Brief History of Tweetfave

Here’s a brief history of Tweetfave – my new free service that automatically emails your Twitter favorites to your inbox.
This project started as one of those “wouldn’t it be useful if…” projects, as an addition to Twitter. I was already using the Twitter favorite feature to bookmark tweets and links to read later, and wanted a way to automatically receive those (short of going to my profile page and viewing my own favorites). Combine that with an interest in learning the Twitter API, and the project was underway.
As I started writing this, I was a bit surprised as to just how long I’ve been working on this. Here’s the history timeline I came up with…

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Tweetfave Software and Services

With my Tweetfave project finally launched and starting to get a little bit of usage, I thought I’d summarize some of the key building blocks for this project.
First of all, what does Tweetfave actually do? It periodically checks your Twitter account to look for new tweets you have marked as favorite. If you have any new ones, it sends them to your email inbox. The functionality is very simple, but I’ve found it to be a handy addition to Twitter, turning favorites into a sort of “read it later” bookmarking feature.
Following are some of the software tools and services I used to build Tweetfave…

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Introducing Tweetfave

Tweetfave is a free service to help you get more out of Twitter favorites. Tweetfave monitors your Twitter feed and sends the tweets you mark as favorite to your inbox. I built Tweetfave for myself (“scratching my own itch”) and it’s really helped me track and remember interesting tweets and links. It’s especially useful when reading my Twitter feed on a mobile phone. If I don’t have the time (or patience) to read linked articles on the phone, I’ll mark the tweet as a favorite, knowing it will arrive later in my inbox.

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Export Twitter Friends Script

As part of my Tweetfave project, I wanted to get a better sense of the people I’m following and whether they use the Twitter “favorites” feature. By using the Twitter API, I’m able to first fetch my list of friends (i.e. people I am following), then get the detailed stats for each one. The result is a CSV file which can imported into Excel or other spreadsheet program: Twitter friend data loaded in Excel This script is written in PHP and uses the Twitter OAuth PHP library. It uses the Twitter API methods friends/ids and users/lookup. Because the user lookup…

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Preventing Scam or Fraud Warnings for Email Newsletters

Some email clients like Thunderbird will sometimes show a scam warning message on emails which appear to be normal and not suspicious. The Thunderbird warning is two-part: first an inline message “This message may be a scam, and second a modal dialog which appears when you click on any link in the email. Combined this could be worrisome for users who aren’t sure what the warning means. I’ve been seeing this more frequently lately with email newsletters. The most common cause is link tracking added by the newsletter delivery vendor (MailChimp, Tinyletter, etc.). The scam warning will come up whenever…

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