As many of you have noticed, the "recent books" feature at BM isn't currently working.

The reason is that Twitter changed the way programs need to work with them, and I haven't rewritten the "recent books" feature to work with the new way Twitter does this.

The reason I haven't done this, is that I'm really, really fed up with Twitter, and would like to propose no longer using them for the "recent books" feature.

There are two reasons I'm annoyed with Twitter:

1) way back when the feature was programmed by me, you could search for #hash tags in the BM Twitter feed, which was really handy, because you could (for instance) do a search for "#scifi #uk" and instantly be notified when moochable scifi books were available in the UK. However, at some point Twitter stopped full text indexing the BM feed, so this stopped working.

2) Twitter would randomly put daily-posting-limits on our feed, so even though there were new books available, they rejected our tweets. Once, I got a human being in tech support, who removed the limit. That lasted about 2 years, then the limits came back, and no human being at Twitter replied to my inquiries.

So... I'm thinking of redoing the "recent books" feature to not use Twitter, but to either user a competitor or to use an open source program or for me to simply write something that does the job we need.

For example, there's StatusNet, which is open source and provides similar features:
http://readwrite.com/2010/09/27/open_source_twitter_alternative_statusnet_releases#awesm=~oacC7CTLGKavXQ

Using Google+ is possible, but there seems to be a 500-per-day limit, which will bite us too.

Thoughts?

-john

Thanks, everyone, for your feedback. I had been thinking of doing it as an "RSS Feed" and that's likely what I'll do.

For nontechnical folks, you won't need to know about the underlying technology, because I'll be putting in a "live display", similar to the "preview" on this page: http://www.surfing-waves.com/feed.htm

but I'll also make it so that both the RSS feed, and the "live feed" display can take parameters such as the country and book genre that you're interested in.

I would not be against the "StatusNet" thing. I would encourage it even. Competition is always good. At worse, people who are really interested would have to add another app on their smart phone. I'd say do it, and let's see how it goes.

Thanks again for everything you do John.

It was a great feature-- being able to see a list of recently added books-- I got a lot of great stuff that way. I say, John, do whatever is easiest for you to get some kind of "recently added" feature back.

Thanks for all you do, John.

And, imo, you are perfectly justified in kicking Twitter to the curb.

Thanks for all you do John.