Help Key: Watch Netflix From Outside The U.S.
You Americans have all the good stuff. Stuff like BP pumping oil in the Ocean and guns, lots of guns. And then you have Netflix and we people outside the U.S. are wondering what could it feel like to have a service like that. Now I know.
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Twitter Begins User Streams Testing. Realtime Tech Should Help Ease API Strain
For some time now, Twitter has been working on a new API: the Twitter Streaming API. The idea behind it is to allow third-party Twitter clients to receive continuous tweet updates in realtime. As developer advocate Taylor Singletary notes today on the Twitter Development Talk Google Group, limited testing of this new feature (also called “User Streams”) for desktop clients has now begun.
Currently, TweetDeck and Echofon, two popular Twitter desktop clients, have access to the new API for testing. Singletary notes that not all users of these clients will see this new tech in action at first. Instead, there will be a more gradual roll-out with each app. Once that occurs, Twitter will start opening up the Streaming API to other clients as well.
Twitter first started talking about this new API this past April at their Chirp conference. Others have already been internally testing it for some time as Twitter is also testing out its new Annotations feature through the API.
While the feature is very cool and makes third-party clients much more interesting, the Streaming API also helps Twitter significantly. As Singletary notes, “The transition to User Streams should return considerable capacity to the
REST and Search APIs, increasing stability for Twitter users & developers alike.” With their recent scaling problems, one of the aspects hurt the most by limits Twitter had to impose is the API. Services like TweetDeck and Seesmic rely heavily on the Search API for their various windows — so obviously, this was a problem. The Streaming API should alleviate that quite a bit.
And there’s more. Singletary notes that:
Additionally, several interesting new event types are available: Favoriting, retweeting, following, and list additions are also streamed along with direct messages, mentions, the user timeline and the home timeline.
Again, all of this should help ease strain on the rest of Twitter’s APIs. The only question is: how long will it take to roll-out in a meaningful way? Twitter says that an open beta is tentatively scheduled for Q3 or Q4 of 2010.
At the end of the message, Singletary also hints at a new API product called Site Streams:
Application developers needing to consume multiple, simultaneous user streams will be served by an upcoming Streaming API product called Site Streams. Stay tuned for more information on that when we’re ready.
[thanks Richard]
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Help BP Learn How to Use Photoshop
Apparently BP can no longer afford to employ people with even remotely reasonable Photoshop skills. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the company has admitted to (poorly) altering photos of its clean up operations in the Gulf of Mexico that were released to the public.
BP claims these truly pathetic Photoshop jobs are the work of a contract photographer. It’s hard to know what to believe about this, but if there really is a photographer who took it upon himself to mess with these images, then this individual should be ashamed. We just can’t decide which is more shameful, the complete lack of ethics or the complete lack of Photoshop skill.
So let’s lend poor, embattled BP a hand and show them what people who actually know how to use Photoshop can do. Choose any of the three original photos from BP’s Flickr album of altered images, and have at it. Our favorite is the cockpit photo that was altered to look like the helicopter is in the air (above). But almost as charming is the first altered photo discovered of BP’s crisis command center (below). Gizmodo and Americablog do a great job of tearing down these photos and showing just how bad the Photoshopping is.
We’ll choose some of your best, most interesting, funniest and most skilled images you send us and post them early next week. Feel free to take as much creative liberty with the images as you like (as long as the end product isn’t obscene).
Submit your photos and vote for your favorites at the bottom of this post.
Images: 1) Original (left) and altered (right) versions of a BP photo./© BP p.l.c. 2) Original (left) and altered (right) versions of a BP photo./© BP p.l.c.
OK, you know how this works. Submit your photoshopped pic and vote for your favorite.
Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own photo
Submit a BP Photoshop job
While you can submit as many photoshopped pics as you like, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.
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