News on Twitter Verified Accounts from Mashable.
Twitter Launches Verified Accounts.
This is great news, many people are trying hard to block identity theft on the net so it’s important that new mediums take this seriously as soon as possible, preferably at the design stage!
Look at the difference between XMPP and SMTP(lack of) anti-spoofing features, the ease with which SMTP senders (email) can be spoofed has caused many problems.
On the other hand it’s also spawned a huge IT security industry… hmm.
Well, TechCruch reporting that Twitter are finally talking about their firehose, that stream of tweets that was XMPP is now HTTP…
“The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. ”
As an proponent of XMPP for near real time messaging I must say that using a technology designed to pull data for this is slightly baffling. But then most developers know HTTP so I suppose it makes sense, but then again if the ‘firehose’ is only available to select few then it makes no difference.
I can’t help but think they took a wrong turn with XMPP by trying to get OpenFire to do the job, when they had been working with ejabberd, which is a much better base platform. Was OpenFire the cause of Alex Payne’s comments about Java libraries not handling the load? Did they talk to someone like ProcessOne about ejabberd’s clustering?
I suppose the best thing to do from here on in is to support the projects that support XMPP, the obvious ones being identi.ca and other Laconi.ca based mirco-blogging services like TWiT Army.
Not a step by step but this will help to get TwitterSpy running on Debian.
Dependencies
Make sure you have these installed (in this order?)
With Python, pysqlite and Twisted you need to download then run the following in each directory after unpacking
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
- Memcached (apt-get memcached on Debian)
- Python 2.5.x (not 2.4, 2.6 or 3, remember to reboot)
- SQLite3 (you may need to remove sqlite first, [apt-get remove sqlite])
- SQLAlchemy
- pysqlite-2.4.1
- Twisted 8.2.x (remember to reboot, odd I know)
- git (to tackle the gitfm file manager name clash)
— apt-get install git-core
— update-alternatives –config git
Installation
- Unpack Twitterspy
- git submodule init && git submodule update
- copy twitterspy.conf.sample to twitterspy.conf
- edit twitterspy.conf
- sqlite twitterspy-test.sqlite3 (to create the database)
- run ./etc/create_tables.py
- Setup a startup script in /etc/init.d
- run twisted -ny twitterspy.tac &
Leave the ‘n’ out of the above if yu’re going to be logging out and want to leave twitterspy running.
‘pnormand: is using xmpp to post on identi.ca, which forwards to twitter which syncs with facebook, isn’t that simple?’
Well, it took a while but I finally got Twitterspy working on our ejabberd server. I’m not at all surprised that the process broke our Yahoo! IM gateway as I had to update to the latest version of Python… the joy of open source R&D 
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