March 2008 – Sol Young

‘Flow’ – day 7 – My Twitter thousands

Posted on March 30, 2008March 30, 2008 by Sol Young with 3 Comments

Day 7 – The flow rises, but as it gets faster I just want more… I wonder what Scoble‘s flow is like…

Here are my previous flow entries so you’re up to speed:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
~~Day 6~~ (no post)

I’m visiting my in-laws this weekend so haven’t been spending much time in the flow this weekend. However, even with short stints I’m finding a recurrent issue. Each day I think I’m going to hit a maximum number of people I can pay attention to. Each day I’m proven wrong. There’s an adaptation that takes place.

I’m following almost 3,400 and it’s working very well. I could imagine 5,000 being more than comfortable. Even on a standard IM client, the data flow is manageable. Most IM clients don’t smooth scroll, so it’s annoying to have each incoming tweet snap prior tweets upwards.

I’ve been thinking of the outline for a high-traffic Twitter client spec:

XMPP for tweet flow.
Web Services harnessed for contact management.
RSS/Atom integration for pulling articles from Twitterer.
Caching of existing Twitter contacts to embed information in to the XMPP traffic.
Search and real-time filtering.
Ability to only show tweets with links.
Additional filters based on: Age of Twitter of account, Location, number of tweets, ratio of following/friends, has non-default avatar, has non-default twitter design… with real-time color-coding of tweets.
Ability to favorite a tweet that came through XMPP.
Auto-pull of a Twitterer’s most recent blog entries (requires a scan for RSS feeds on the Twitterer’s home page, then pulling/parsing those items).
Auto-addition of Twitterer’s RSS in to Google Reader or other items.

With the above, one would have a complete Twitter news-room. One could immediately see what’s flowing and have access to a Twitterer’s additional information. This may be possible with a Flash or Java application, though I’d prefer a highly portable objective-C or C++ app. Maybe even ported to mobile clients (maybe, maybe).

Posted in Education, Flow, iofy, Prediction, Social Networking, Software Development, Twitter, Web Services, XMPP

Salaries way up in Asian IT, articles pointing to brain drain

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Sol Young

Keyboard

Something that has piqued my interest in the last year are trends for technology professionals overseas, especially Asia. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I believe it’s important to have an understanding of where the worlds employment markets are…

ZDNet Asia is more frequently featuring stories of significant salary hikes and movement. Local papers and blogs describe brain drain between Asian countries.

This is all interesting because in the dot com bubble days of the late 90’s until about 2003, articles pointed to a brain drain of talent from Asia to the US. Now we’re seeing talent shortages there as countries attempt to equalize the ex/im of intelligent personel. It would make sense that if salaries rise beyond what American firms are willing to pay, we’ll see a reverse brain drain.

Posted in Asia, Hiring, Prediction

Image of CNN covering politics at the Philadelphia Art Museum

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Sol Young with 2 Comments

Took this quick snap of CNN’s bus in front of the Philadelphia Art Musuem. With Obama and Clinton bringing attention to our state we’re seeing more and more news organizations around.

That’s all boring stuff… What is funny is there is a huge, stinking, pile of manure right at the rear end of the bus. It almost looks like the bus dumped it there itself. Click the image to be taken to Flickr and see the larger version.

Posted in Flickr, Photography, Politics