Twitter

I flatter myself to think that I am at least known as someone of mostly Phlegmatic Temperament, even when peculiarities of Second Life are concerned. I am, I believe, reasonable tolerant of Flaws, even if I will occasionally make squawks of protest; these are mostly due to surprise.

There are some things, however, up with which I will not put.

“Twitterbox say”? Have I accidentally entered the Pre-Teen Grid? Or perhaps we are expected now to write in “lolcode“? I believe that I do take some Care in the composition of Prose, and even if that is not the general perception, I am certainly sensitive to errors in this regard, even if at times I am known to play with them; the improper conjugation of verbs is as the squeaking of the brakes of a Hansom cab, or the squealing of a Guinea-Pig. I constantly have objects telling me things and this will drive me absolutely potty.

Natural Language Generation is a complex area of study, and even identifying a plural noun can be rather tricky; it appears that in this instance that has not even been attempted. For heaven’s sake, if conjugation is impossible, stick to the colon. Everything else uses the colon in any case; this offence against all civilised mores only occurs when llOwnerSay is used.

It really does feel as if some Linden or other has decided to repeatedly poke me on the nose. Stop it. I am aware that my nose is quite sizeable, it does not need poking.

The Jira issue is here: Fix the legibility and grammar/consistency of the new llOwnerSay implementation. Vote, and vote again.

A perpetual problem of mine is that I am unable to concentrate on one thing for more than about, oh, an afternoon, leading to the unfortunate situation where possible projects and Matters Upon Which To Write flare brightly and then burn out within moments, like phosphorus sparrows. No sooner do I plan to write a Definitive Article upon some subject, which must be Gotten Right, than some new shiny object appears and drives the original one completely away from my attention.

The result of this is that I am rather poor at actually writing anything, as perfectionism restrains me from making an entry on something incomplete, yet I do not have the urge to complete it, and it is only when I reach a level of self-disgust at this that I throw out whatever peculiar half-finished objects that remain in my mind into this Journal, often in the form of Bullet Points. I believe that it was easier in my earlier days, when I was rarely thinking about more than three things at one time.

Enough of this preambling though; I will do my best to clear the decks. The subject of this entry is something that I call the Twitterbomb, though really it isn’t much of a bomb, unless one considers very slow-moving fragments that are in any case phantom to be dangerous. This was actually mentioned previously by Nick Wilson writing in Metaversed as he is a proper journalist who investigates things and writes about them, whereas I am no such thing and do not even have a picture of my own creation at the time of writing.

The Twitterbomb, as Mr Wilson says and as I mention in the comment section there, is a device for the Visualisation of timed and differently-authored data; the Twitter friends timeline is the easiest to work with, as it collects data into a single feed, but I suppose RSS feeds and such could be used. There is a central “bomb”, which reads in Twitter data via a proxy (a stripped-down version of the Twitterbox one) throws out differently-coloured “fragments” - the angle of movement and colour of these fragments is individual to each different author, thus each person’s output is represented by a line of tweets stretching out from the centre. Each fragment’s size is proportional to the number of letters in the tweet.

The fragments move outwards at a constant speed, with their distance from the bomb being a function of their age. There is a configurable maximum age, with fragments disappearing once they reach this. (Once rezzed, the fragments are independent, and with a busy friends timeline this could result in an awful lot of prims being around, thus best to use this in a fairly empty lot.)

I confess to not having a specific target to achieve here, but it is a toy that enables one to play with the possibilities of visualising data in Three Dimensional Form. One can look at the fragments produced and see, say, how active an individual is and their “rhythm” by observing the “clumping” and size of clumps produced; a wordy but regular poster will have fat fragments evenly spaced, someone who posts in bursts of short pieces will have thin lines separated by empty space and so on. A particularly significant event for one’s friends will be marked by a “shell” of tweets all appearing at the same time and expanding outwards. Changes could certainly be made to the way the fragments are emitted to test different concepts of visualisation.

I say all this, but actually, in practice I have Given Up on the Twitterbomb for the moment - which is likely to mean forever - since Twitter has taken to caching my requests and not giving me recent updates reliably at all. This is odd, since the Twitterbox seems to be working perfectly well, or at least is when both Twitter and SL are working at the same time (a combination of reliabilities that one is not advised to bet one’s life or significant bodily organs upon). With this in mind, once I am able to return to the world I shall be sure to post the relevant Code here.

Well, that is over with in any case. Next, something else, I believe.

Before I dive back into acts of proper engineering within SL (usually located at <0,0,0>) I would quickly like to note one more Twitter-related product - the Twitterbadge. This is a device, suggested by Mr Marcel Goodfellow, which allows one to display one’s own Twitterings, or, in fact, the public Twitterings of anyone, easily upon the Grid.

Things being what they are, it is only possible to display Two Hundred and Fifty-Five Floating Letters at a time, thus probably only two or three Tweets, but there are a number of different options which one may set, which will be detailed when I have a moment.

For now, please do see the Dedicated Aethernetical Area for the project for access to the LSL script concerned. Simply edit this script and place it inside a Prim, and said Prim will thenceforth display the appropriate Tweets for the person you have specified.

For what it is worth, I have finally gotten around to releasing the latest version of the Twitterbox, which includes a number of new features and is generally a bit more reliable. Of course, at this time the Grid is… well, it is a Wednesday.

If you wish to view a list of changes from the previous version, by all means read on, and do excuse the scrappiness of my list-making.

Now, hopefully, I might be able to work on, you know, a thing, rather than a succession of ephemeral seance devices. Something which exists in its own right, and allows one to do something upon the Grid itself which one previously could not. Alas, the fractious nature of reality is making this just a tad tricky, with some of my best works now appearing foolish and error-ridden, but the time will come I’m sure when events do not just occur in random orders.

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~ Herein, one may find a few notes dashed off in a hasty hand whilst standing in a damp Caledon drizzle, repeatedly poking a riveted cube. ~

In case any reader had not yet heard, Caledon approaches war with sundry treacherous sausage-eaters:

I have been working on a small flying vehicle, which uses Jillian Callahan’s “Callahan Combat Control” system. Amazingly enough, it was possible to hold fair-sized “dogfights” involving half a dozen people without any part of Caledon falling into the sea, which I was expecting. Said Runabout (a fast and maneuverable little thing using the patented Levitation Coil Engine, though somewhat vulnerable) will be available shortly in a finalish version, and all proceeds from it will be directed towards Relay For Life, at while it is still (ho ho) running.

I plan to have a few other Purely Defensive Vehicles becoming available as well, as soon as I organise my time correctly and stop being quite so scatterbrained, which could be a little while coming.

I confess to having spent most of the latest Sunday investigating and construction engines relating to the I Ching, the final versions of which I am rather proud, though not being the most spiritually competent person in the universe I have at some point doubtless made some appalling error which will require hasty correction. I shall post more about this at some future point when I am not quite so ridiculously distracted by Things.

Oh yes. The Twitterbox. Ahem, yes, I am myself currently using version Zero Point Four, which actually has some quite handy extra features, but I haven’t put that out either. In futile defence of my organisational skills, I did post the Control Script for 0.3 eventually, and also edited the page generally somewhat to make a few things clearer.

Of little interest to those not inclined to develop Twittery Things, but proposals have emerged for those creating Clients (such as the Twitterbox) to be able to identify their Device to the Twitterverse. Apparently the latest proposals can be found here, and involve setting values for the following headers:

X-Twitter-Client
X-Twitter-Client-URL
X-Twitter-Client-Version

I have modified my own control script for Twitterbox 0.3 to include these - fear not, no action is required on the part of any users.
Thank you for whatever attention you have seen fit to pay to this entry.

Oh my giddy aunt, I forgot entirely to announce the release of version 0.3 of the Twitterbox before retiring the previous night.

Well, version 0.3 of the Twitterbox has been released. It is fairly similar to the previous version, as one might expect, with the addition of the ability to automatically post the URL of the latest entry in an “RSS” or “Atom” “feed”. Say, for instance, one places a photograph of one’s surroundings on Snapzilla - with proper configuration and a Twitterbox, one might include the word SNAPZILLA (or, depending on one’s preferences, ZILLA, SNAP, PHOTO, PORCUPINE or pretty much anything) in one’s twitterings and have it replaced with a conveniently-bijou tinyurl leading to the photograph. The same goes for a journal entry, or a phonographic recording, or, well, I am sure others are more inventive than I. (You may see a more full description in the “keywords” section of the main Twitter page.) Personally speaking I find it very convenient when combined with the Applescriptery mentioned in my previous entry.

I might also mention that I tidied up the reporting-of-errors function a little, so that it does not throw a whole mess of nonsense into one’s face whenever it is unable to locate something. This is a common enough wrinkle of the Aethernet for nonsense-mess-throwing to not be particularly desirable.

As usual, the Twitterbox can be found at my Caledon shop, or, shortly at SLExchange and SLBoutique. Similarly as usual, full details are on the main Twitterbox page.

I mentioned in my last Twitter-related post of inordinate length that it might be possible to set a Folder Action on the Apple Platform which would automatically upload full-sized snapshots to Flickr, although dealing with Applescript was like having porcupines in one’s socks. The porcupines have turned out not to be quite as troublesome as I first thought, and I have managed to squash together two existing Applescripts in order to make this possible. Do note that this is of no use to any reader whose Own Engine is not compatible with the “OS X” System, and I have no inclination, or indeed idea of how, to make such a thing work on other Systems.

Here is the code for the Folder Action:

• convert-flickr-send-folder-action.scpt

The exact details of how to set a folder action on a folder are a little beyond the explanatory power of this Journal, but I would advise anyone not familiar with the procedure to inspect the Apple Company’s own pages on the matter.

Firstly, create a folder to which you will be saving your pictures - I have one on my Desktop called “Send To Flickr”, but it could really be anywhere. Save the script above somewhere, edit it to include your own Email Address and your own personal Email Address For Sending Things To Flickr With (see here if not aware of this), then assign it as a Folder Action. The script itself includes detailed directions as to where you might stick your Email Addresses.

Once this has been done and one enters Second Life, the first snapshot that is saved to disc will have to be saved specifically to the folder which you created. You should, really, be able to remember its location. After that, any snapshot you take and save there - or in fact any that you move to that folder by hand, as it were - will be converted to the JPEG format, and then sent to Flickr. A simple “CTRL-” will be sufficient to publicly record your immediate surroundings, as long, of course, as you are a user of the Apple Company’s Mail.app device. And with Twitterbox 0.3 you will be able to swiftly send this picture to the world, or at least the Twitterworld, a dark and drunken hive of scum and villainy if you ask me.

As an addition, I have designed an icon appropriate for a Flickr-uploading folder which you are very welcome to use, until such time as Lawyers force me to remove it, which I hope they will not. “Flickr” is a trademark of somebody or something, and no infringement is meant blah-de-blah.

Next, we shall examine methods of forcing Second Life to make one tea and toast. Or perhaps some other subject will arise.

I had decided that the next iteration of the Twitterbox (note that the official spelling has now been set as the previous, rather than “TwitterBox”, for reasons of idleness quite honestly) - which will be 0.3 - should incorporate some form of support for images. As is my wont, I am mostly interested in an client for Twitter in the respect that it can be individual to, and send data regarding one’s activities in, Second Life itself - otherwise, why not simply use one of the other excellent methods of communicating with it?

I find the Twitterbox very convenient for taking notes of travels and the locations of things, somewhat in the same way as my existing Slurlblogger, but more immediate and clearly more fashionable; the automatic “tinyslurl” function in version 0.2 has the intention of making this even easier. (I find the tinyurl function provided by Twitter a little unreliable and unpredictable, and would rather do it all myself.) Clearly what readers really desire from a travelogue is photography, though. Twitter is not capable of delivering actual pictures, but is perfectly capable of providing links to pictures stored outside of it, on Aethernet sites such as Flickr and Snapzilla.

It is at this point that one starts to butt against the limitations of (L)SL. It is currently impossible to have a script take a picture. The only way to extract images from the Grid is for one to do it manually oneself with the “snapshot” function; this can then be saved to one’s own Machine (quickest, but not terribly useful) or sent elsewhere as a rather decorated Email, or Postcard. As many will be aware, it is possible to send images directly via Email to Flickr, but Flickr considers the Postcards sent to be too confusing to manage and refuses to accept them. Snapzilla is specialised for the receipt of Postcards (and will even cross-post them to Flickr if properly instructed) but unfortunately I am having… issues with Snapzilla with which I will not bore you but which are currently preventing me from taking advantage of its existence. In either case, sending Postcards still takes a little time, and is not nearly as convenient as typing in a line of text to twitter.

Not for socks.

Ironically the only way that automated picture-taking-and-uploading may be implemented at the present time that I know of is to modify one’s own client or use an Automaton, an early example of which was Destroy Television. From that piece of November 2006 we see the following:

Jerry Paffendorf, the Sheep’s resident futurist, is hot on the idea of Destroy TV as it relates to lifelogging. He imagines residents of virtual worlds traveling around with a similar service attached to them, Flickring every moment of their virtual lives.

A noble imagining, Mr Paffendorf, and one which corresponds somewhat to my own desires here, though I have a feeling that Flickring every moment of their lives might not be universally popular with residents. However, I podo not personally have the time or quite frankly ability to modify clients to do this, and would much prefer if they were included for all to use within LSL. A thought has occurred just the moment that it might be possible for me to write some sort of Applescript which would react to the process of Second Life taking and saving pictures to one’s (Apple) Machine - in other words, it throws a huge bitmap onto one’s desktop - by converting the picture and sending it off to Flickr, so that just one keypress would result in an uploading… but I heartily despise Applescript and the experience for me would be rather like having a porcupine take refuge in my sock. I shall take a look to see whether it works out to be a Simple Task, but I warn you that I will not be suffering quills under the toenails for long.

I seem to have digressed somewhat from discussion of the Twitterbox here, as usual, and should return to my original point for this post before I wander completely off the face of the Grid. Sending picture links via Twitter, yes, that was it, pay attention Ordinal.

So. Last night I was thinking: how could one’s Twitterbox actually find the URL of an appropriate picture to display? Well, I could have a system which received Postcards, sent them to Flickr, and then made a Twitter entry about them, but (a) I do not have the time (b) I do not have the energy (c) other people have done things like that already, for instance Kisa Naumova, which look far better than any poor effort I might be able to knock up and (d) it would result in the Twitterbox code ending up hideously bloated and unreadable, which I submit is not really the point of it. I wish to keep the thing relatively lightweight and able to be read easily by Scripters of PHP and LSL alike. Please do not tell me, readers of the Scripting persuasion, that you really love to read page after page of such stuff. Even if you do, honestly, love to read page after page of such stuff, please avoid mentioning it, as I will not cater to your peculiar fancies.

I decided instead to toy with the idea of providing a keyword, as with the one for tinyslurls (”SLURL”). This keyword, say “FLICKR”, if included would result in Twitterbox Control looking back on the user’s recent Flickr pictures - as taken from the RSS Feed for that person’s account - and turning the link for the latest one into a tinyurl. In short, it posts a tinyurl to your most recent Flickr picture. I do not even bother to properly parse the RSS feed to be honest, just grab the first available thing and assume it is right.

To properly use this function one must have previously sent a picture to Flickr, and thus it is a two-or-more-stage process: extract a picture somehow, get it into Flickr somehow, then sent a tweet. This does in fact work as it is, but it is not particularly convenient compared to, say, a BlogHUD.

In my disheartenment this morning, though, a thought struck me: why should this be restricted to pictures? Almost everything has an RSS feed these days, and they (should) all use the same format. Why not simply have a function which can be given the appropriate RSS feed, and will extract the latest item on it to post a link to? It could be something on Vimeo, or Odeo, or even another Twitter account. It need not necessarily even be yours. The point of this is a little limited perhaps but the possibility of possibilities intrigues me.

At this moment I am considering a notecard to be placed within the device and edited by the user, which would let keywords be defined for inclusion, so a line reading

FLICKR http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=25972087@N00&format=rss_200

would mean that any mention of the word FLICKR would be replaced by a tinyurl to the latest Flickr entry defined by the feed at that particular address. (It is mine, in case you were wondering.) One could have several different services. Perhaps with both FLICKR and SLURL being used in the same post, the SLURL could incorporate a thumbnail from the latest Flickr post. See - I have managed to turn the fact that it does not actually do what I wanted it to into a feature! The ghastly vision of a future in sales flashes briefly before my eyes, leaving me sweaty and shaken.

Please do not take the above as being necessarily indicative of the contents of Twitterbox 0.3, but there will be at least some vague and incompetent attempt to implement them.

Post Scriptum: I am currently using the “Google Documents” system to compose this and finding it surprisingly convenient.

I would like to keep this particular entry for people using the TwitterBox to add any suggestions or hints they might have in the comments. So, really, this entry does not have a huge amount of content. I am sure though that there will be many terrific ideas which put me to shame emerging here.

Remember that the latest version of the Twitterbox can always be found at the main page:

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/twitter/

and that all posts relating to the TwitterBox can be found at

http://ordinalmalaprop.com/engine/category/twitter/

Twitterbox 0.2 post animation on Vimeo

The latest version of the TwitterBox, 0.2, has just this minute been made available. There are two main changes here:

1. The TwitterBox now has more decorative and animated effects when twittering - see the video above;
2. More practically, if one includes the word SLURL (as written, all capitals) in a tweet, it will be replaced with the TinyURL to a SLurl for one’s present location.

As usual, full details, including links to the SLX and SLB pages concerned, can be found on the main Twitter page, and of course it is all free. I shall be posting the code at my earliest convenience.

Oh, and as an addendum - I have previously complained that Vimeo, my preferred Video Hosting Place, restricted uploads to a mere Thirty Megabytes per Week. They have recently changed their policies to permit Two Hundred and Fifty Megabytes per Week, and at no cost! I would thus heartily recommend them for all Machiniminamists without reservation; the resolution is the highest (400×300 rather than the usual 320×240), they allow direct access to one’s source files if one wishes, and their interface is simply a joy to use.

The TwitterBox is now present for your delectation on SLExchange and SLBoutique (the latter was giving me gyp last night, but seems to be behaving itself properly today).

As always, the latest versions of everything are available from my main TwitterBox page.

I have also now posted the source code for my PHP Intermediary Server Thing:

twitter-control-0.1.phps

This will not I expect be of interest to the casual Twitterer, but if you were wondering precisely what it was that the Thing did, well, do go ahead and read,and it may enlighten you to at least some small degree. There are a number of comments in the code, but, in short, it reads in the contents of the POST that is sent by the TwitterBox to it, which should be of the form

user email
password
action
status

then evaluates the “action” parameter. There is a generic function to send a request to Twitter using curl, which returns the JSON data that it receives parsed into an array. (I wish more online services would agree to return data in the JSON format.)

Notes On The Process Of Obtaining The Owner’s Proper Twitter Identity

The script makes it easier for users by only requiring them to enter their email address, which Twitter requires for the login procedure. Knowing the Screen Name of the owner is very handy for the TwitterBox, though, and in future I hope to use the ID number as well for nefarious and disgraceful purposes.

The TwitterBox gets round this by exploiting the two following facts:

1. Upon an update, Twitter sends back information regarding the last post made by the user, including username and user ID number;
2. Twitter will not post an empty update, but will still send information back.

Therefore, when it receives a “get id” action, the control script tries to make a blank update, which does nothing except returns information about the last post made. The script then takes the user’s screen name and ID number and sends them back to the TwitterBox, which remembers them. Thinking about it now, I suspect that if the person has actually not made any tweets at all, this may not work. Hmm.

Notes On The Process Of Updating (or “Twittering”)

As mentioned above, updating with either a blank or real entry returns information on the last post, including the time that it was created. The control script checks this - if it is before the time that it sent the request, it assumes that there was a failure to post and says so. Otherwise it says “OK”.

Notes On The Process Of Checking For Tweets

When checking for recent updates, the script pulls together all of the tweets that it receives into the format:

screen_name
text
relative_created_at (this is the “about 4 hours ago” part)
created_at (converted into UNIX timestamp format)

up to a limit of 1500 characters, which is about all that LSL will accept as the body. (The http_request event will allegedly accept 2049 bytes, but the header seems to take up a lot of this.) Note that it will not include a partial tweet if the length goes over the limit. It then sends the compiled tweets back to the TwitterBox. Actually, even restricting the number of tweets sent to 1500 characters, one still does get a satisfactory number of tweets.

If you read the LSL script for the TwitterBox itself, and you understand LSL of course, you will see that it is the box itself which actually decides which tweets to announce, if any, filtering them on the criteria “must not be posted by the owner’s screen name” and “must be after the last tweet that I announced”. The PHP script does not store any screen names or requests or any such thing, and it would have to make two requests to Twitter to be able to filter on screen name, which would be an extravagance. The TwitterBox itself is quite capable of doing this.

I actually find the way that the TwitterBox operates when displaying updates more convenient than using an External Instant Messaging Client, as the latter won’t tell one what nonsense one’s twittering friends have been blithering whilst one has been away - whereas upon entering SL now, I am immediately (or at least quickly) brought up to speed with the latest trivialities. Hah! What say you to that, Corporate IM Giants? Stop blubbering, Yahoo, it really is unseemly, stiff upper lip chaps.

Things For The Future

The next version of the TwitterBox will hopefully possess a few new features:

• option to automatically post a SLurl for the user’s location after every tweet (in tinyurl format, of course, SLurls can take up the whole of the tweet by themselves);
• automatic notification of other TwitterBox users in the vicinity, and the option to add them to one’s friend list (this one might cause a little difficulty in practice, though I have a few ideas, and is probably going to be entirely useless anyway, so is the least likely to happen);
• an easier method of entering the username and password and generally configuring the TwitterBox;
• changing the sound and adding a more visual alert;
• the option of automatic updates on certain events (e.g. an automatic “has logged in” tweet on entering SL);
• anything else that isn’t too difficult.

Do bear in mind that all of these things are “coming very soon/in the next update” in the Linden Lab sense i.e. may or may not appear at all.

Right. After a frustrating evening of trying to deal with all sorts of issues relating to Second Life, mine own Hosts and Twitter itself, it seems that the TwitterBox version 0.1 is now ready for release, and I have placed an open copy in my freebie box - available in the usual place.

I have put up a permanent Twitter-related page from which you should always be able to get the latest version and/or news. It also contains a link to the TwitterBox Basic, an LSL-only client that can only post, not receive tweets.

I may write further on the matter but for now I must retire.

Updated: versions of the TwitterBox are now available for public consumption - see the main TwitterBox page, or subsequent journal entries.

I mentioned in my last entry the subject of using HTTP Basic Authentication in LSL. (For those of you not familiar, this is a simple and not very secure method of restricting access to a web page via a username and password.)

From further investigation I have come to the conclusion that “using Basic Authentication in LSL” would be a very short article, because the fact is that one does not seem to be able to do it at all. It is quite simple to send the username/password in an external request, all one has to do is send the following header as part of it:

Authorization: Basic user_pass_base64

where user_pass_base64 is the base64 encoding of “username:password”. However, the LSL function llHTTPRequest does not appear to allow one to add new headers, and prefers to do them all itself; Authorization (dratted Colonial spelling) is not one that it provides a hook to.

Why was it that I was interested in this? Well, I have had some recent experience of an Aethernet Service known as Twitter, a very simple system for distributing short messages about what you are doing at the moment (or about anything, really) and also, of course, for reading other people’s updates. Think of it as the most minimal sort of “blogging” system imaginable. Updates can be made and read not only on the Web, but also via or sent to one’s Portable Telephone (for free I might add) or on out-of-SL Instant Message systems.

As well as simply the challenge of implementing this inside Second Life, I am interested by the potential that exists for this to be used as a system of automatic communication. Say, for example, one has a security device which instead of informing you via IM or email when it has expelled an intruder. Twitter will keep an archive of all of these notifications, and if you wish one might subscribe to it, as could any interested party; one could monitor it on the Aethernet or via Telephone or through any other mechanisms developed in the future.

(This sort of thing is often termed a “mashup”, a word which makes me think of some sort of brewing procedure, but I prefer the old-fashioned term “laziness”. It is far easier to have other people do the hard work of setting up a system, providing phone access and so on, than it is to do everything oneself - and being lazy in this case also benefits others who might wish to do similar things to you, as long as you make your methods known. Socially-beneficial idleness, well, things do not get much better than that, surely.)

Anyway: Twitter requires that one authenticate any requests to it via Basic Auth, and I was unable to do that in plain LSL, so I simply created an intermediary - a PHP script which could receive username, password and command from somewhere else, and send it on to Twitter, returning appropriate data formatted for use in SL. This has certain privacy implications, but at the moment anyone wishing to use this will have to trust that I am not saving their email address and password. I can guarantee that it only stores the information for a tiny fraction of a second, but if you do not trust the security of my site, well, I suppose you could host the script yourself, or just not use it.

At the present time, Twitterbox 0.1 posts and receives new friend post notifications adequately. Saying an entry on channel 282 (”too-whit-too-whoo”, a rather pathetic construction but sort of memorable) sends a message, and it checks every minute for updates. I shall release the full script and PHP intermediary when I have put in some of the other functions that I am interested in, for example, a system whereby anyone coming nearby within SL wearing the Twitterbox HUD announces their user ID to your Twitterbox, giving you the option to add them as a friend. Perhaps something to automatically send SLurls to Twitter. Or similar.

For the meantime, anyone wishing to read my pointless twitterings can add ordinal to their own list. If anyone would like to help me test the above-mentioned social functions I would be obliged if they would let me know.