2009
How to Expire Tweets on Twitter
A lot of people consider Twitter a microblogging platform. I don’t really agree with that. I think Tumblr and Posterous are great examples of microblogging platforms. Twitter, to me, is much more like a “micromessaging"platform. As such I think it has more in common with email and instant messenger than WordPress and Tumblr.
I’ve been thinking more recently about the digital trails we all leave and it struck me that Twitter really should be managed more like messaging applications. In those applications, I tend to have an expiration date for things. To be formal about it, there is a retention policy for that content. Twitter needs a retention policy. Do I really care to have archived forever the Tweet about lunch from three years ago? No. Does Google need to index it? No. The only practical use I can think of for a long history on Twitter is to be able to profile me for advertising better. No thanks.
I did a little looking and couldn’t find anything to do this, so whipped up a Ruby program with the handy Twitter4R library to do what I want.
This script requires Ruby, the Twitter4R library and is intended to be ran on a schedule with a utility like cron. Edit the code to use your login credentials and set the days that you want to expire tweets after. This program will then repeatedly look at your timeline and delete status messages that occur more than the number of days you specify ago.
#!/usr/bin/ruby
#
# Get requires out of the way
require('rubygems')
gem('twitter4r')
require('twitter')
require('time')
# Configuration parameters
twitter_username = "YOUR_USERNAME"
twitter_password = "YOUR_PASSWORD"
delete_after_days = 14
# Let's get a Twitter Client created
client = Twitter::Client.new(:login => twitter_username, :password => twitter_password)
# Expire deadline
expire_before = Time.now - (delete_after_days * 60 * 60 * 24)
expire_ids = []
puts "Expiring all Twitter updates prior to #{expire_before.to_s}."
# Iterate through timeline
# Purposefully get a large number of updates. As written, if your delete_after_time does not
# occur within the number of updates this script will never see an update that is old
# enough and never delete anything. It would be nice if we could request the timeline from
# the oldest tweet forward, but I cannot find a way to do that with Twitter4R. (The :since
# parameter does not seem to do anything for a :me request)
# If you have problems with this scripte set the count to something like the number
# of tweets you would create in delete_after_time days.
# Using the defaults, if you Tweet more than 200 times in 14 days this will never expire
# anything. If you try to use an expire length that is very long, like 365, this many not
# work at all.
timeline = client.timeline_for(:me, :count => 200) do |status|
if status.created_at < expire_before
puts "Queueing delete status ID #{status.id} created at #{status.created_at} (#{status.text})."
expire_ids.push(status.id)
end
end
# Now we'll sort the array, this will have the affect of putting the oldest items first in
# the list to be deleted.
expire_ids.sort!
puts "Deleting #{expire_ids.length} tweets."
# Now let's delete the stuff
# The Twitter4R library delete method seems to be completely broken. So, rather than a simple
# client.status(:delete, delete_status) we are going to go right to the API methods on Twitter
# this is ugly, but we are just going to spawn curl to do this work for us. And I'm sure I
# could do this without execing curl in the shell, but, whatever...
# Note: the delete method is not rate limited.
expire_ids.each do |delete_status|
puts "Deleting #{delete_status}..."
`curl -s -u #{twitter_username}:#{twitter_password} --http-request DELETE [twitter.com/statuses/...](http://twitter.com/statuses/destroy/#){delete_status}.xml`
end
This script does not do any checks to make sure the delete commands succeeded. Consider yourself warned. I don’t think it matters much since if it fails a delete it will just try again the next time.
Since the delete method is not rate limited, you could run this whenever. However, I would suggest to run it at once a night, perhaps late in the evening, so that you don’t interfere with the Twitter API usage from your normal Twitter clients.
Apple Store preparing for Snow Leopard release.
TED Video: Hans Rosling Dataset Mindset
The visuals in this talk by Hans Rosling at TED blew me away. Animated displays of 200 years of economic data about the world.
Mazie Photo Shoot
Last Friday Mazie and I had a super fun “Daddy-Daughter” day filled with many fun things. Part of our fun day was a trip to a store to get a new dress (we ended up getting two) followed by a photo shoot in her new clothes. We decided to do the photo shoot in our front yard, taking advantage of all the wonderful tall grasses and native plants. Mazie had a ton of fun, and so did I behind the camera.
Goodbye Blue Dog Mural
This week we said goodbye to one of the most distinctive art features of our house. In January of 2003 Tammy’s longtime friend Liane McMeen painted a great mural in our living room that surrounded a piece of art that we got in Denver featuring a dog positioned in a Volkswagen Bug door. For over 6 years when people have come into our house and turned the corner to enter the main living area, they’ve been greeted by a very large mural that put a smile on their face and welcomed them to our house. It set the tone of our house: fun, lighthearted, happy.
As much as we liked the mural, we decided that it was time for a change, and that the mural should be retired. We celebrated with a dinner at our house with Liane and her husband Chris. Just this week the actual paint went up and the mural is gone. Some wonderful new pieces of art have gone up in the spot.
In memory of this great gift, I decided to do a new version of the original time-lapse video I did when the mural was put up, with some new photos on the end.
I put in the post 6 years ago that “We live with all of our art, but this is part of every day.” That couldn’t be more true. Thanks again to Liane! We still have the Blue Dog sculpture but it has been moved to a different spot in the house.
Frankhouse
Enjoyed listening to Frankhouse tonight at the 318 Club. Good jazz. Friend of mine is the lead/trumpet player.
Still totally digging my Mini.
Just finished an emergency dog bath for Chase. I have no idea what he got into, but it smelled absolutely horrible. Hopefully a double shampoo got whatever off of him. Ugh.
Holy crap did the WordPress plugin Hot Linked Image Cacher just save me a ton of effort in moving things off of Tumblr.
Surly Hell
I got an email from Four Firkins at 10:13 am that they had received their very first limited shipment of Surly Hell. They were limiting sales to 2 4-packs per customer, and opening 2 hours earlier to accomodate. I immediately mobilized with my neighbor Mike and off we went. Got the last four 4-packs in the cooler. They sent an email at 11:47 am saying:
Sorry people, it was crazy in here, it’s all gone.
It tastes delicious.
