mixamail 3

I’ve updated Mixamail to access Google search results via e-mail. For those new here, Mixamail is an e-mail client for Twitter. It lets you read and update Twitter just using your e-mail (you’ll have to register once via Twitter, though). Now, you can send an e-mail to [email protected] with a subject of “Google” and a body containing your query. You’ll get a reply within a few seconds (~20 seconds on my BlackBerry) with the top 8 search results along with the snippets. ...

When writing Mixamail, I wanted tweets automatically shortened to 140 characters – but in the most readable manner. Some steps are obvious. Removing redundant spaces, for example. And URL shortening. I use bit.ly because it has an API. I’ll switch to Goo.gl, once theirs is out. I tried a few more strategies: Replace words with short forms. “u” for “you”, “&” for and, etc. Remove articles – a, an, the Remove optional punctuation – comma, semicolon, colon and quotes, in particular Replace “one” with “1”, “to” or “too” with 2, etc. “Before” becomes “Be4”, for example Remove spaces after punctuations. So “a, b” becomes “a,b” – the space after the comma is removed Remove vowels in the middle. nglsh s lgbl wtht vwls. How did they pan out? I tested out these on the English sentences on the Tanaka Corpus, which has about 150,000 sentences. (No, they’re not typical tweets, but hey…). By just doing these, independently, here is the percentage reduction in the size of text: ...

Since I don’t have Internet access on my BlackBerry (because I’m in prison), I’ve had a pretty low incentive to use Twitter. Twitter’s really handy when you’re on the move, and over the last year, there were dozens of occasions where I really wanted to tweet something, but didn’t have anything except my BlackBerry on hand. Since T-Mobile doesn’t support Twitter via SMS, e-mail is my only option, and I haven’t been able to find a decent service that does what I want it to do. ...