Book publishing is getting expensive. Profits are way down. Readership is declining for printed books.

Ebooks, yes. POD books, yes. But books published by a profit-seeking publisher are limited to low-risk authors. High-return authors are best.

If you have something to say, blog it. After a few years of blogging, write your first book. You will have an audience.

If your blog does not attract an audience, neither will your book. Publishers know this.

Bottom line: Start a blog and prove you can attract an audience… If you’ve got traffic, you are infinitely more likely to get your book published.

Gary’s full post is, So, You Want to Write Your First Book. Here Is How to Do It.

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It was April 6th, 2008 that I posted How to post images to Twitter and Flickr at the same time from an iPhone. It has been one of the more popular posts on this blog.

Flickr now makes it possible to post to Twitter directly via an emailed photo AND via Blog This. Their integration removes the need for TwitPic, and arguably SnapTweet too (though SnapTweet is faster than using Blog This and can be used for multiple images at once).

Images are posted to Twitter with Flickr’s new flic.kr URL shortener.

Here’s how to get set up:

1. Visit Flickr’s beta testing group’s page (actually, this step isn’t necessary, but if you run in to problems, their page is the best resource).
2. Associate your Twitter account with your Flickr account here. It leads you through the process and uses OAuth, a safer mechanism than providing your password.
3. You will be provided with a second special email address to send images to. If your main Flickr image email address is example42test@photos.flickr.com, your Flickr+Twitter email address will be example42test2twitter@photos.flickr.com.
4. Send away!

Photos sent to your primary Flickr image address will be processed as normal (not submitted to Twitter). Photos sent to your new 2twitter version will be processed and then immediately posted to Twitter. Your tweet will consist of [subject_line] [url], with the [url] being Flickr’s shortened flic.kr url.

Example.

After signing up for the Twitter integration you also get a new Blog This addition when viewing a single image. Clicking Blog This brings up the option to post an existing image directly to Twitter. You can post your own, as well as other Flickr users, images via this feature. Very powerful.

Twitterlike post…

Grabbing a late lunch and testing a blog post via email. Early this morning I finally set up a cron to check for posts via email.

This post traveled from a Blackberry Bold to Gmail, then the cron ran and the email was pulled by Postie and imported as a post.

Along the way, I ran in to the following problems: – Postie Gmail support – Hosting provider had outgoing ports 993 and 995 blocked – Cronless Postie vs standard (now running cron rev)

Over the weekend I created two blogs for my parents, Heartsong Studios and Earthsea Pottery. I’ve used my own hosted server for sites in the past (and do with solyoung.com). I used WordPress as the host this time… Their distributed servers and pricepoint (free.99 + $10 for DNS name server hosting) is better and cheaper than a personally hosted solution.

Each site, soup-to-nuts took less than six hours and were fun weekend projects. The blogs themselves took less than an hour, really, with image editing for Earthsea and the audio cleanup for Heartsong taking the real time.

I need the ability to modify the source of my solyoung.com blog, but if you’re looking for a clean and hosted solution that lets you personalize, WordPress was a good experience.

“On March 17, Apple presented the blueprint for iPhone OS 3.0, the next version of the world’s most advanced mobile platform. In addition to previewing its innovative features, Apple gave members of the iPhone Developer Program immediate access to the iPhone OS 3.0 software beta and an updated Software Development Kit (SDK) with over 1,000 completely new APIs.”

The announcement page is here (C&P’d, too): http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/

Twitter Tools, a WordPress plugin by Alex King, blew up my blog last night. For those of you following my RSS or Twitter updates, this meant you got 45 copies of a weekly Twitter update (and you would have gotten 8 more that were in the queue to be published if I hadn’t caught it and shut it off – thanks @evantravers for the RSS heads up).

I like Twitter Tools very much. It’s the first WordPress Twitter integration I used, and it’s still my preferred way to go. It automatically sends a tweet when I write a new blog entry. A good, clean, way to let people know you wrote something you’d like them to check out. I used to use it for a list of my more recent tweets, but I’ve replaced that with a FriendFeed plugin.

In one of Twitter Tools more recent versions the feature of weekly digest posts of one’s tweets was added. I wasn’t hot on the idea of a daily digest since it would be too often and would ultimately just be a daily barf of one’s tweets and wouldn’t involve actual thought. The weekly was worth checking out so I played around with the settings (above pic).

If the setting for “Create a weekly digest…” is Yes, you are given a choice of day and time for your post. During my trial of the settings, I chose 11:59pm on Sunday night.

This was last week. I’d forgotten about it. This morning however, it blew up with the 45 posts. Pretty ugly bug!

Today I hit 100 miles of running with Nike+. It shows how poorly I’ve been keeping up with running (Galina is in to 200+ now). It’s a nice feature they offer… Rewards keep participants interested. I’d still like to see more non-flash integration with blogs.

The stats for my first hundred with Nike+:

• 26 runs
• 3.81 miles per run
• Average pace of 7’24″

I’m still tracking with both Nike+ (today’s) and Nokia SportsTracker (today’s). The SportsTracker, with GPS, is slightly more interesting because it maps your progress while on the run and offers live mapping. I’d still like to have SportsTracker integrated in a blog – it’s a pain to share otherwise.

Something else of interest during today’s run… Everyone on the trail was in a great mood! I offered, “Good Morning!” to eight people and received eight positive responses. In Philadelphia this is a first. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s a fluke. But either way, it’s awesome to return from vacation with a strong positive vibe.

Good Morning!

“What have I done!?”

I’ve gone back to the traditional use of Twitter. The method more than 95% of the userbase uses it for. I now use it to stay in touch with the people I’ve met and know personally, rather than using Twitter as a medium for info aggregation. It’s not possible to use Twitter how I did in the past.

If you know my series on flow (it kicked off here), you know what I was doing and how cool it was. I got the idea partially from Robert Scoble’s entry, The Secret to Twitter. His use was brilliant and it worked amazingly well!

Back in March of ’08 I began following any interesting person I thought to be intelligent and putting out informative tweets. Primarily I found people in the software development, new media, aviation, library science, and management arenas. I ended up following 6,218 people at the high (last week). Everyone’s updates were viewed in IM and I would see an amazing flow of information.

Usually hundreds of tweets per minute, forcing me to read very quickly and get a quick read on the blogging, technology, and media areas in a short period of time. It allowed me to find articles and posts that would have filtered in slowly on RSS (arguably, if I had more than my 632 RSS feeds I’d find more information here, too).

It was great. Flip on iChat over breakfast and watch the flow while eating granola and yogurt. An ideal start to the day.

But in the last week I’ve culled over 4,000. The removed are people who don’t follow me and who I never met in real life. The chance of our interaction is very small, and if we meet I’ll follow.

I’m looking forward to having more intimate interaction with friends and followers. Focus will shift more towards FriendFeed and Google Reader (RSS).

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For WordPress bloggers with iPhones, the iPhone WordPress application is close to the best gift since receiving a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1983. The application is solid, allows tags and categories, posts pictures direct from the phone, etc. Awesome!

But what if you want to post pics from your Flickr stream? What if you’re shooting with another camera and want to post high quality photos not taken with the iPhone crackerjack cam? Here’s the instructions, including detailed pictures, on how I get photos from Flickr in to an iPhone WordPress blog post:

note: you can ignore 1/2 of the steps if you already know how to use WordPress and Exposure on your iPhone.

1. Get the WordPress app (Utilities section of the App Store).

2. Get the Exposure app (Social Networking section of the App Store).

3. Open Exposure and locate the desired picture or pictures in your photostream, as seen below.

4. Click the small right-pointing arrow, you will now see the image below.

5. Click the small arrow in the top right corner to see your Share Photo options.

6. Open in Safari, and Safari will open, as seen below.

7. To save the image, press and hold your fingertip on the image. Selecting Save Image will save the image to your Camera Roll on the iPhone. You now have your image.

8. Open WordPress and create a new blog post.

9. Select the Photos tab and click the “+” button at the bottom right.

10. Choose to Add Photo from Library.

11. Click the Save button in the top right – When you post, your photo will be appended at the end of your post (below image was pulled from Exposure/Flickr/Camera Roll exactly as described above).

Had an awesome day – time to share!

• 12seconds.tv/channels/solyoung
• First 12second introduction
• TechCrunch link
• WCU post

It’s a great new world when we can blog and participate, without limitation, from a pocketable handset.

The pic is a snap of my N82 here at a diner over lunch.

I picked up the Nokia N82 yesterday from Import GSM, a great hybrid brick-and-mortage / online store. Think Dynamism for phones. It was my first visit, right at closing, and despite trying to get stuff out the door for the evening shipment the guys helped out with descriptions and subtle nuances between the N95 and N82 (special thanks to Eric – good guy).

Anyway, so why the heck would someone get a Nokia N82 when the iPhone 3G is getting released tomorrow? There are five reasons, one for each megapixel, and a lot of backup arguments. The iPhone 3G doesn’t hold a candle to the image sensor quality, flash, or lens quality.

This wasn’t meant to be an N82 vs. iPhone 3G post. They’re both the best mobile equipment one can get (imo).

The N82 is going to be my net enabled camera and broadcast machine. No more notebook + Canon SD-1000 combo!

The iPhone 3G is for everything else. I had the iPhone (1.0 / original / whatever). iPhones are the best for usability and communication. I gave it to my wife and she’s gone from check-email-and-browse-at-home to check-email-send-texts-and-monitor-weather-while-away. The wife-o-meter was pegged.

The Nokia’s OS, after 30 hours of tweaking, is finally usable for me. Very steep appreciation curve. I would only recommend such a phone to a power user needing the best tool for quality images… I can’t wait to start posting and qik’ing them.

• sol on Qik
• solyoung on Viddler
• sol on Twitter

This video was a fun experiment in video blogging.

Tools used:
Canon SD-1000, 640×480 @ 30fps
iMovie
Viddler for commenting (uploading to other services for comparison)

Chris Bilson (@cbilson) had a good description regarding my post about Twitter’s scaling/architecture challenge.

“Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte tweet at the same time = crossing the streams”

I dunno if Proton Packs have exponential load challenges, but the end result for a server can feel similar. Is my post I pointed out that Twitter has to determine delivery options and potentially deliver between 100 million and 1 billion updates per day.

But that’s in a day. 1 billion messages in a day are a piece of cake when spread over 24 hours. What if 1 billion messages have to be delivered in an hour? Or all at once?

Take my list of the top-10 Twitter accounts and imagine them all at TED, WWDC, Google I/O, or your local unconference. These ten users, if each sends an update around the same time create 321,928 messages that need delivery (total number of followers for top-10 accounts). This is an awesome amount of message delivery. If those ten users live-blog or get conversational and send ten updates in an hour… 3,219,280 (again, that’s from only 10 users).

I don’t illustrate this to state it’s these power user’s fault. Absolutely the opposite. They’re generating amazing amounts of traffic, which is a wonderful thing, and the algorithms are the problem.

It’s possible to optimize algorithms and modify systems for maximum performance. I bring up Twitter’s challenges because I’m wondering if this is a challenge beyond present day computing.

To open some minds, here’s an impossibility often overlooked: Huge numbers in a deck of cards (just to show impossibilities can stem from small initial numbers).

Thanks to new Twitter user @waileacapital for posting about a British woman, Roz Savage attempting to row across the Pacific (she rowed across the Atlantic already). If she succeeds she will be the first woman to complete the journey.

Roz blogs on a daily basis during a trip at http://rozsavage.com/blog. Her main site is at http://rozsavage.com. The video above is of her Atlantic trip.

The latest is that she is having trouble with her desalinization system and having trouble getting fresh water.

Twitter has been having all kinds of scaling challenges. There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of posts on the subject. Dave Winer pushed an idea for a decentralized Twitter (and has since admitted the power of Twitter is in its centrality). There is a single, simple, reason for Twitter’s challenges – Math is against them.

The facility of communication on the Twitter service is absolutely outstanding. I’ve written extensively about using it to receive an amazing amount of quality information in my series on flow.

I originally questioned the scaling ability of the service prior to SXSW, but when the service held up I went back to the drawing board to make sure my numbers were correct.

Before continuing, let’s establish the basics about the service so the math will make sense…

• Each Twitter account can follow any other Twitter account (bear with me and forget those accounts with private updates).
• Messages travel in one direction, from the updater to the follower.
• Each account has updates from other accounts it follows placed in its timeline.
• A Twitter account can selectively receive pushed updates immediately via instant messenger and SMS in addition to having an update added to its timeline.
• An update added to an account’s timeline may or may not be push based (lets assume it’s demand driven, or pull based).
• An update sent to an account from an account denoted as SMS or IM announcement is push based (there is no other way to send an update – it must be actively pushed from the server).
• The mere possibility of an update needing to be pushed requires the system to check with each follower’s settings, thus requiring analysis of each follower for each update.

A warm-up equation

If there are one hundred (100) users and each user follows ten (10) fellow users, and each user sends ten (10) updates per day, assuming all updates are push-based, how many updates are sent?

The answer is 10,000 – each sent update (100 users x 10 updates) is forked out to 10 followers who have requested push updates. This is a very large number of updates to send out via SMS or IM compared to the base of users.

A very important fact: It doesn’t matter if a user follows with the intention of receiving an SMS or IM update. The possibility of an updating needing to be pushed requires Twitter to examine every follower when an update is received.

From 1999 to 2004 I worked as a software engineer at Mplayer (who then changed names to HearMe, who then sold their video technology to LIvVE, who then was bought by GameSpy).

As with any chat room, the scaling is similar to Twitter. We had to restrict rooms to 500 users (and had insanely reduced reliability as we approached 500). As shown with the warm-up, each message is forked out to every user. We capped at 500 in a chat room because each user in a room contributes some amount of messages, and therefore as users join a room the traffic grows exponentially.

Official and unofficial numbers

According to Twitter’s blog post with stats, 50% of the Twitter population has 10 followers. 10% of users have 80 or more followers. According to TechCrunch’s research there were 200,000 active users posting 3,000,000 updates per day (as of the end of April 2008). The average Twitter user posts 15 updates per day (3,000,000 divided by 200,000 = 15).

We’ll use Twitter’s percentages in their blog post and combine them with TechCrunch’s numbers. From this, we know there are 100,000 daily users with 10 followers and there are 20,000 people with 80 or more followers. To keep things simple, we’ll leave the other 80,000 daily users out of the equation for now.

• 100,000 users x 15 updates per day x 10 followers = 15,000,000
• 20,000 users x 15 updates per day x 80 followers = 24,000,000

For laughs, let’s put in the top 10 Twitter accounts with the most followers (beware, there were fights over this).

1. Kevin Rose x 15 updates per day x 46,646 followers = 699,690
2. Leo Laporte x 15 updates per day x 44,948 followers = 674,220
3. Barack Obama x 15 updates per day x 42,201 followers = 633,015
4. Alex Albrecht x 15 updates per day x 30,348 followers = 455,220
5. Jason Calacanis x 15 updates per day x 28,773 followers = 431,595
6. Robert Scoble x 15 updates per day x 28,037 followers = 420,555
7. Mars Phoenix (rover) x 15 updates per day x 26,828 followers = 402,420
8. Veronica x 15 updates per day x 26,199 followers = 392,985
9. John C. Dvorak x 15 updates per day x 24,102 followers = 361,530
10. MacRumors x 15 updates per day x 23,846 followers = 357,690

Total of average users + top 10: 43,828,920 updates delivered per day.

And that’s half of the Twitter user base, mixed with a tiny fraction of the users who have large number of followers. Realistically, my estimate above is less than 10% of actual traffic because I’ve left out the 40% and have not included the thousands of highly popular users with more than 80 followers. Additionally, the number of followers for the people in the top-10 has grown between 50 and 100 percent since the end of April! (Twitterholic)

This puts Twitter’s actual message analysis and possible delivery between 100,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 per day.

This also does not include a single page view or web service call to their servers. Those alone account for a huge amount of Twitter’s traffic.

Compared to IM traffic

Back in 2005 (ZDNet) there were 13.9 billion instant messages sent per day, with estimates of quadrupled traffic by 2009 (46.5 billion). Instant messaging is divided up among a few primary services and IMs are one-to-one. According to Wikipedia, AOL AIM has 53 million users. If Twitter became as widely used as AIM, it would grow 265 times (53,000,000 divided by 200,000).

Take our findings for the number of delivered (or analyzed) updates on Twitter and multiply by this growth and you find Twitter has to be capable of delivering between 26.5 billion and 265 billion updates (probably much closer to the latter).

How can Twitter scale?

Decentralized XMPP is probably the answer, but I don’t really know. I can see the problem though. If they grow to having one million daily users, they have between 500 million and 5 billion messages to deliver. If they grow as popular and as relied upon as AIM, they’re staring straight in to their own exponential order of magnitude.

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Last night I headed down to MCCXXIII, a club at 1223 NW. Connecticut, for a DC Social Media meetup. The meetup featured Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) and Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) as guests.

I’ve been following Scoble more than usual this week, as he’s come to DC to interview politicians and government officials with Rocky (@RocmanUSA) and his son Patrick (@pscoble). It’s been a merging of the blogging tech world and the US government (finally!).

The club was jammed, no room to move, great vibe and so packed the A/C was ineffective. It was awesome to see the turnout and feel the energy towards geeks making inroads to Washington.

Scoble described the experience in a single word, “Incredible.” We talked for a while on East Coast vs. West Coast interviews and the whole crew agreed that it’s been a refreshing experience. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the Silicon Valley CEOs are embellishing the value of their company. Here, it was described, instead of an executive power (pun intended), the power is more pure and the answers more honest.

When Robert described the difference in honesty I did a double-take. Seriously? Whoa. He described a few of the interviews, talking about some of his favorite moments and personal opinions. I’ll let you catch those in the coming days at Scobleizer.com and in video on FastCompany.tv.

A highlight he kept coming back to: His son nailed down the FCC chairman on the topic of porn (it wasn’t on video – wish it was). Robert’s eyes beamed with pride as he described his son having the guts to ask the questions.

Overall, a good meetup and cool to have Scoble out here for a few days, doing something different and interesting.

Existing posts on Scoble’s visit to Washington:

• How is technology changing the world of Washington D.C.? (6/24/08)
• Visit NYC & Washington D.C. with us (6/21/08)

UPDATE: Here’s the link for Gary’s book tour ’08: http://tv.winelibrary.com/gary-vs-book-tour-2008/

Gary Vaynerchuk is continuing his book tour, visiting the Rockville, MD, Barnes & Noble for a signing this morning at 9:00AM.

Here’s a breakdown of the sites and social networks I frequent. Numbers indicate my personal value (10 being daily use and highly valuable and 1 being a land-grabbed account and following the service’s popularity). Plus (+) indicates rising popularity and minus (-) means I’m losing interest:

• ActiveRain – sol – 3+
• Bebo – solyoung – 2-
  
• del.icio.us – solyoung – 9+
• Digg – pytchfork – 4-
  
• DOPPLR – solyoung – 3+
  
• eBay – pytchfork – 2-
  
• Facebook – 604231141 – 8
• Flickr – solyoung – 8
  
• FriendFeed – sol -8+
• Friendster – solyoung – 1-
  
• Google Calendar – solyoung – 10
• Google Reader – solyoung – 10-
  
• Jumpcut – solyoung – 2+
  
• Last.fm – solyoung – 7+
• LinkedIn – solyoung – 7-
  
• LiveJournal – solyoung – 1-
  
• Multiply – solyoung – 2+
  
• MyBlogLog – solyoung – 4+
  
• MySpace – pytchfork – 5-
  
• Plaxo – Sol Young – 4+
  
• Pownce – solyoung – 3-
• Seesmic – sol – 4+
  
• StumbleUpon – solyoung – 5-
• 30 Boxes – SolYoung – 2-
  
• Tumblr – solyoung – 2-
  
• Twitter – sol – 9
• Upcoming – 221289 – 7+
  
• YouTube – pytchfork – 6
• Zillow – solyoung – 6
  

Quick Links to the streams:

• Flickr Photostream
• Twitter
• Utterz

My plan was to Twitter my progress and TwitPic/Flickr the pics out to my followers. But I woke up at 3am from a caffeine rush and a thought of typing for an hour becoming a nightmare – and boring. Utterz.com, a service doing pretty slick mashups of audio/video/text/photographs/etc, while harnessing APIs from pretty much every popular social networking service, caught my eye (more on Utterz later).

Here’s the day – check the Flickr photostream and the Utterz links below for my audio commentary while I running…

1. Lined up and ready to go
2. Started!
3. Mile 1
4. Mile 2
5. Mile 3
6. Live music between mile 3 and 4
7. Mile 4
8. Mile 5
9. Passing Ed Rendell, governor of PA
10. Mile 7
11. Mile 9
12. Finished!

About Utterz: You start an utter by calling or emailing. Either one initiates it. After that, you have 10 minutes to add more content to the utter. Utterz automatically adds audio from a call or content from an emailed pic/video/audio/text to create an utter similar to what I created above. The call-in feature (dial, press 2, talk, hang up) is extremely simple.

Now, none of the above would be impressive except that Utterz.com is doing it right. This is how services today are supposed to work. Utterz is tied in to all the social networking and blogging services. Any new utter is announced on Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, or even your WordPress/Blogger/MoveableType/etc blog (hosted or self-hosted – COOL!)

After a few months of preparing for the Broad Street 10-miler, it’s now the night before and pre-race excitement is setting in. iofy‘s new office in the Navy Yard of Philadelphia is a block away from the finish line, so this will be a pretty nice way to finish a race. There are showers and refreshments in the building… Life will be good.

The race starts at 8:30am EDT. For the first time while running a race I’ll be Twittering. This is partially because I want to try it as a social experiment, and partly because I’ve been sick and not training for the last week (read: I’d like an excuse to run slightly slower than usual).

If you see someone blow by you, with the above on the back of his shirt, send a text message to 40404 with “follow sol”…

Gear:

• iPhone
• Nike+iPod Nano

Software & Services:

• Twitter
• TwitPic (Send a pic to twitpic and have it announced on Twitter)
  
• Flickr (Get the photostream here)
• MobileTwitter (stable jailbroken iPhone Twitter client)
• Twinkle (jailbroken iPhone geolocation + Twitter)
• Snapture (jailbroken iPhone camera.app replacement)

Good luck and see you at the finish line!

A lot of people asked how to order their own… You can get one for $20.00 at reactee.com. They ship pretty fast. I ordered on a Friday and received it on Monday (today).

UPDATE: I signed up for an affiliate program with them after getting the shirt. I’ll keep a tally and update this blog entry with the number of people buying them.

I completely dig Scoble’s method of using Twitter. I’ve been wanting to consume mass tweets and watch information pass…  It’s simply not possible to ‘flow’ when you’re using apps like Twitterific and only follow a hundred people (this setup is great for smaller numbers).

I’d been using Twitterific for a while, but it was clunky and limited to an update every few minutes. This required scrolling backwards in time and seeing what people had written as I broke one hundred friends. It was neither real-time or indicitive of a large enough audience.

Twitter supports XMPP (Jabber/GTalk). I’ve set up Adium with a GTalk account and switched my Twitter connections to update to the IM account. This has made it so all tweets are in real-time. Suddenly Twitter seems terribly slow as tweets scroll by as a trickle.

I’ve gone from a hundred to five hundred connections and it still seems slow – I’ll keep growing it. The major drawback to this setup is that you can’t consume it at all times. Your phone would blow up if you had this traffic going to SMS (it’d be great if Twitter offered separate SMS and IM settings). My personal preference is to follow the flow in the mornings during RSS reading and in the evenings while writing a blog post or other catch-up activities.

Wild thought… I wonder if the number of simultanious connections in the ‘flow’ will become a sign of one’s intelligence?

As developers, if you’re building services your customers can share, you need to plan on announcement integration.

I keep thinking back to February when I wanted a better way to integrate Twitter. Others wonder about Twitter being a source of lost content, as Cartoon Barry describes well. If a visitor is on my site I want to ensure they can consume everything they’re looking for without bouncing. If they prefer to consume the content elsewhere that’s fine… but they shouldn’t miss it here.

Dave Weiner was looking for a way to integrate a daily links entry back to his scripting.com (he was posting to Twitter and skipping the daily post). Dave started using the prefix “!” so he could have a service read his Twitter feed and build a daily post. This is a good start, but my thought is that this isn’t the way to go. My ‘starred items’ idea is also not the right approach. Both are moving from Twitter to the blog. Twitter is the announcement service and if we can automate its announcing of what we’re doing, we don’t have to do anything special.

Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc are announcement services. Their power is in providing an API other services can hook. The best solution is to intelligently connect Twitter to what you use and to encourage the services you use to integrate with Twitter. Or if you’re building sites and services, do it so your customers get this benefit.

The web-world I see in the next year offers announcement service integration. When I find a site I like, not only does StumbleUpon or Google Reader suck it up and share it for me, but an announcement is fired through my service(s) of choice. When I make changes to Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profiles, an optional announcement is fired outside their gardens.

This approach doesn’t neglect the social networking aspect of these announcement services. A response should be pulled back as a comment, if available/applicable. All of the announcement services have response API calls. The social aspect of these services is retained and the content becomes more valuable as it is connected with its target.

Think efficiency and value for your customers – Bring announcement to an automated state.

This weekend my wife and I got an early start Friday to finish off our bathroom’s tile. I’ve been photo-blogging it to Flickr and periodically putting up notes on Twitter. The last couple weekends have been similar, doing plumbing, floor tile, prep work, etc.

Though there is so much to do (more blog posts, tons of iofy priorities, and building in a certain web service), this is still satisfying work… Something everyone 1/2 interested in real estate should do at least once. I’m a software engineer and dev team manager because I love to build things. I think other developers should feel this way too.

More pics after the jump…

Google Reader has a great feature for sharing articles. It’s been a terrific way to share interesting and pertinent information affecting iofy and to give like-minded folks easy access to my favorite RSS feeds.

You can access my shared page here.

Or pull the feed here.

And with any luck, a drop of the most recent items will be on the sidebar of my blog… Sharing is caring.

Added FriendFeed as a combinatorial service. You can get all my updates and information in one single location there. There will be tons of these sites very soon, followed by an inevitable shakeout. Should be interesting see who and how the best of these services connect.

http://friendfeed.com/sol You can follow my blog, Google Reader, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Stumble Upon, and LinkedIn streams there.

It should be even more interesting to see how much funding they get and whether Web 2.0 falls for the ‘eyeballs-are-worth-more-than-revenue’ bologna.

UPDATE: Hey, wait a second… Why not just find me at solyoung.com, where I’m already combining these streams!?

I’ve been reminded today about how easy life is when we use the right tools. My wife and I were out skiing and watching Spring Mountain‘s Big Air Jam. I took pics with an iPhone and Canon SD-1000 and was blasting them straight to Flickr/Twitter. I was also taking video…

At lunch I pulled out the MacBook Pro and iMovie. In fifteen minutes I’d imported and edited the videos, laid a techno track, and exported. Sure the videos could have been uploaded raw, but a highlight reel is better edited, cleaned, and combined. Check it out after the jump.

For those that enjoyed the photostream today, I’m pleased and hope you’ll spread the word.

I like Robert Scoble’s preference of broadcasting live (I was doing this in 2001).

A historical note: I used to broadcast live. I was the General Manager at LIvVE.com, from 2001 to 2004. We would do live remote broadcasts with nothing more than a Sony GT1 and a high (cough, cough (28.8k)) speed cellular connection. Back then we risked a punch in the nose when going about an interview with an UMPC device shoved in someone’s face.

The highlight live broadcast was on the 4th of July in 2001 at the New York Trade Towers. A guard offered to let us film from the top of a tower if we slid him a fifty.

And now for the highlights reel

Yesterday I asked the question, “Random House DRM-free a hoax?“ The question was based on Cory Doctorow’s post announcing a big move by Random House towards DRM-free MP3 audiobooks. The PDF on his site links to a letter by Madeline McIntosh detailing the move to Random House’s partners.

Since my post both Cory and Madeline have confirmed the validity of the letter. Thank you to both for following up and answering the question.

I too would like to integrate Twitter more selectively in to my blog. Twitter’s API, under “Favorite Methods” allows you to set specific tweets to be starred, or favorites.

If you want to want to have a set of targeted tweets which you’ll highlight in your blog, star your own tweets and pull the feed (here’s their RESTful documentation for how to do that):

favorites

Returns the 20 most recent favorite statuses for the authenticating user or user specified by the ID parameter in the requested format.

URL: http://twitter.com/favorites.format

Formats: xml, json, rss, atom

Parameters:

• id. Optional. The ID or screen name of the user for whom to request a list of favorite statuses. Ex:http://twitter.com/favorites/bob.json or http://twitter.com/favorites/bob.rss
• page. Optional. Retrieves the 20 next most recent favorite statuses. Ex: http://twitter.com/favorites.xml?page=3

In other words, with the above documentation, you would just pull the RSS feed for your favorites and have it rendered on your blog. This method works best for me since it allows after-the-fact selection, addition, and removal.

While it seems many are rejoicing over the supposed announcement of Random House going DRM-free, it also seems this could be hoax. BoingBoing, care of Cory Doctorow, brought the story to light. But something doesn’t smell right…

Don’t get me wrong – this would be groundbreaking and very fast for an industry that doesn’t usually take big risks. But there’s a lot bordering on the edge of too-good-to-be-true and not sitting right.

Cory Doctorow broke the story on BoingBoing.net, where he claims to have gotten hold of an announcement. The announcement isn’t available anywhere else on the net.

The content of the letter is downright mouth watering for folks looking forward to DRM-free content.

“The results: we have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally.”

Seriously? Not a single one? Were there no sales? There will be piracy with any content. Everyone expects this. The issue is not whether it will happen or not, but whether DRM-free content leads to increased sales, increased profits, and increased customer love. The statement that not a single instance occurring is hard to swallow.

I’m not saying it’s a hoax – only that I’m looking forward to getting more facts and seeing how this plays out. I’ve written to Random House for comment but have not yet received a response.

UPDATE: Madeline McIntosh, Random House publisher and author of the letter, confirmed this morning via email that the letter is not a hoax (also confirmed in the comments below). This is exciting and game changing news in the audiobook industry.

http://philip.greenspun.com/business/internet-software-patents

Actually, I feel challenged to prove him wrong.

is working well as a good photo stream and album holder (using the Sets feature.) It works as a free backup service too ($25 per year for photo hosting is close enough to free.)

Both apps accentuate mobile blogging and connecting to people. I’ve been using the iPhone to take pics on the go, dropping them in to Flickr on the fly via Flickr’s email service (iFlickr on jailbroken iPhones is fantastic too), and then Twittering the links.

Which leads to tying together Twitter and Flickr. Twitxr ties Twitter and Facebook together, but isn’t really that impressive since it only runs on hacked iPhones and hits those two services. I’d really love to find an app and/or service that hooks Twitter and Flickr together. Both have APIs. This seems natural, no?

It met its demise in the outer pocket of a WWDC07 laptop bag (yes, my bag, d’oh!)… Cracking the screen and becoming unusable. I don’t feel like doing a screen replacement. It’s now up for sale and I’m using the iPhone as the primary, with the BlackBerry 8800 as a backup. I’m hoping HTC will make another similar all-in-one device for mobile blogging soon – preferably with Windows Mobile 7.

Until Term-vt100 works as well as Rove’s SSH client, the 8800 stays in my bag for backup…

I switched from solyoung to sol. Easier to remember and less to type (special thanks to the Twitter guys for help with that.)

Each message on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. As of yet there isn’t a Twitter application which handles the @user feature. Thus, a response to a longer name both costs time and characters. Another Twitterer I follow (you should too, he’ll change your life) is braverydanger. That’s thirteen characters (or fifteen including the @ and a space.) A response to jack or iofy with the @user feature costs six total characters, allowing 6.7% more room for a response.

This becomes even more important on a mobile phone when typing the extra characters could cost an additional twenty or more seconds (assuming a typical numeric keypad w/out T9 input.)

The switch meant losing all my previous followers (name changes are bad news for brand recognition.) It also meant getting my tweets over to the new account. Both are worth it since I’m young in the game of blogging.

(note: Twitter’s API saved the day. To copy the tweets from the old account to the new account I screen-scraped the old posts and wrote a shell script that imported the scraped posts in reverse order with do/curl/while. Fifteen minutes of coding.)

Now… If only the guys at sol.com would let me pick up that domain for less than the quarter million they quoted last time ;)

I wasn’t attracted to the Twitter service when it first came round. It wasn’t because of the service itself, but rather because I didn’t accept the mentality of Twitter. I started out using it as a communications tool for passing work details to fellow co-workers (a terrific use of Twitter, btw!) In that state of mind I knew I was writing for a target group and ultimately found it easier to reach them with email, SMS or phone calls. What’s the point of another channel?

Twittering for a single purpose was clumsy and short-sited. Messages go much farther than the group. Messages go to everyone. It’s a many-to-many service and you’re shouting to the world silently announcing what you’re doing, thinking, or wish you were doing.

So with that in mind, you need the mentality of hitting the Public Timeline. You’re reaching any listening party and sending words which may never reach a destination. <geek>(It’s a massive hub, broadcasting UDP packets.)</geek>

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/solyoung. Leave a comment and get followed.

Primarily I’m happy to hear that they’ve got a solid block to base their system on, “When other parts of the Twitter site go down, Starling stays up.”  From that block they can build out and have a scalable system.

And we’re going to help them build it.  Developers and customers and companies desiring to tie in to the magic are going to help build upon that block.  Heck, I’ve been buried in queue management…  I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve got under their hood.

Back when Twitter first launched, my boss couldn’t say enough praise for their use of Ruby on Rails and the rapid speed of their development. I agreed that the speed at which they brought their service to life was impressive, but I wasn’t sold on Ruby. Rightfully so, as I soon was pointing out Twitter’s scaling problems and their blaming Ruby (it wasn’t Ruby, but it certainly cast doubt).

There are performance issues with Twitter. Their dev team blamed Ruby and was ultimately wrong. The product is so addictive that folks get angry when they can’t have it. So why not split this product up and decentralize it? Let’s make it a system of RSS feeds and all subscribe to the feeds we want. Why not?

Remember that Twitter is a service. Consider it somewhat like AIM or LinkedIn. Users have an identity, profiles, etc. It’s a social network. A very popular one at that. And decentralizing Twitter means creating a decentralized social network.

The value of Twitter (and why it wouldn’t succeed in a decentralized environment):

1. Unique identity of each individual user.
2. Speed of text messages and group announcements.
3. Twitter Timeline… You can see a river of everyone’s posts.

If Twitter were switched to a system of RSS feeds we’d be nowhere further than the present blog feeds. A one-to-many approach instead of many-to-many. It would simply be a restriction and/or self-imposed limit to 140 characters + a topic that we’d be living by.

Prognosis: Twitter will step up and solve this with architectural improvements and bandwidth/load/communication concentration. If they don’t already have request concentration which directs requests to the appropriate cluster and DB, they’re already working on building it. The discussion of decentralization will go away.

Since I’ve been diving in to a heavier load of server programming, an SSH client has been a priority. Rove offers a terrific terminal app, Mobile SSH, covering Telnet, SSH 1&2, etc. It’s $95, but well worth it. Tailing a log file while walking with my wife last weekend was far superior to sitting at Starbucks and dealing with WiFi. Spoiled? What?

Add to it that Rove offers a combination VNC RDC client called Mobile Desktop and a file manager app (though I have no idea when I’ll be FTPing or SFTPing stuff from the bberry – who has that much content on a bberry??). What Rove lacks in creativity for naming its products, it makes up in enterprise level quality.

If I had thumbs and fingers the size of matchsticks, the blackberry could replace my laptop. The keyboard is small, but so what?… Mobile blogging isn’t about long, drawn out posts (like this one? Sorry.) With WordPress hooked up, posts are possible. We’ll see if this turns in to a true mobile blogging platform… I’d love to hear from people on their preferences in the mobile blogging arena.

So it’s hooked in to WordPress for mobile posts. Flickr is plugged in to the 8800 and flickrRSS on WordPress. Twitter is plugged in to everything. I’m not so hot on Facebook – I’ll write my own apps…