Is there currently a social plugin or a way to post directly to someone's wall or tweet directly at someone?
For example, say I have a list of people on my page:
Nicholas Cage
Robin Williams
Kiss
Pink
Is there a way to post to their wall/tweet without leaving my page? I currently have it set that it opens their page in a new window, but it would be much more usable to be able to do it this way.
You could do that in the background from the server, but if the social site asks for a confirmation, you'll have to go back to the user again. As all top social sites ask for confirmation you would only catch users who confirmed before... If this is worth the effort is up to you.
Related
I would like to monitor users' page visits and clicks in my Rails app to make recommendations. My questions are:
Is there a Rails gem for this, or Google Analytics is the standard? If latter is true, then how should I link a page visit to a particular user profile?
It is typical in Rails to have a section in application.html.erb, which is shared for all pages. If I add Google Analytics pageview tracking code to in application.html.erb, will it be able to track all individual pages?
There are other ways, but the vast majority probably use Google Analytics. Several gems exist that help you integrate with GA to get at the data. See here: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/Web_Analytics.
Based on your first question, it seems you may want more insight than GA can provide. I've used ClickTale (http://www.clicktale.com) and Woopra (http://www.woopra.com) before, to good effect. This article lists several other alternatives, too - notice the high marks for Clicky: http://imimpact.com/web-stats-alternatives-to-google-analytics/.
Google Analytics (and almost all of these others) will take care of your second question automatically whenever the user loads a new page, since it keyed by URL. That means that, although you put the GA script code in a single place, each unique page is tracked individually.
If you have AJAX requests that change that page without changing the URL, you'll need to dig in to the GA script API. Essentially you'll need to push a new url (possibly with a # in it) whenever you want to track an AJAX-driven link/button click. See here: http://davidwalsh.name/ajax-analytics
I am biased, but I would recommend checking out impressionist, if you need to integrate the page views into the app in real-time. With analytics you will always have some lag time and you are also relying on an external dependency. Impressionist is good if you need this kind of control, but if you are just looking for simple metrics and don't need to pull them into the app, then analytics is probably the way to go.
Check out Ahoy, at https://github.com/ankane/ahoy. With just a few lines of code in your app, you can track page views and tie them to user accounts.
You can further customize Ahoy to track custom events, both the client (with JavaScript) and server.
Ahoy does not depend on any third-party services.
I am creating an ios app that needs to download a html page and extract some information from it. To get to the page I also need to login. I have looked everywhere for some code on how to login to a site using the cocoa framework, but every answer I see only seems to answer half the question. Here is the login site: romres.ist-asp.com. I need some code for writing something in the first field (the other two are left blank), then submit the form and then I need to be able to see the next page. I believe apps like Facebook should use som of the same technology, where you log in to a facebook and then you can see the contents of your profile.
Basically what you want to do is called scraping.
Scraping is really easy for sites that don't require authentication, but in your case what you should do is to inspect the POST request being made when logging in the site your interested in (try to understand of the service respond) and the POST request made, when already logged in, to retrieve each page.
The purpose of all of this is to have later the possibility to simulate regular HTTP requests that should came from a browser via code.
If you have any doubt ask in the comments.
Ok so I've scoured the docs and stackoverflow for an answer, but maybe I'm asking the wrong questions or looking in the wrong places. I'm working on an native iOS app and I want to give the user a way to post a comment to a page, but through native UI and not through a UIWebView with the comments plugin embedded. I can make a comment on a comment on the page, but I can't seem to make a comment from an authenticated user on the page itself. Is this even possible?
Apple's URL Loading System provides you with the ability to set credentials for basic HTTP authentication, but it sounds like you're talking about logging in to some kind of forum system. The way those generally work is that you send your credentials to the site, and get an authentication cookie back. You then need to provide that cookie to the system when you interact with the site.
Here's a blog post with an example of how to do that.
What is required for me to integrate automatic activity updates on a user's facebook status?
I frequently see things like "Joe Shmoe" is listening to Cornbread And Butter... by Carolina Chocolate D... on Spotify
I'd like to know what it takes to integrate this.
My suppositions:
I imagine the user has to "agree" to this.
The user has to either sign in with Facebook auth, or be signed in?
There is some kind of server-side script that runs when a page loads, or is this an ajax JS library.
Does facebook offer some kind of api for this or JS library for this?
Also I work with Ruby on Rails, so please let me know if there's a gem that facilitates this.
Any info appreciated.
You should probably start here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/
This is the documentation for the new Open Graph features which include low friction publishing of structured data
There have been quite a few number of start-up pertaining to analyzing Twitter data. There is CrowdBooster, then there is Klout, which use Twitter data to tell the user their True reach.
I have got the following two questions:
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter. Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
I have looked through Twitter API and some of the companies that have licensed Twitter's Firehose, but have not found anything that meet my needs.
Also, to give you a short answer to your 2nd question. Now that we've established that view analysis is impossible. Can you find out which user has clicked on that link, absolutely. And depending on what your talking about, user as far as the user who has clicked on the link or the user that has the link on their Twitter stream. Both are possible,
in the case of A, you would get the referring users IP address. Methods vary depending on language.
But what I think your asking for is scenario B, finding out which user has the link in their Twitter stream. This can be done by querying the link, the API response you will get can include tweet entities which will list all this information out for you and more. Open up a firehose with your link and watch what comes in.
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the
number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell
you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
No, in the case of a view - this would be impossible. The tweet impression can happen in multiple silos. On the website, in a widget, in a mobile app. You can imagine that it's simply not possible to get the impression of a tweet on a view because of this reason and because unlike a click, there is no I viewed this tweet identifier sent when a view has been enacted. I spent a great deal of time researching for a way to get the tweet impression even based on a similar clicked link and this is not even possible. (edit: it's possible see the last paragraph) This brings us to question 2.
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter.
Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
Yes, what these websites are mainly doing is analyzing links that you process through their website. If you can have a unique hash marker on a link then analysis becomes possible. Without a unique hash marker, Twitter will re-interrupt two of the same links in a exactly the same way, even in the case that it shortens your link to it's custom t.co wrapper.
This means the only reliable way to do tweet analysis is by including a unique link marker code on your tweet and analyze the the fact that somebody that has hit your server has clicked on that link.
There is a somewhat hidden Twitter API feature that helps you understand how popular a particular link is. That being the link count API .. http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=
Something really outside of the box you can do if your set on analyzing multiple versions of exactly the same link without using markers and if your also using the Streaming (firehose) would be to analyze the tweet views (using the link count API) on similar links that hit your server. The link that got the +1 boost in view is the one that hit your server. But that's about the extent of creative analysis you can get with your tweets and more specifically the links, as mentioned links are the only thing your really able to analyze when it comes to Twitter.
1) Is there a way to find out who has viewed one's tweet, or the number of people that have viewed a tweet. Crowdbooster claims to tell you how many impression one received per tweet. How do they do it?
Yes, sign up for Twitter Analytics https://analytics.twitter.com (free service provided by Twitter) and you can see how many people view (impressions) for each tweet and totals for specific dates or a date range.
2) Thousands and thousands of links are shared each day on Twitter. Can we find out which user has clicked the link in a tweet?
Yes, you can do this. Using a URL shortening service like Bitly.com you can track how many clicks you had from Twitter (only give out that Bitly link on Twitter to do this). But if you want more indept information you may need to create a tracking software, as I don't know of any available. To do that you would need the tracking software to track the link and find out the refer header and see if it's from Twitter (or better yet, just give out a unique URL for your tweets), then you would need to use the Twitter API to find out the handle (username) of that visitor who clicked your link. Lastly store this information in a database so you can review who clicked what link.