Reggie Watts and Bitching about Twitter

May 7, 2009 - 07:43

Listened/Watched

Funny. Speaks for itself. Trust me. Sit through it.

Reggie Watts on The Sound of Young America from Jesse Thorn on Vimeo.

Learned

I learned that this blog post on being careful about a Twitter API based business is 100% correct. Last night around 10pm, Twitter decided that the emails that are sent for new followers and direct messages would have background colors, pictures and other information. Previously, for direct messages, you just had the direct message as the first line of an email. Now, the message was trapped about 5 lines down.

Maybe the HTML is valid XML for easy parsing? Nope. Maybe the actual direct message is in a HTML element that's easy to pick out? Nope. In fact, the direct message is in an incorrectly marked up <td> that makes parsing a total bear:

<td valign=3D"top"><strong>username: </strong></a>Your message here</td>

See that </a>? That was already closed in the previous <td>. Lovely.

So, yeah. There went a few hours. Thanks, Twitter! They've given me a lot and I should be grateful they even have an API, but man... that was a pain in the ass at an inappropriate hour.