I wrote an article a little while back for Simple-Talk.com about how you can get information out of Twitter using James O’Neill’s PowerShell Twitter functions and the Twitter PowerPack for PowerGUI - they’ve published it now so you can check it out on their site.
Most Windows administrators know that the maximum length for the Netbios computer name of a machine is 15 characters since they may well have hit that limit at some point in time. Slightly less familiar might be the samAccountName attribute of an Active Directory account which must be less than 20 characters - I had experience troubleshooting this one though as recently as last year.
Last week I needed to create hundreds of distribution lists in Active Directory (using PowerShell of course ;-) ), some with particularly long names and during the first run through in my test environment about 20% of them failed to create with an error along the lines that one of the properties I was trying to set was causing a violation.
Having had some fun previously putting together some PowerPacks for PowerGUI, I had an idea that it would be quite a good tool to use with Twitter. One thing I found annoying with the web interface for Twitter was that it was difficult to see a full list for who you were following and who was following you - you could only see 20 people per page. After Steve Murawski put together his list of Powershell Twitterers at the Mind of Root website I started playing around with some of the ways you could use Powershell to access Twitter data.
So I was pretty sceptical for a long while about things like Twitter and Facebook, but I finally gave in mostly thanks to my buddy Alan Renouf and to be honest its been brilliant. Its such a useful way to quickly find information and keep up to date with a particular topic, obviously in my case Powershell.
Whilst at Teched it was a great tool to keep up with things which were going on in sessions or what people where up to.