Jeromakay

I’ve been playing with the Twitter  API again (authenticated REST requests this time), and kept getting this nasty 417 Expectation Failed HTTP error.

I checked the sent headers, there was no Expect header being sent, until I realised the requests I was making to twitter using POST HTTP method weren’t sending the variables I wanted to POST, or they were incorrectly formatted.

So, if you’re ever playing with Twitter’s API, make sure that when POSTing data, variables follow. This ate 30 minutes of my life.

Now, this happens only for requests where POSTed data is expected.  I guess the response Twitter sends is a general one, usually, the 417 HTTP Error shows up only when there’s an Expect header present.

I haven’t read the RFC specs for what can happen when no data is POSTed, but I guess a less ambiguous message than this, could be taken into account.

Thanks for taking part of this experiment! In exchange I’ve got something rewarding to give you back, please read on.

I know you’re willing to learn more on social media and how you can apply this to your business, that’s why I invite you to  follow @loopthing on Twitter, and then submit your business to Loopthing.com.

This is it!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s OK, it wasn’t designed to. This post is part of an experiment related to this tweet.

This summer is being a blessing for Loopthing, the business networking platform. We just finished integrating the Twitter functionality for business profiles, and there’s few more other features integrated as well.

A sample page where twitter is the news feed page of the Loopthing company profile.

Besides the Twitter integration, we also added RSS feeds news feeds reader which also adds content to the profile page of any company joining Loopthing.

Two more other features were also integrated into the networking functionality of the site. The networks members can now upload media files (audios, videos and images), and they can also store files into the repository of each network.

I’m going to keep you posted on updates related to Loopthing, but for now, this is it! Here’s the official blog post announcing the Twitter integration feature.

Party time for 14.7 seconds

Good news for the social media community out there. Loopthing will integrate Twitter in the following days and this was a feature which we kind of pushed and prioritized it into the plan.

This is because social media is the most important aspect of promoting a business online nowadays, and here it is. It will take few days until it’s complete, but it will be there. The good news is confirmed by a blog entry posted on the official blog of Loopthing.

Basically businesses will have their tweets flow available on their profile, and as an extension to this, I can tell you there’s more stuff to help businesses promote themselves coming soon.

So…

Loopthing + Twitter = LOVE

I’m starting a linking periodical which means I’m going to post tech/web related links now and I decided to call it “half-geek links”. This is a list of quick and important links I consider you should visit and you can post your comments or send your suggestions whenever you got something that may fit the list. (thank you).

• become a PR guru via Twitter, Loopthing, blogging and meetings in few simple steps
• former MySpace execs move out to build their own house
• microsoft working on a new search engine (called kumo) ?
• The Fourteen Points of Management of Dr. W. Edward Deming
• bugmenot (for those people living in caves who haven’t heard of it yet)

If you find yourself wasting time on Twitter, I have one single word for you: TweetDeck.

I have been using TweetDeck for about two weeks now, and I think it really changes my way  of using twitter, and if I can say so, I’m more productive. This means, less time wasted on finding exactly what I want to read, and more time for things that I am focusing on at the moment.

Here’s few reasons why you should use tweetdeck:

• it is faster than the site
• real-time tweets
• it let’s you know quickly if there’s any update related to your account, so you can quickly evade the tweet zone
• it brings focus on what you want, everything is nicely rendered, you don’t waste time with unnecessary filtering
• you are in control of the tweets you want to see thanks to the multi column data (replies to @vladimir_ghetau are so cool in their own column, same thing for my saved searches and direct messages – I feel like a DJ)
• way faster navigation: replies, tweets, direct messages, shoter URLs… all this is all painless with TweetDeck
• it’s for all the major operating systems: Win, linux, Mac
• it’s free

All this tweet play thanks to TweetDeck takes now 10 minutes max a day, instead of 30 when I was using the web interface. I can’t look back for anything else.