Tag Archive: twitter

1. The First Rusic Hack Day was amazing

   January 15, 2012 5:24 pm Comments Off

   Yesterday was the first Rusic Hackday. It was awesome. Totally awesome. The skills that we saw blew our minds, with themes being created that we did even think were possible.

   The £250 was split up between the designers as “Best use of Rusic”, “Best Design” and “Closest to complete”… Eveybody that attended voted, and by the end of the day there were a few friends of Rusic making it a little more interesting in the voting process (kindly sponsored IamKeir Inc.). Judging by the effort by all involved it wasn’t about the money though!

   If you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

   And the entries were:

   In no particular order and with links to Twitter and the live application itself. It’s worth stressing that all of these applications were created from scratch in about four – five hours with Rusic. Some aren’t quite finished, but they’re not far off. Expect to see more of these themes…

   @iamkeir – Rusicursive

   

   Showing off the Websnappr’d entries to the competition

   A really interesting theme that didn’t quite get where it needed to Essentially you add a website and it pulls back the web page as an image and adds it into Rusic. Very cool and with a bit more work it could be part of an interesting theme for building on in the future. As Keir is a friend of Rusic he wasn’t allowed to to enter the competition. (Don’t ask about the name)

   @daleanthony - Best Recipes

   

   Lovely design and use of Masonry

   A really simple and beautifully designed theme built with Masonry. Add recipes and share them. Perfect for a cookery site. Dale is part of the Rusic team and built all of the deafult themes in Rusic, so doesn’t qualify for a prize.

   @jamesGuest – Full English Breakfast

   

   I want that breakfast

   Building on one of the default themes, James after having to re-install pretty much everything in his laptop, spent a few hours coming up with this. Submit Cafes, their breakfasts and their location to find the best fry up in the UK. Combine this with the iPhone SDK and this is one awesome idea, anywhere you go you can find the nearest decent cafe. Seriously ESSENTIAL. Probably the best commercial idea of the day.

   @tholder – Mountain biking locations

   

   Lovely Google map integration

   A really nifty geo based app for plotting the best mountain bike trails. Good integration with google maps and another app crying out for the iPhone SDK. While Tom would’ve liked some cash he’s part of Rusic…

   @adambu1988 – 360k

   

   A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

   Adam’s tag line of “Three hundred and sixty thousand pixels & 360kb to do something awesome with…” is pretty cool. Reminiscent of the demo scene popular “way back when”…

   This is one of the themes that blew us away. Adam has managed to make a “code gallery”. Coders paste in their code snippet and then other people vote on it. Slick interface, great idea and slick implementation. Hard to believe this was created in an afternoon.

    @jegtnes and @mark_js – Blah Blah

   

   Liking of Comments.

   These two guys, students at UWE performed a minor miracle. I’m still not sure how they did what they did… Essentially they found a way to add “like” states to comments. This is not a core feature of Rusic, it may be one day, but right now it isn’t. Somehow they got it to work. Awesome. Really.

   @scottifydotcom – FootoFan

   

   Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

   I think this goes down as another really good commercial idea for an application, especially combined with the iPhone SDK. Essentially when you’re at the football you submit the match, and then photos and comments as you’re watching the game. I suspect this theme needs the most extra work as it needs some clever implemenation tricks to get it rocking… although Rusic that won’t take long.

   @benjaminReid – Eye Bomb

   

   The lovely action hover bar

   A beautifully designed theme just for submitting pictures of inanimate objects with eyes on. Beautiful action menu appearing over the main image and a nice simple navigation. Worth mentioning the cool Google maps integration here.

   A worthy mention goes to Roy that completely stripped and one of the default themes of CSS and javascript and rebuilt it semantically as HTML5. I can’t find your Twitter address or theme Roy. Where are you Roy?

   And the winners were:

   Best Design - Eye Bomb and 360k.

   Best Idea - 360k

   We didin’t do the “Nearest to complete” prize in try end as the guys that used the default themes were the  closest to completion which we thought wasn’t on in the end. So instead:

   Generally Cool - Footo and Blah Blah

   Overall a really awesome day and a testmant to the talent in Bristol. Feed back on Rusic from the guys was really positive, we learnt a lot as well. Thank you so much to everybody that came. Roll on the next one.

   Just in case you missed it at the top of this post if you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

2. Social media, riots, politicians and humour

   August 23, 2011 4:37 pm Comments Off

   You’ve heard the politicians going on about Twitter and Facebook and the riots? You’d have to be living in a serious hole or must have been on holiday a long time not to have. There’s been a lot said and a lot done.

   We recently pitched the government via the Technology Strategy Board for a system to predict where this stuff might happen (better the devil you know!)… They are taking this stuff seriously, there was £600k available to research this “Minority Report” style software and while its not where it needs to be yet, it is not as far off as you might think.

   Well now (via a new company) we’ve done the opposite of predicting the future and discovered an interesting twist – humour, however “dark”, plays a large part in social communication and trending. Using control data and then a continuous stream of “chatter” that fits targeted queries, the Churnbar system was “taught” what it should be looking for with minimal human interaction with some interesting results.

   To quote Nigel Legg the auth of the post,

   Care is needed when using social media to find the instigators of criminal activity.  Law enforcement agencies need to determine whether a post is humorous or serious in intent.

   For a full explanation read Nigel’s excellent post.

3. Custom tweets and Facebook posts from your Rusic account

   August 3, 2011 5:52 pm Comments Off

   One of the great things about Rusic is it’s really easy to share your actions on the site with your friends. This is all done through your Twitter or Facebook account, and we’ve just finished adding a neat little feature to make this even better.

   

   Soon you’ll be to customise the message it sends out whenever you create a new idea, like an idea or comment on an idea. And not only can you include your own content but you can also give the message some great context too. We’ve made it really simple to drop in tags for things like: the idea’s title, the bucket name, the comment text as well the user performing the action and the idea or bucket owner.

   As a quick example, you could setup the twitter post for creating an idea to this:

   Hey {{bucket_owner}}, {{idea_owner}} just created an awesome idea 

   called {{idea}} in the {{bucket}} bucket, have a look here: {{link}}

   Now, whenever a user creates an idea, a tweet is posted from them saying (something like):

   Hey @joebloggs, @johnsmith just created an awesome idea called 

   "Some idea" in the "Cool thoughts" bucket, have a look here: 

   http://cool.rusic.com/cool-thoughts/likes/123

   This is all done using an amazing templating engine called liquid which was developed by the guys at Shopify, so hats off to them!

   We’ll be rolling this out as a feature on all paid account soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

4. Five to follow (it’s not Friday though)

   July 5, 2011 3:13 pm Comments Off

   Fellow lovers of Twitter? Then here’s a list of the top to follow recommended by our very own team. From tech and social media whizzes to people who we just think deserve a shout out.

   Darren Rowse [@problogger]

   Well known for giving advice and tips to not only aspiring but expert bloggers, a lot of useful tricks that wouldn’t hurt to be learnt.

   Alex Hunter [@cubedweller]

   Genuinely nice guy with great digital marketing experience and broad knowledge.

   Indian Ocean Race [@OceanRowingRace]

   Ben Stenning (part of our director Les’ extended family) and James Adair are currently rowing 3,100 miles of open water from Australia to Mauritius for charity.

   Follow these great guys on their progress on the Indian Ocean Rowing Race on twitter.

   Shaun Collins [@bugsy2301]

   Music lover? This is the guy to follow.

   An aspiring journalist and someone who clearly knows their music, adding a twist to his writing with humour, wittiness and obvious passion. Make sure you check out his posts.

   Zee M Kane [@Zee]

   Finally Editor-in-Chief of  The Next Web so expect all the latest technology posts, as they say.. if it’s worthing hearing: you’ll hear it from them first.

5. Company Tweet – Free app for Multiple users and one Twitter account [product update]

   March 8, 2010 9:39 pm Comments Off

   The two main wishes for Twitter are managing multiple clients and letting multiple users manage a single account. All while knowing who’s posted what and when, and to which account.

   We’ve created a FREE Twitter client for Media Genius (our social media toolbox) that lets anybody manage multiple Twitter accounts with multiple users and keep track of everything. Every company needs accountability when they are saying anything in public so we’ve built “Company Tweet” to do just that.

   After creating your account with Media Genius, setting up a workspace, and installing the “Company Tweet” application you can start to see its power.

   

   Writing a Tweet in Media Genius

   On a basic level you can use Twitter’s essential functions; posting tweets, seeing replies and seeing the stream of tweets. It becomes really useful once you’ve added other people into Media Genius. You can do this for your company or even your clients companies.

   

   Twitter updates from people you follow

   Any user will now have their name logged in Media Genius’s activity stream along with the message and the date and time. If you install “Company Tweet” into another workspace you can add another twitter account and manage that as well.

   

   Checking the activity

   After installing into a clients’ workspaces you can give them access; giving you a centralised way to manage your clients’ Twitter usage…

   There’s a lot of possibilities for anyone managing multiple Twitter accounts and multiple users.

   See a video on Blip.tv for a quick introduction. Or go straight to Media Genius and get it for free.

   Header image courtesy of www.hollyspringtradingco.com