A note about last night's tweet-mashap (Drupal +Twitter + Activity Stream)

First off, I'd like to make things perfectly clear, I use both my blog and twitter as a place to test technologies. There's always a possibility that something I do will cause a minor explosion. It happens rarely, but every now and then it's going to and I apologize in advance for this. This is a bit of a playground for me.

As is painfully obvious to my twitter-peeps last night there was a bit of a mishap involving twitter and my blog. In a period of a minute I basically retweeted my last hundred tweets or so. I'm posting what happened here so folks having similar issues can see what went on and how I'm handing it in the future and possibly some changes I'm making to the drupal modules in question.

So... on to my story. A few days ago I posted an entry about making my blog the center of my web presence basically adding friendfeed style features into my blog and using seanreiser.com as hub to access my online content.. While doing some research I found a drupal module named activity stream which grabs content from a number of services, creates drupal nodes for them and creates a stream for your site. It also accepts RSS and has a plugin system that allows you to create interfaces for services that it currently doesn't support. So, last night, being the curious person I am, I decide to install the module on seanreiser.com's drupal install and check it out.

A couple of minutes after the update I realize that something has gone terribly wrong I start getting twitter DMs and @s like mad (and by upset folks). It appears that I'm tweeting my entire activity stream for the past few days including tweets that I had already sent out. I shut stuff off.

A while back I had installed the twitter module onto my blog. It sends a tweet whenever I add a new story to seanreiser.com. It's a nice little module that I don't give much thought to. I always assumed that it sends a tweet when a front page node of type story was created, this is not the case, anytime a node is created, regardless of whether it's a front pager or not; a tweet is sent. As it just works I've never needed to look at the code to see what it was doing, my bad. So as activity stream is creating all these nodes for my past tweets, photos, bookmarks, etc they are being tweeted.

In addition, it seems that activity stream doesn't work fully, yet. For some reason most of my activity was dated 12/31/1969 (I assume that's a plug date for content it can't figure out a date for). So, here is my todo for these modules to get things working

1. Update the twitter module so you can select which node types you want tweeted (I might want to tweet the handful of bookmarks I set through the day tweeted as well).
2. Fix the date issue on the activity stream module. If a date isn't accessible, use the current date instead of the past date. (date issue fixed here
3. Consider rolling twitter module functionality into activity stream. This might be a good idea. As you're coding the api here, it should be possible to code and outbound as well. This would allow auto notification to multiple services (twitter, pounce, etc).
4. If I do 3, look at baking in XLM-RPC type functionality allowing me syndicate my info to LJ, etc. I am unhappy with the way the LJ crossposting module currently works, and would lok to change it out.

As I get these thing done I'll post them over at the lab and submit patches to the module owners.