Soon after we released HelpdeskOnTwitter, we got reports that people in China can’t  access it. At first we thought it is just a DNS delay issue. But after several days the problem still exists. And finally we are convinced we are blocked by the Great Firewall in China. But why? Our website is just launched that almost nobody know us. It turns out there are several types of censoring: Some big name sites are filtered by ip. And for some others, url filtering is used. Twitter.com is blocked in China, and unfortunately our website ‘HelpdeskOnTwitter.com’ has ‘Twitter.com’ as suffix, so the poor url filter of GFW blocks us as the result. And whenever you enter ‘HelpdeskOnTwitter.com’ in your browser in China, it is resolved to a fake IP so that you can not see anything. How to workaround it? Edit your /etc/hosts file and add the entries which are:

67.23.7.110 helpdeskontwitter.com
67.23.7.110 blog.helpdeskontwitter.com

WebsitePulse has a online great tool to test if your website is blocked in China:

We just released a very important feature: brand monitoring (or also called ‘buzz tracking’). You can enter a your company’s name as keyword for search, then see what people are saying about your company on Twitter under ‘Buzz Tracking’ tab.

I am a GMail user, and also use Google Apps to manage company’s email accounts. To me, the best feature of GMail is it groups individual emails into conversations. Since we like the thread view very much, when we started to build HelpdeskOnTwitter, this is one of the first things we implemented.

Each tweet has a ‘in_reply_to_status_id’ field, it makes it possible for us to track the relationship of tweets. And the result looks very good, and it is much easier to understand the context of a tweet. Here is an example: