Twitter updates

[Andreas Jonsson]

A twitter feed is now available for all reports submitted to the Toronto Reports section. Please follow it here:

http://twitter.com/TorontoBirdList

Only initial posts are tweeted. Follow-up posts do not generate a twitter message.

EDIT:  Service change as of September 2011.

Please note that this is a not a real-time service. Typically there is a delay of 5-60 minutes between submission on the message board and arrival on twitter. The delay depends on the performance of on-line web services such as pipes.yahoo.com, twitterfeed.com and twitter.com.

Any feedback on this service is welcome.

There is also a twitter feed for the Bird Photo Corner.

Learn more about twitter here:

http://twitter.com/
http://www.youtube.com/

[Matthew Strimas-Mackey]

It seems odd that Twitter isn't used more by birders. I'm not on Twitter because there's little on there to interest me and I don't have a cell. It would be the perfect tool for the timely reporting of bird sightings though. Someone should start #TOBirds for sightings. Does this already exist?

[Andreas Jonsson]

Good idea. I think a lot of people get the ONTBIRDS posts to their phones. Then there is also Birdseye... http://www.getbirdseye.com/. Not sure if that works in Canada? And you get only reports when and if they are reported to ebird... ONTBIRDS only carries rather major and summarizing reports, so there is a niche available for something different...

I'd be interested in trying something out... Gotta go now...

[Andreas Jonsson]

The twitter feed has been up for soon 9 months now and there are currently 40 followers:

http://twitter.com/#!/TorontoBirdList/followers

Pretty cool that there are a several out-of-towners keeping an eye on us, including Peterson Bird Guides, Audubon of Florida, and birders from some pretty odd places, including Oxford and Uganda!

[Andreas Jonsson]

Dear twitter users. Due to a major software update over at Yahoo Pipes, the Twitter updates here on the board are no longer working as intended. The service was designed to tweet once for every new thread posted. With the new Yahoo Pipes engine, however, the same thread is tweeted multiple times, generally (but not always) for each new reply in a given thread.  

I have spent a fair bit of time trying and correct this problem, but I have not been able to. This type of functionality would be easy to provide if the message board was running on a more modern forum software platform like phpBB  v3 or similar, while my "hack" is rather complex and difficult to maintain. So, I've decided not to research this further.

I'll leave the twitter feed on, but please understand that it is not working as intended. Thanks for your understanding.

[Andreas Jonsson]

Thanks to Andy's addition of news feeds to the forum I am now turning on the twitter feed for the Toronto Reports section again. You'll find it here:

https://twitter.com/#!/TorontoBirdList

The new twitter feed only updates for new posts, i.e. not for comments. Enjoy.