. You can choose to only follow people above a certain Klout score, or to remove followers below a certain Klout score.
I’ve also added support for using Twitter Lists as unfollow exceptions. This is much easier than remembering to run Follower and add an exception for each account that you want to always follow. Just add people to a private ‘don’t unfollow’ list and then check this off in Follower Settings. You can add as many lists as you like as unfollow exceptions.
1.40 also includes a big performance boost. Under the covers accounts are now processed using Twitter APIs that return up to 5,000 friends or followers at a time. Before 1.40 Follower would process around 200 accounts per API call. This change means that Follower runs faster and is less likely to hit Twitter call limits.
If you already use Follower upgrade today. If not, and you’re looking for a way to manage your Twitter account check it out and read Getting the most out of Catfood Follower.
I’m close to releasing a new version of Catfood Follower.
The update has some cool new features including Klout integration and a switch to bulk twitter APIs that allow the follow engine to run much more quickly. I’ve also mopped up several bugs and generally tidied up the interface.
Download Catfood Follower 1.40 Beta and leave a comment below if you have any problems, questions or suggestions. Thanks.
(Updated 2011-10-22: 1.40.0136, improves Klout integration so that processing an account does not fail because of temporary Klout failures.
Catfood Follower has been failing with a (401) Unauthorized error message since Thursday night.
Twitter has suspended API access for follower because they object to a blog post on how to use it. I’m working with Twitter to try and understand their concern and hopefully Follower will be authorized again soon. I’ll update this post as soon as I have more news.
(Updated 2010-11-18 17:00 PST: Follower is working again. Let me know if you run into any problems.)
LooseLips is an alpha release of a post only Twitter client. The idea behind LooseLips is to quickly share photos, links or other content. By focusing on the posting experience LooseLips already offers some useful capabilities:
- Shorten a URL just by clicking it. You can restore the URL by clicking it again.
- Share a photo by dragging and dropping to the post area, or by copying and pasting.
Download LooseLips
I'll update the download link with new versions as they're released. If you try out the alpha please get in touch to let me know about problems or to provide feedback.
(Updated 2010-04-11: Should have mentioned - supports XP SP3 or better. You need .NET 3.5 SP1 installed - you can pull this from Windows Update if you don't already have it.)