Beta v0.3 - Upgrades and Controversy
Posted 13 March 2008, 15:42 by Sam Brown
After some great initial feedback from beta testers (EJS, TVD, RCB and CH) I am close to releasing a third iteration of the beta which is very close to what will hopefully become the final 1.0 release.
Lots of updates in the past week, can’t list them all but the big ones were:
- Added Goodies page
- Created Settings page
- Modified app wide styles
- Changed the basic output to use JS instead of a PHP include
- Got rid of widget.php now bookmarklet uses Add page function
- Add page now has checkbox for tweets, controversial!
- Added trash all Archive items command
- Added excerpts to entries
- Updated the bookmarklet to use selected text as excerpt
Controversy comes in terms of the post to Twitter functionality that Commented On offers. Some have suggested that this is essentially Twitter spam, and that this is not what Twitter was designed for.
I agree and disagree, Twitter by definition is “a service to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”. Thus I believe the use of the Twitter API is fair in this circumstance, as through Commented On you are letting your followers know what you are doing.
There does seem to be an inherent problem with the way Twitter handles its API requests and a suggested solution would be to allow Twitter users to opt-out of third-party updates to their Twitter feeds. Whether this is plausible or the right solution is up for debate, but the post-to-Twitter functionality will stay in Commented On for the time being.
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