6

Hi everyone:

I ran into @Ubuntu_Ask and thought, wow, what a great idea. I got in contact with the author with the hope of making a more "official" twitter feed so people can just follow the account if they want to see the new questions and he's keen on the idea!

However the really nice name that we want is @askubuntu. Has someone on this site registered this? I started following it in the hopes that I could DM the person asking if they'd be willing to let us have the account.

  • fluteflute has @Ask_Ubuntu saved but the underscore is a bummer.
  • Marco Ceppi has tried contacting the person with no response.

Ideas on how we can get this name? I think Twitter has a trademark policy but I am unsure if Canonical and/or Stack Overflow have trademarked "ask ubuntu".

Namespace issues aside, we should discuss what we want in a twitter feed. I was thinking that we don't want every new question on there, perhaps a threshold (like 3) to make sure that the less-than-ideal questions don't flood the feed. Thoughts?

3 Answers 3

5

The SE folks have just implemented network wide twitter accounts.

Here's ours: https://twitter.com/AskUbuntu

1
3

Here's what I've come across so far.

  • When I set @Ubuntu_Ask up, I set it up as follows: @Ubuntu_Ask is set to poll the RSS feed at https://askubuntu.com/feeds every 15 minutes, and post the title, link and up to 5 tags of the question as a hashtag on twitter.Example tweet
  • I've found a way to filter the questions by votes, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get an RSS feed of that search.
2

Rehashing the post from Should we target Social Media? and the frantic two days I spent searching feeds, creating a system to help extrapolate Ubuntu questions and pair with answers might still be useful - as well as posting statistics like: Popular questions as they arise, etc.

It really shouldn't be too much a HARD SELL for the site, but rather an interaction with the other Ubuntu users - and prospective Ubuntu users - on twitter.

6
  • @Marco: The thing with that though, is the question/problem that has plagued small projects, is resources, particularly manpower and time. Who would handle the account? I would do that, but I know that I can't handle it alone. We've got to figure out how to get people to help, if we did that.
    – jrg
    Dec 10, 2010 at 14:26
  • I'm more than happy to help - and moderators + trusted community members could be given access. Dec 10, 2010 at 16:00
  • I think in the meantime an automated thing just putting the questions there is good enough. Last thing we need is another unfinished project on the internet. :) Dec 10, 2010 at 16:01
  • @JorgeCastro What does that achieve though? Dec 10, 2010 at 18:22
  • It gives people an option of following Ask Ubuntu questions directly in their twitter client AND he's got it so it's posting to related hashtags so a question with #php will hit all the people following that tag. Dec 10, 2010 at 18:26
  • @Marco Alright cool. @Jorge I agree. another unfinished project won't help anyone. :)
    – jrg
    Dec 10, 2010 at 18:47

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .