Tag Archives: Twitter

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Turn Twitter Threads into Shareable Posts with Spooler

Photo of spool with several thread colors

One of the most delightful occurrences on the internet is when someone writes a little script or web app or bot to solve one of your pet peeves. Not only does it scratch your not-very-important-but-still-irritating itch, but it makes it seem like you’re not alone. “See?!? Someone else found this irritating!”

Darius Kazemi‘s Spooler is just such a service, which solves a simple, recently emergent problem: sharing sequences of interconnected tweets. How do you share Twitter threads (or, god help …

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Twitter Continues to Fail at Handling Harassment

man with head in sand

[This article is co-authored with Kate Bowles. Dr Bowles is Associate Dean International in the Faculty of Law Humanities and Arts at the University of Wollongong. She writes online at musicfordeckchairs.com and tweets @KateMFD.]

Note: we are intentionally not sharing specific examples we have seen in order to protect those who have been recent targets of harassment.

Imagine this. You use Twitter in teaching, or for professional development, or at conferences. It’s been an important environmen…

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Supermute Twitter

Start or Stop

I’ve been talking a lot about Twitter lately here on ProfHacker, but it’s still one of my favorite places to be online. However, sometimes, I don’t want to see certain things in my timeline. Certainly you can use the Mute function on Twitter, but why use a subtle, flexible, and complex tool when you can use a blunt instrument?

Enter Supermute:

Supermute is a blunt tool. You can define any phrase you’d like to mute for up to 7 days. During that time period, if anyone in your timeline (including …

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Save That Hashtag! Twitter Recorder Extension

Got Hash Tag?

We’ve written about Twitter a lot here at ProfHacker. One of the best ways to archive tweets, particularly around a particular search term or hashtag is Martin Hawksey’s TAGS archive, which George recently wrote about. But the TAGS archive works best if you already know you want to archive a hashtag or search term; the archives can only go as far back as the Twitter API will allow, which isn’t all the way back.

I ran into this problem when I wanted to go back and collect all of the #FYCchat arc…

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Culling Your Social Media Past

Picture of a Delete Key

Last week, I wrote about data security when crossing the border, and my own…unease about my upcoming trip to Canada (and subsequent re-entry). One of the challenges, however, is that much of my social media is pretty wide open and easily accessible through a google search of my uncommon name.

Recently, my colleague Kris Shaffer began an experiment in digital minimalism. He wrote a post last week on deleting a large swath of his Twitter history based on Tweepy in Python. His step-by-step instruc…

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Getting Started on Academic Twitter v2.0

balloons on strings

At this year’s MLA Convention, I was invited to give a workshop on getting started on social media, namely, Twitter. It was an interesting full-circle moment for me, as is writing this piece; my first ProfHacker appearance was because of my virtual participation at MLA11.

I’ve written recently for ProfHacker about why I still find Twitter valuable. And apparently, many academics are, if not seeing the value, then at least interested enough to attend a session by me at the MLA Convention in 2017…

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Are You on Mastodon Yet? Social Network of Our Own

Mastodon homepage

Have you heard of Mastodon.social? Several of the edtech/digped people started appearing there over Thanksgiving weekend, thanks in part to this article, touting Mastodon as the open source alternative to Twitter. According to their “About” page:

“Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server. A decentralized alternative to commercial platforms, it avoids the risks of a single company monopolizing your communication. Anyone can run Mastodon and participate in the social network seamle…

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How Twitter Changed My Life

One evening last week, while watching hockey (HOCKEY IS BACK) and scrolling though twitter, I noticed a hashtag that had started to trend: #HowTwitterHasChangedMyLife. Of course, the hashtag was filled with funny and nonsensical, and more than a little sarcastic, tweets, but if it’s crossing my field of vision, it means those associated with higher education have discovered it.

Going through the hashtag, it’s amazing to see how many friendships and relationships have been formed over the social …

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Scheduling Tweets? On Mobile?

For years, I have been using Tweetdeck to schedule tweets. Yesterday I suddenly wondered why I couldn’t just schedule tweets from an app on my mobile. So I searched and found this Mashable article recommending 3 free tools (it called them apps so I thought they were mobile apps, but they’re actually web-based) and I thought they worked better than Tweetdeck for some things but worse for others.

I schedule tweets for the following purposes:

  1. To pre-tweet questions or notes during a conference …

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How to Store Your Twitter Archive on Github Pages

It’s no secret that here at ProfHacker we’re interested in the ways Twitter can be used in higher education, and one of our favorite tools for working with Twitter is Martin Hawksey’s TAGS, “a free Google Sheet template which lets you setup and run automated collection of search results from Twitter.”

As Mark has written, Something cool you can do with Hawksey’s TAGS is create an automatically updated, publicly viewable archive of all of your Tweets. Mark keeps his archive on GoogleDrive, which…

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