How to find your Facebook friends on Twitter

A while ago I was looking for a way to find any of my Facebook friends who are also on Twitter.  A bit of Googling for "How to find your Facebook friends on Twitter" turned up a number of articles from around mid-2010 which suggested that for a while Twitter's Facebook application allowed you to do just that.  Unfortunately, that's no longer the case.

According to an article at mashable.com, Facebook claimed at the time that they were working with Twitter to resolve the issue, but here we are almost a year later and the friend-finding functionality is still missing from the app.  Whether they'll admit it or not, I think it's fairly likely that Facebook is intentionally making life difficult for Twitter because they'd much rather have you communicating with your friends within the Facebook ecosystem.  Making it easy to connect with your Facebook friends on Twitter is therefore not in Facebook's best interests.

Another suggestion that came up in one of the pages in the results of my Google search was a third-party Facebook app called fb140 which apparently used to find any of your friends who had Twitter handles listed in their Facebook info.  That would have been useful if people bothered to update that info, but lots of my Facebook friends who I know are on Twitter haven't bothered to reflect that in their Facebook info.  Unfortunately, it appears fb140 is dead, so even its limited functionality is no more.

Fortunately, there is still a way to find your Facebook contacts on Twitter, although it's a bit of a roundabout route.  What you need to do is to use an intermediate address book provider to whom you can export your Facebook friends' details, and from whom Twitter will help you find contacts.  Here's the current list of services that Twitter will search for you:

Now the relationship between Google & Facebook is far from great so there doesn't seem to be an easy way to sync directly between Gmail & Facebook, but both Yahoo and Hotmail provide the easy Facebook contact import functionality we want.  AOL and LinkedIn may do too, but since I only need one that works I haven't explored those options.  Given a choice between sharing data with Yahoo or Hotmail, I tend to think Yahoo's the slightly more benign option, so that's what I'll use here.  

Step 1

If you already have a Yahoo account and you want all your Facebook friends in your Yahoo address book, you can obviously use your existing account, but for the sake of clarity let's assume you don't already have an account.  Your first step is to create a Yahoo mail account by visiting mail.yahoo.com and clicking "Create New Account".  Don't worry about the extra email account you're creating - there's no need to use it for anything other than syncing your contacts, so you won't have yet another spam collection point to deal with.  You can bypass some of the sign-up questions by signing in with your Facebook credentials at this stage, but that doesn't automatically import your Facebook contacts into Yahoo, so it's not an automatic win.  It will also add the email address you use for your Facebook account as a secondary address on your new Yahoo account, which you may or may not want.

Step 2

Once you have your new Yahoo account set up, you want click on the Contacts tab, and then the "Import Contacts" button.  Next, click the Facebook icon.  A new window will open prompting you to log in to Facebook if you aren't already logged in, or simply asking if you want to share your contacts with Yahoo if you're already logged in.  Log in if necessary and click OK to allow the sharing.  You'll now have all your Facebook friends listed in your Yahoo contact list along with the email addresses they use for their Facebook accounts.

Step 3

Your next step is to log in to Twitter.  Click on the "Who to Follow" link in Twitter's main navigation, and then the "Find Friends" tabs as shown in the first picture in this post.  Click on the Yahoo button and you'll get a new Yahoo window asking you to sign in (if necessary) and then to authorise sharing of your Yahoo contacts with Twitter. Once you've clicked the "Agree" button, Twitter will take the list of email addresses it got from Yahoo and check to see if they have Twitter accounts.  (Remember Twitter can only find them if they used the same email address to sign up for both Facebook and Twitter, but that's a topic for another day.)  

For most of the people that do have Twitter accounts you'll see their Twitter avatars, bios and the usual Follow button that you'd expect in most Twitter people-search results, but for some of them you'll instead see a message saying "This person is on Twitter, but isn't yet findable by email. Let them know you'd like to follow them."  These are people who've unchecked the "Let others find me by my email address" option in their Twitter account settings.  For them, clicking the Follow button just greys out the button - it's not entirely clear whether clicking it actually lets them know you'd like to follow them or if Twitter expects you to manually email them to ask them.  If you've got an email from Twitter saying I want to follow you, please let me know!

Update after some more investigation:  Anyone who's actively unchecked the "Let others find me by my email address" option in their Twitter account settings will not be found at all.  The people who "aren't yet findable by email" are those that haven't updated their Twitter account settings since the "Let others find me by my email address" option was introduced.  If they visit their settings they'll see the box ticked by default, but until they actually save their settings Twitter's keeping them in a state of limbo where you can see that they have an account, but can't actually follow them directly.  I also confirmed that clicking the Follow button for these people does absolutely nothing.

If you're not sure about your own findability then I'd suggest you visit your Twitter account settings and click Save.  Assuming you're exposing your real name in your Twitter settings, I don't see any point in unchecking the "Let others find me by my email address" option - all you're doing is making it harder for your friends, who already know your email address, to connect with you on Twitter.

Step 4

	Tweet

Now, if you've found this article useful, please help spread the word so your friends can find their friends too.  All it takes is a click on one (or preferably more) of the buttons to the right.  I'd also appreciate your feedback via the comments form below.

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Kirstenbosch pics from 7 & 8 May 2011

Today started out seriously foggy, and ended up seriously smoggy, so these are all pics from last weekend.  A decade and a bit ago when I lived in Durban I used to lament the absence of discernable seasons, but Cape Town has no such problem.  There's a serious chill in the air in the early mornings and evenings, and in this part of the world there are even enough deciduous exotics to give the landscape a hint of orange:

I've very recently decoupled my cameras' auto-focus function from the shutter button and moved it to the dedicated AF-On button under my right thumb.  That puts you in control of when the lens refocuses and avoids a lot of unnecessary focus-hunting which can be hugely beneficial for bird photographers when you're following a little bird flitting through the bushes or hopping through the undergrowth.  It certainly helped with this Cape Robin-Chat:

Ultimately I'm pretty sure I'll stick with the change, but for now it's still not second nature.  I think it's going to take a bunch of practice before muscle memory takes over and I can trust my thumb to do the focus thinking for me.  In the meantime, I'm feeling the pain mostly in those quick spur of the moment shots where my focus has been a bit off, like this could-have-been-stunning Red-winged Starling:

and occasionally I've just totally failed to focus before hitting the shutter, as with this Egyptian Goose dislodging a shower of beautifully backlit water droplets.  Aarrgh!

While I was with the geese I caught this little guy mouthing off to his fellow goslings.  I think I would have preferred the shot without the sibling in front, but there's still something about his attitude that I really enjoyed:

It wasn't only the geese that benefitted from back-lighting.  These Erica glandulosa were glowing like little out of season Christmas lights:

Fortunately the light wasn't all harsh, and when I was facing the right way there was stunning blue sky to be had as a backdrop.  This vaguely Triffidesque beast is a Balloon Milkweed:

One of the great things about Kirstenbosch is that there's pretty much always something in fruit or flower or seed to keep the birds happy.  I didn't note the variety of grass, but this one's seeds are currently a magnet for little seedeaters like these Swee Waxbills (first Mr Swee, then Mrs Swee):

And sometimes background flowers just provide bokeh of an unexpected hue, although I'm not sure that purple realy works as a backdrop for this Karoo Prinia:

Heading up the hill towards the Erica gardens we came across a Cape Spurfowl crossing the lawn.  I find their strongly patterned plumage tends to present a challenge for auto-focus (Guineafowl are even worse) but I seem to have nailed it this time.  I like the attitude in the slightly raised crest and the spur prominently on display.  That actually helps me accept their renaming from Francolins to Spurfowl - there's nothing subtle about that weapon.

One of the birds that's quite easy to get close to at Kirstenbosch is the African Dusky Flycatcher.  For a couple of seconds at a time, between flights to earn their family name, they're happy to sit relatively close to you, but you have to act fast if you want to get the shot.  By the time I'd repositioned myself by the couple of centimetres it would have taken to get a more consistently bright or dim background this youngster (note the still prominently yellow gape) had flitted off.  If I'd been alone I might have waited for him to return, but that's generally not an option when I'm accompanied by my own hatchlings.

This adult landed right next to me.  So close, in fact, that I think I had to step back to get to the Bigma's minimum focussing distance.  This is a very nearly full frame shot:

and if you look at this original size crop from an adjacent exposure you can see the lawn, sky, me, and even my shadow reflected in the bird's eye.  This bird's only about 13cm long, and I'd guess that its eye diameter is around 4 or 5mm, so even on a tiny smartphone screen this is likely to be larger than life:

There were also quite a few Forest Canaries about, but none of them well positioned.  The first of these two was high above me against a bright sky, while the second stayed close for quite a while, but the only time it emerged into the open was for a few seconds atop this super-bright white rock.

And, finally, here's a sub-adult male Orange-breasted Sunbird, with just tiny flecks of the iridescence that'll make him such a pain to photograph when he's older:

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Old Mutual Entrepreneurs' Guide

At today's Net Prophet conference, Old Mutual launched their Entrepreneurs' Guide as part of their "Do Great Things" campaign. I was honoured to be one of the entrepreneurs who contributed content to the guide, so it was great to see the final product finally launched to the public about six months after I was interviewed.  The project was the brainchild of Jack Kruger, head of Old Mutual Digital and the notable omission from the credits list on the site, and took a lot of work from a big team to put together.  You'll find my contribution at DoGreatThings.co.za/duncanforrest

Minor gripe: I'm generally much more comfortable behind the lens than in front of it, so it's not often I like pictures of myself.  The stills for this project were taken by the brilliant Clare Louise Thomas, who managed to pull off a miracle by creating a number of pictures I really like!  Thanks, Clare.  My small gripe with the web design is that the person in the screen grab above isn't actually me - it's my mirror image.  I undertand why designers feel the need to flip images, but it's always bugged me when it's noticeable, and now that I've been flipped it's even more so! :)

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Photographing Sunbirds at Kirstenbosch

I'm fortunate to live very close to Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, and over the past few weeks I've taken the kids and my camera for quite a few walks through parts of the garden. Now kids' noise and patience levels aren't usually recommended ingredients for successful bird photography, but despite that I've managed a few pleasing shots recently.  I'll hopefully get around to posting more of them in due course but for today I'm only including sunbirds in this post, because they're probably the most frustrating of the birds I've photographed recently.  

So, let us examine sunbirds' crimes against photography:

• For starters, they're pretty hyperactive little blighters and spend far too much time flitting from bush to bush in search of the next snack.
• Most species are quite protective of their territory, so birds of both genders are easily distracted by the need to chase off competing birds. 
• When they do sit on the same perch for more than a few seconds at a time, they tend to hide their faces in flowers a lot, and generally devote much too little time to posing co-operatively against distant, neutrally coloured backgrounds.
• Then there's that gaudy iridescent plumage of theirs that makes them so attractive to look at, but a nightmare to expose correctly: there's a fine line between shiny and blown highlights.  
• Next, there's the little matter of their not so little bills.  Side on, they have the potential to lend a graceful and attractive curve to a picture, but a sunbird that's facing you is likely to look silly even if you do miraculously manage to keep both head and bill in focus.

OK, so their crimes are numerous and heinous, right?  Maybe we should just ignore them and never photograph them!  Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to do that, so I keep going back for more frustration.  Here are some pics from yesterday and two weeks ago, none of which is quite good enough for me, so I guess I'm condemned to continuing the quest for better sunbird photos.

First up, the Southern Double-Collared Sunbird.  I was going to post just one of these, but I couldn't decide on my favourite.  I'd appreciate your input on which you prefer, and why.  Hint:  See down below where it says "0 comments"? Click that and make the number bigger!

SD-CS #1

SD-CS #2

SD-CS #3

And now for the even more frustrating Orange-breasted Sunbird, probably the gaudiest and most beautiful of our sunbirds.  They seem to prefer the Erica gardens which are quite far up the hill at Kirstenbosch, so the kids tend to be bored and wanting to go home by the time we find our first Orange-breasted Sunbirds and that means I haven't had much quality time with them...

O-BS #1

O-BS #2

O-BS #3

PS: I just discovered that Kirstenbosch tweets, so if you're on Twitter and in the area you may want to follow @KirstenboschNBG

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Seascape shoot at Kogelbaai with David & Shem

It all started with a tweet from Shem Compion on Easter Sunday saying he was planning a seascape shoot the next day.  I shoot landscapes from time to time, but I've never tackled seascapes before, so it was a welcome opportunity to try my hand at something new and to meet Shem before David Burstein and I head off to the Masai Mara with him in September.  After a morning of on and off rain in Cape Town that had me skeptical about our chances of good weather we headed off to meet Shem at the Dappat se Gat parking area in Kogelbaai at around 4pm.

Of course seascapes call for wide angle lenses, but I rarely head out on a photo trip without my Bigma and that proved useful while we waited at the parking spot. First we were treated to a fly-by by a Jackal Buzzard which yielded a few usable shots including the image that I'm currently using as the header for the blog:

and I quite liked this one too:

Then right next to the car I captured this Cape Robin-Chat:

With the distraction of the birds over, we headed down to the beach.  It soon became apparent that without the right kit I was going to battle to slow down my shutter speed sufficiently to capture much of the movement in the water that I was going for.  David & Shem both have beautiful Lee filters (both graduated and constant neutral density), but all I had available in the way of light limiting filters was my circular polariser.  With that fitted, the aperture stopped right down to f/22 and the ISO all the way down at 50 the slowest shutter speed I could manage we first arrived was 1/4s, but with swell running quite hard that was enough to bring out the movement in the breakers:

and in areas of the shore with significant movement, like this rock, though only on bigger, faster moving waves:

which occasionally had us (David, in this case) on the hop:

Fortunately the light soon started co-operating, thanks largely to the rainstorm that was approaching from the West.  As the sinking sun filtered through that we received beautiful yellow-golden light:

which lit up the clouds boiling over the top of the Kogelberg.  This is the first image I posted the next day...

... but the more I look at it, the more uncomfortable I am with that horrible blown out section of sky - a reminder once again that once your highlights are completely blown there's no rescuing them despite the extra latitude that RAW images give you.  Next time I set out to shoot seascapes, I definitely want a graduated filter in my bag.  Here are a few more shots from the afternoon:

and, finally, the one that I think is my favourite:

Be sure to check out David's and Shem's photos from the same shoot too, but don't forget to come back and leave me some feedback!

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