ÜberTwitter does not delete cached Tweets

I don't know if this is good or bad news, but apparently if you have ÜberTwitter you get to read any tweet once it get download into by ÜberTwitter client even if that tweet is deleted.

ÜberTwitter doesn't use PUSH technology. That's why the client needs to set the interval checking time to refresh the tweets every minute or so. If that interval is very small it will drain your battery but you will get to see maximum number of deleted tweets.

Let me give you an example, lets say that you tweeted something and the next 5 second you changed your mind and deleted that tweet. In this 5 seconds, all your followers that use ÜberTwitter client who managed to download that tweet to their Blackberry will read it even after 5 hours, because Ubertwitter won't bother looping through your cache and delete that tweet. Unless they manually clear the cache.

I don't know about other clients though, you can help us.

Idea: One Button, Ten Commands

Usually when I get an idea, I quickly note it down on my phone so I won't forget it. Well, I wrote this 2 months ago, I decided to compile it into a blog post now. It goes like this.

Design a physical button that have fingerprints detectors. So when you press the button with your index finger, the button detects that you used your index finger, thus delegate the action to a given function to execute. When you use other fingers you get a totally different command. At this pace, you can have up to 10 commands for a given button.

For example, you can turn the light on and off, open and close the fan, switch the AC on and off, switch on TV on and off, play DVD, switch PC on. All with one button.

So Imagine how this can simplify a complex interface. You can design a complete system with 3 buttons only. Of course this design have flaws, one of them is that its very difficult to execute actions simultaneously. For example you cannot press same button with two of your fingers to execute two actions at the same time, this limits your actions to a degree.

Twitter Trends in Bahrain now Available in Twitter Chrome Extension

Until Twitter decides to include my country in their Geographical Trending Topics I created a generic way to calculate trending topics in twitter for a particular country/region/collection of countries almost any set.

The method is not 100% perfect but it works, I used the concept of lists. The service reads from live stream of a list, in this example it reads from a real-time list of most active bahraini twitters. For small regions like Bahrain and GCC, we can create such list and group all people.

The beautiful thing about this, is that I can list the trending topics of say Geeks in Bahrain, or Photographers in Dubai.. Just create a list and let the service read from that list. I might list how developers can create their own service in a separate post.

Apparently, tomorrow is Eid, so as you see #eid is trending, the others mostly are TV series in GCC.

I combined the list into a new version of Google Chrome extension for Twitter web

Download the latest Google Chrome Extension for Twitter Web here

Note: if you double click on the trend, it will take you to a new twitter search.. will enhance this later to actually show the tweets generated this trend.