MediumTweets

Crowd feedback (by me)

A few years ago I wrote about the importance of searching for feedback on your creative work, based on ego searches at popular platforms. When you search for your own name and mentions across services, you’re not only getting the ego stroke of seeing who likes what you’ve created, but you can often find valuable feedback where people are discussing the work. Sometimes, you can get the most honest, valuable (possibly harsh) feedback from people that never thought you’d find it through these searches.

Lately I’ve been writing more on Medium and I’ve enjoyed getting feedback in comments and mentions at Twitter. I’m also a fan of the “Stats” page at Medium, which shows you how many people are reading/recommending your posts as well as how readers arrived at your post. However, the stats page doesn’t really tell you anything about Twitter mentions aside from how many people followed a link to your post from Twitter.

Cool URLs

Soon after Flickr launched a number of years ago, lead engineer Cal Henderson gave a talk that mentioned they paid close attention to the design of URLs in their app. Most every URL on Flickr is human readable, but durable, and gives you some information when you stumble upon a random link, and also allows you to “hack” the URL by easily editing variables into and out of it.

I noticed lately that many newer apps like Pinterest, Instagram, and Medium instead obscure some part of their URL with a bit of hexadecimal code. A typical Medium URL looks like this:

https://medium.com/p/fb0e552da7d0

You might see any number of collections mentioned where the “p” is seen above, but that odd code chunk at the end is a unique identifier that points to this very essay and nothing else in the system. By my rough calculations, the 12-character code is capable of describing one quintillion (1e18) unique objects.

In comes Twitter

In the past, I’ve simply searched Twitter for a full Medium URL to find mentions of my work there, but some of my essays end up in half a dozen different collections, which required separate searches at Twitter. Eventually I wised up and realized if I searched for just the hexcode string, I could find every single tweet linking to my Medium posts.

Once I figured that out, it was time to automate things.

Enter Bookmarklets

With a predictable URL pattern from Medium along with an easy search URL at Twitter, it’s pretty simple to make a browser-based tool called a bookmarklet. You install it in your toolbar then fire it from any Medium post to find all the Twitter mentions of it.

Get the MediumTweets Bookmarklet here

Here is a quick animated GIF of it in action, where I click the bookmarklet in my browser while viewing one of my own Medium essays to see Twitter results for mentions of it.

One last request to Medium employees

The Stats page on Medium has a nice page for referrers to your posts, and it does break out Twitter as a single referrer. Most other referring sites are linked to view pages mentioning your Medium post, but the Twitter stat title doesn’t link anywhere. I think it’d be a nice subtle way to add additional information to the Stats page by linking to Twitter search results, with simple URL scheme of: twitter.com/search?q=(essay’s hexcode).

In the meantime, anyone and everyone can use the MediumTweets Bookmarklet to find out what everyone on Twitter is saying about your Medium posts.