Author Topic: Automatically Deleting Tweets  (Read 2350 times)

toadstone

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Automatically Deleting Tweets
« on: September 08, 2013, 07:25:32 AM »
While having a Weather Tweet Station may appeal to some just think of the volume of data one puts out.  Which is why I tended to limit reporting. Well an ex Twitter engineer, Pierre Legrain, has come up with a Twitter app called Spirit. Essentially once the app is installed on your Twitter account if you include the # tag at the end of your Tweet and include a time limit eg #5m  relating to 5 minutes then hey presto in 5 minutes your Tweet will self destruct.  Other values are h=hours and d=days, simples!

Here's how I added it to my WeatherCat Twitter Uploader prefs script, don't forget to compile the script. For good measure I stopped the WeatherCat Twitter app while doing it.
Code: [Select]
set twitString to stationName & " conditions at " & localTime & " " & "Temp: " & ExtTemp & " " & tempUnits & ", Humidity: " & humidityValue & "%, " & " QNH: " & baroMin & ", " & "Av Wind: " & windVelocity & " " & windSpeedUnits & " from the " & windDir & ", Rain today: " & dailyRain & " " & rainUnits & ", #6h "
Twitter apps may be a new frontier for some but if for any reason you don't like third parties accessing your account then you can always revoke the app by going to Settings- Apps to both view what apps you have and to revoke them.

Finally to get the app go here  http://twitterspirit.com
A word of caution here.  If you have your Twitter account open previously in your browser or you may have 2 accounts open. Then I suggest you quit your account/s, close browser down completely and then restart browser, log in to your Twitter weather account and then go to the link above.  The reason is because the app, once you click the start button, automatically interrogates the browser to collect log on details and then installs the app.  Go to your settings - apps in your Twitter account and you'll see that Spirit is there. Stop and start your WeatherCat Twitter app refresh your browser page and you should see the hash tag addition at the end of your Tweet.
Quote
RainowWX ‏@RainowWX 28m
Big Low conditions at 6:50 Temp: 8.6 C, Humidity: 85%, QNH: 1015, Av Wind: 13.0 km/h from the SW, Rain today: 0.0 mm, #6h


A word of caution: I believe the app only deletes the "public" side of the Twitter equation. As far as Twitter servers and data retrieval issues are concerned that info is still there just not seen. Remember the guy who wrote it is an ex Twitter engineer. 

Hope this may be useful for some of you.

Peter.

Addendum:   All that glitters is not gold...................    I've just noticed that you actually create a hash tag trend if you click on your own hash tag addition you get all the tweets that have your chosen hash tag time limit!!!   I suppose it won't be long before this will abused?   

elagache

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Thanks for the info. (Re: Automatically Deleting Tweets)
« Reply #1 on: September 08, 2013, 09:23:48 PM »
Dear Peter and WeatherCat twitter fans,

While having a Weather Tweet Station may appeal to some just think of the volume of data one puts out.  Which is why I tended to limit reporting. Well an ex Twitter engineer, Pierre Legrain, has come up with a Twitter app called Spirit. Essentially once the app is installed on your Twitter account if you include the # tag at the end of your Tweet and include a time limit eg #5m  relating to 5 minutes then hey presto in 5 minutes your Tweet will self destruct.  Other values are h=hours and d=days, simples!

Thanks for the information.  It might be of interest to some folks using my AppleScript.

A word of caution: I believe the app only deletes the "public" side of the Twitter equation. As far as Twitter servers and data retrieval issues are concerned that info is still there just not seen. Remember the guy who wrote it is an ex Twitter engineer. 

I also don't upload very frequently and don't use Twitter really.  I just wrote the AppleScript because there had been an older Twitter upload scheme used with WeatherCat's predecessor LWC which was very convoluted.  It finally stopped working.  So I searched around and tried to see if there was a way to do this with AppleScript.  Thanks to J.A. Computing, there was.

Cheers, Edouard  [cheers1]