justSignal Status & Updates Blog

Hover Cards - User Info in the Twitter Widget

Sometimes before you can know what to do about things you see in your Signal you need a little more information about the person who said it. No where is this more true than in Twitter.

Today we've added Hover Cards to the Twitter Widget and in the SignalMonitor.

What does this mean?

When you put your mouse cursor over the Twitter User's name a "card" pops up with all the important information abou this user.

• How many people they follow.
• How many people follow them.
• How many updates they've posted.
• Their Bio
• Any Link associated with their account (if available).
• Where they are located (if available).

You can click on their avatar and be taken to their Twitter Profile page - if you like.

While the Hover Card is open we stop streaming in updates - so you can take your time and read the information without worrying about the stream of tweets flowing away...

Here's a screen shot:

the justSignal team

Twitter OAuth Upgrade

As many of you may know, Twitter has (at least twice) pushed back the mandatory migration to OAuth for Twitter API logins. We've been holding our migration from basic (username, password) authentication to OAuth due to these issues.

We have made the determination that now is the time to complete the OAuth migration process.

What Does This Mean To Me?

On Friday evening (July 16th 2010) at 6 pm Pacific Time we will move from Basic Auth to OAuth. 

When your visitors see one of our Twitter widgets they will now see something similar to:

We've created an informational page - which you can review here. This link is available right below the "Sign in with Twitter" button in the widget.

Another SignalMonitor Upgrade

At justSignal, our goal is to constantly adapt to your needs and better solve your problems. We heard from several of you that it would be great to have more options when viewing your data in the SignalMonitor.

Last week we added the ability to directly export any analytics view to Excel. Today we've added much more flexibility to the timeframes you can view. Until today you had options for:

• Today
• Last 7 Days
• Last 30 Days

We've added:

• Yesterday
• Individual dates for the last 30 days.

Let us know what you think... we've got lots more tricks up our sleeves!

regards,

the justSignal team

NOTICE: Maintenance Today at 3pm Pacific

UPDATE: Please make sure you follow justSignal on twitter at: http://twitter.com/justsignal - we will post updates as the maintenance progresses.

We will be performing maintenance on our systems today at 3pm pacific time. The upgrades are expected to last 2 to 3 hours with intermittent service interuptions.

These upgrades will allow us to improve performance - and move several beta services into full production (more on that later).

Service:

Collection of Mentions: Collection will be down for approximately one hour at the beginning of the maintenance window.

Widgets: The widgets will be available and continue to load without errors, however, there will be periods (lasting as much as 1 hour) where there will be no new content collected or displayed.

Portal: Expect the portal to be down for the duration of the maintenance window.

SignalMonitor: The SignalMonitor will be unavailable for the duration of the maintenance window.

Reports: There will be no reports sent during the maintenance window. This may cause some users to not receive daily reports for today.

As always, if you have any questions let us know at support at justSignal dot com.

regards,

the justSignal team

NOTICE: API Errors

The API is generating errors right now. We believe this is an unintended result of the Twitter Upgrade. 

We are investigating now and will post updates as we have more information.

regards,

the justSignal team

Ouch... Twitter is GONE!

It isn't just you (or just us). It appears Twitter is gone. 

We are still connected and looking for Tweets to collect for you... but we just aren't getting any. We will stay on top of it and make sure we pick right back up when Twitter comes back.

regards,

the justSignal team

Update - Get All Tweets From a Twitter User - ACTION REQUIRED

Yesterday we rolled out the new Partner Access Collector for Twitter. That collector was slightly different than the old one, in that it would not find tweets from a user if you specified the user name in your filter.

Today we've rolled out an update that corrects that - but you must take action in order for it to work.

What you need to do:

If you want to get tweets from a specific user and any tweets that contain the user name, precede the Twitter user name with an '@' in your filter. For example - to get every tweet from and mentioning justSignal put "@justSignal" in your filter. 

NOTE: Omitting the @ will only get you tweets that have "justSignal" in the body (140 character part) of the tweet.

If you have any questions - shoot us an email at:

support at justsignal dot com

regards,

the justSignal team

NOTICE: justSignal Twitter Access Upgrade

We've fully migrated to the new Twitter Partner collector. In this process we've noticed that some of our users are attempting to get every tweet from a certain user. The new partner API we are using will only get every tweet that mentions keywords in your filter - so if the user's name isn't in the tweet, we won't get it.

We've got a fix that will allow you to track a specific Twitter user in your Signal - and it should be ready to go tomorrow. We will keep you posted here.

UPDATE:

To clarify, the twitter username must be in your filter AND THE BODY OF THE TWEET or it will not be collected.

As always - if you have any questions or concerns let us know at:

support at justsignal dot com

regards,

the justSignal team

Upgrade - Twitter Partner Access

We just wanted to let you know that sometime in the next couple of hours we will be moving to a new Twitter collector that has a higher level of access to Twitter.

What This Means For You:

First, it means that there should be nearly no delay (less than 10 seconds) between when a Tweet is posted and when it appears in your justSignal Signal. Additionally, this higher level of access means there should be dramatically less sampling (Twitter samples the Search API - which means not every tweet matching the search is picked up).

Net/Net, you should notice 2 things:

1. Tweets show up much faster.
2. We get all of them (~ 98%).

Second, there may be some bumps durring the cutover. We've exhaustively tested the new collector, but there is still some risk of issues. In the event we run into any problems we will fall back to the current collector until we can sort out whatever happened.

As always - if you notice any issues let us know.

Enjoy your new, faster and more complete Signals!

regards,

the justSignal team

Reporting Errors Update

We wanted to update you on the recent reporting errors.

We put in place some new monitoring for our Amazon EC2 infrastructure, unfortunately there was an unintended side effect. The method used by the monitoring tool repeatedly connected to our database and then abandoned the connection. This method will lock a host (IP address) from being able to connect to the database. 

Because the monitoring server sat behind a firewall the effect of the lockout was to disallow access from every server behind that firewall - including our reporting server. When this occurred all reports generated connection errors until we reset the lockout information on the database.

We've shut down the monitoring until the problem is corrected.

Additionally, as we investigated the errors we discovered a bug in the User Activity report. When a Signal had no ReTweets or Replies in their tweet stream over the last 30 days the report would generate an error. We've patched the report today and corrected the issue.

We are sorry for any inconvenience these issues may have caused. As always, if you any issues let us know at support at justsignal.com.

regards,

the justSignal team