“… my MySpace friends and Twitter list…” (0:32) is a double-take moment for those of us who got in on Twitter when it was only used by the geek crowd. Twitter mentioned in a mainstream ad!? S’wut?

Figured it had to be expensive product placement, so asked Biz Stone:

@biz Did Twitter pay for placement in the new Coke pre-movie ad? 10:21 AM Nov 18th

And received:

@sol no, it just showed up which is totally cool 10:41 AM Nov 18th

Side note: Walmart has plenty of room for improvement in their online and social media presence. They could have auctioned that product placement off for some decent VC supplied money and should be getting their videos out to many many many more services more quickly…

Age Demographics from Quantcast – Twitter.com

On Wednesday my wife and I were out at Flavor by Thai Pepper, enjoying some insanely good food and drink. Two conversations took place in adjacent booths, too loud to ignore.

In the booth behind Galina a group of late-twenty-somethings laughed loudly about replacing the contents of a box of chocolates with rocks and giving it as a gift (WTF?!) Behind me, a senior couple dropped the “T” word.

You don’t usually hear random people, especially outside of the tech community, drop Twitter in conversation. However, that’s been changing…

“Twitter? What’s that?” she asked, laughing.

“It’s this web site where you answer a question, ‘What are you doing right NOW?’ – You send a message on your phone, ‘I’m standing in line for a latte’ to everyone.” he described, emphasizing NOW.

She said she was fearful of a greater and greater generational gap forming, to which he disagreed and assured her they could keep up.

Their convo reminded me of a post by Zena Weist, in which she unscientifically found the average age to be ~37. My own findings were similar but I didn’t keep track of demographics.

Most folks on Twitter are not in the high-school contingent, and judging by more scientific methods the average age is indeed in the mid-thirties. 48% fall in to the 18-34 range, but 21% are over 50. That’s a huge difference compared to Facebook and MySpace having only 8% being over 50.

Don’t let age come between you and your tweets…

Follow @sol on Twitter

From Quantcast (Twitter):

Facebook:

MySpace

She’s proud of not being late on the rent for sixteen years and is one of those ideal persons you would want to have as a neighbor. She’s become a wonderful character in my wife’s and my lives.

We lived downstairs from her while we renovated an apartment there, and out of the blue she left a can of salmon treats for our cat. The next month we reciprocated by giving her a large gift basket close to Christmas. I give all my tenants gifts of some sort around Christmas – usually movie tickets – but she doesn’t get out much and something for home was better.

When we came home the next day there were bottles of sake and raspberry brandy at the door. She wasn’t sure what kind of alcohol we’d like, so she hedged and covered as much culture as she could with two bottles.

She called a couple weeks ago about a leaky faucet in the bathroom. She’s consistently worried about bothering us when she calls and often apologizes for doing so at the end of the call.

I’ve been working some intense projects at Ingram Digital, so my first opportunity to visit was today to see what I could do about the sink. She explained that professionals who tried to fix it over the years had described the faucet as not fixable.

The plumbers and contractors were right. The faucet can not be repaired, and replacement of only the faucet requires replacement of the sink, too. To correct the problem requires disconnecting the faucet fittings and the drain, removing the sink from the wall, installation of a new pedestal sink, installation of a new faucet, and then reconnection of the fittings and drain. Bummer!

Tomorrow I’m installing a new sink and faucet. I hope she likes it.

UPDATE: paragraphs of sugarcoated fluff snipped/removed from this post

• Facebook Group
• Upcoming Event – RSVP
• Privé
• Inquirer’s Table Talk

I finally went for a bike ride to see Privé in person. What I found was better than imagined, even after reading Michael Klein’s enticing description and having high expectations.

During my drop-in visit I met Kevin Landon, who abandoned a staff meeting to give me a tour (the video below doesn’t do the restaurant any justice, the place is fabulous). From talking with Kevin I learned Privé opened only two weeks ago and has been doing wonderful.

We’ll be one of the first groups there, and probably the first blog-heavy group. He showed me around and I got to see the impeccable cut white stone walls, attractive furniture, sleek lines and spotlit mural. He promises the food to be as good or better than the looks.

And he’s probably right. They’ve hired the young Peter Karapanagiotis, 23, who performed as saute-saucier at Buddakan as well as Brasserie Perrier. It’s going to be a real treat to experience his work while he’s fresh and the restaurant is brand-spankin’-new.

Here’s the cam video of the insides (warning: shaky)…

“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).

Twicecream – a fake service to demonstrate a point about single sign-on…

In web 2.0 there is a determination to screw up potentially great services. It’s my number #1 pet peeve with software development these days. Here’s a fictitious example of a service you might create…

You’ve built a service that automatically Twitters your geo-position and the name of an ice cream parlor when you’re in front of it. Your phone buzzes when an ice cream parlor is detected and begins sending photos to SnapTweet and TwitPic, including Zagats ratings and commentary. Other patrons respond back and generate conversations. This is your social network: Twicecream – a social network for twittering ice cream enthusiasts.

In front of Ben & Jerry’s on the Wharf, Zagats 4-stars, pics: http://twicecream.com/abc123

Congratulations! You just failed.

You didn’t fail by creating a service few would use. You failed because you didn’t utilize the authentication mechanism your patrons preferred. You built an unnecessary barrier to your garden by requiring an unnecessary account creation. Don’t do this, it’s arrogant and inefficient.

Your patrons have Twitter accounts. Twitter has an API. Your service should have asked the patron to log in with their Twitter credentials.

This isn’t just for social networking. This goes for all web services. SaaS solutions that require secondary account creations are a bad idea. Single sign-on, whenever possible, should be used.

The whole idea is to simplify access to what the customer needs. If you’re requiring unnecessary account creations, you’re screwing it all up.

.

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).

On Twitter, the numbers for friends (people you follow) and followers (people who follow you) are being misreported. The most common tweet today is about one’s follower count dropping off. This is telling of your personality, and not in a good way.

If you’re complaining about your follower count dropping off without your realizing your friend count dropped too, you’ve probably only been paying attention to building numbers. You’re also describing to the world that you didn’t care about losing touch with your friends.

For the record, I first noticed my friend count dropped. Over the year or two on the service, I’ve built up a friend list of ~6200 extremely interesting people (~2100 follow me). When I saw my friend count dropped, I checked my followers to verify. My tweet was, “Wow – number of people I follow and who are following me just dropped by more than 1000 each. Not good!”

While they reboot the service and get your numbers back to normal, take a moment to consider what matters. If you’re that important, they’ll find you again.

Alvin Ashcraft (@alashcraft) put out the idea to create a Facebook group around the geek dinner concept; so I ran with it. The Facebook group is Philly Geek Dinner. Sign up there (or here, here, or just show up here).

A quick additional tidbit. Jason Hill from National Mechanics dropped me a DM and they’re looking forward to our being there. They’ve got a Twitter account for the restaurant itself. Pretty slick.

The kick-off Philly Geek Dinner will be at National Mechanics. I haven’t been there before, so looking forward to checking it out. Post on Upcoming or Eventful so we get a feel for the number of people.

National Mechanics – 22 South 3rd Street – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – www.nationalmechanics.com

Link to today’s run

I love running. I skip wearing headphones or listening to music because I love hearing the world race past me. Things that interfere with the actual experience of being there aren’t interesting to me.

Nike+ on an iPod (a music player first and foremost) thankfully has the option to do a workout without music (and without a headset). I’ve been using this since Christmas 2007 when my wife gave it to me. It’s great! Nike has training programs you can follow to get you the next level.

Recently discovered when I got an N82 is the Nokia Sportstracker app. It keeps track with GPS and gives an amazing amount of live metadata. Not only are you able to follow your speed, pace, average pace, distance, location, etc, in real time, you can pump the data live to the web.

There are a couple things lacking with both systems: Social interaction outside their gardens. Both offer links to back to your workout pages, but neither supports easy placement of the data elsewhere (read: No RSS feeds of the content).

An RSS feed of the workouts would be an ideal next step for either company. RSS being available would allow WordPress and TypePad widget development much more easily.

It would also be slick to have Twitter and Facebook integrations (Nike+ has some Facebook apps written by third parties – I haven’t been impressed with these since they’re all Flash).

Running profiles:

• Nike+: http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/?l=runners,runs,1089318170
• Nokia: http://sportstracker.nokia.com/nts/user/profile.do?u=solyoung

I’ve been wanting to organize a meet-up in Philadelphia for a while. Combine that with having a list of 30+ restaurants stored as a note on my phone, wanting and waiting to try, and you get opportunity. An opportunity for the geek in us…

So I’m finally kicking this off in an official manner. The upcoming.org page is up. Eventful, too. I’ll have a venue picked out this week.

If this works out we’ll keep it going on the first Tuesday each month.

Cheers and looking forware to meeting you!

Ross Miller at FriendFeed responded to my question about FriendFeed del.icio.us feeds not updating. It seems del.icio.us is blocking mass spidering of their site.

Ross’s email:

“Hi Sol, del.icio.us places restraints on our ability to crawl their site. So if for some reason the item is missed, it becomes very hard for us to retrieve the del.icio.us link. Unfortunately for now the refresh button is your best option when this happens. Sorry for the inconvenience and we hope to get this resolved with del.icio.us soon.”

Looks like this is a restriction on del.icio.us’s end.

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).

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.

.

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.

Steven Hodson, in a post over on Mashable, describes security risks and the waste of information that mobile phone GPS use brings (when pinpointing and announcing our locations). He poses some extremely valid points in regards to announcing one’s geolocation via Twitter, Brightkite, or FriendFeed being useless noise.

Telling people via a highly conversational medium such as instant messaging or an SMS text that you are currently at 13th St and Ash Lane is nothing more than noise. It’s a waste of precious conversation. To a few of your closer friends it may be relevant, such as a buddy that would meet you for coffee. But for the masses, it is unimportant and you’re guilty for wasting their time.

I’m guilty of this lately. I’ve been trying various mobile phone GPS services. It’s been fun and interesting, but I’m in agreement with Steven about this announcement being a waste (at least if it’s without background information). Steven doesn’t mention it, but my thought on optimal geolocation announcement is in a widget placed on one’s blog. It’s there for interested followers, but not intrusive or annoying.

But that’s where we agree. He describes broadcasting one’s geolocation as a security risk and I strongly disagree. Yes, there are some situations where it is. US soldiers in Iraq will not benefit from this feature. Folks in witness protection programs, runaways, victims of domestic violence, those being stalked, cheating spouses, and those in organized crime probably won’t either.

The typical citizen without conflict is not at risk. It’s easy to figure out when someone is normally at work, so knowing an optimal time to break in to someone’s home is already simple. It’s easy to find a person in a public place, so it’s already easy to find the optimal time to commit physical harm.

Note: If one is being stalked or believes him or herself to be in a situation where announcing location is dangerous, it’s simple to turn the feature off.

As I’ve said before, people are inherently good. They don’t go around looking for someone to damage or rob. There are some people who commit these crimes. These people use crow-bars instead of Facebook, and are stopped by alarm systems and deadbolts rather than a lack of geolocation data.

Most smartphones slated for release over the next 12-months include a GPS receiver, built in. After that, it will be a marked failure to not include a GPS in a phone. The functionality that comes with GPS is outstanding – mapping, directions, location based experiences, etc. We’re about to enter an age of advancement in technological capabilities that we’re just beginning to imagine.

Consumers are moving to smartphones. The hottest smartphones (iPhone 3G, BlackBerry Bold 9000, most of Nokia’s Symbian and HTC’s Windows Mobile offerings) all include GPS and an exposed API for developing applications utilizing their hardware. Anything people can conceive of for location based mashups will be coming (more on these mashups in later posts)…

Here’s a first application…

BlackBerry is a leader in mobile phone GPS. Recently a few services that announce the location of one’s phone emerged. Initially these were billed as a sort of low-jack for one’s phone, a security service for the insecure (or those who want to spy on their kids, etc).

I decided to try a few of these. Most felt slimy, like, “you always know where your phone is, and you could also know where your wife is!” … I don’t know about you, but my phone is loyal and doesn’t run off with strangers… And I trust my wife far more than a phone.

My goal with trying these services was to mash Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and other social networking services with my location. Such a mashup will allow me to share my real-time location with all friends. I came across BlackberryTracker.com. Much like the others, the idea is to provide you with the location of your phone. However, they have something the other’s don’t… Facebook and Google Earth integration (as well as a drop-dead-simple semi-RESTful API).

Friends can pinpoint me down to the meter on my Facebook profile, updated every 30 seconds. To be honest, it feels strange to openly publish this data. Security, and lack thereof, has us believing we shouldn’t share such information. But this fear is caused by the exception and not the rule. And in reality, my location in public isn’t private. Additionally, there are laws and common courtesies we live by, and I trust that people are inherently good.

Soon these services will be in the mainstream. Everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Let me emphasize that… Soon everyone will be able to pinpoint the location of anyone. Not publishing your location will be like not having a mobile phone.

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!

The exploring of Twitter integrated photo services continues… Today’s post is on SnapTweet, a service working towards announcing Flickr image uploads via Twitter updates.

Before continuing, here’s my philosophy on how a perfect Flickr/Twitter integration works:

1. Images posted to Flickr are optionally announced on Twitter.
2. No additional account required – either Twitter or Flickr is used for authentication.
3. Do not attempt to own the content. It’s ok to own distribution. Images on Flickr. Tweets on Twitter. Render wherever. That’s how consumers what their content.

Summary

For the most part, SnapTweet fits my requirements. There are bugs and gotchas with their implementation, but this is an ideal service for many folks. SnapTweet is tailored for the person who spends time in Flickr and wants announcements sent via Twitter. It is not for the person who Twitters all day and uses Flickr as a repository (me). A pretty neat feature is the direct message to send a link to the latest image on Flickr.

How SnapTweet works

SnapTweet uses one’s Twitter credentials via the Twitter API for authentication. After logging in you are asked for your Flickr username. You are given the option to enter a user-defined tag name so SnapTweet can synchronize with Flickr.

SnapTweet allows update announcements with links to your Flickr images in one of two ways. Tag the image on Flickr with the user-defined tag set in SnapTweet or send a direct message to @snaptweet on Twitter.

Tags

I set my user-defined tag to ‘snaptweet’, but anything could be used. SnapTweet synchronizes with Flickr by checking tags of the 10 most recent images. When an image is found with a tag, a Twitter update with a link to the image is fired. The Twitter status update is set to the name of the image in Flickr (power users can customize the update via additional tags).

This is outstanding for anyone who spends time in Flickr. Simply tag images and have them announced.

Direct Messages

I’ll be using direct messaging. When you send a direct message to @snaptweet, it grabs the link to your most recent public Flickr upload and sends a Twitter update with the text from your direct message, with the link to the image appended.

Problems

There is a drawback to using tags: Timing. A Twitter update is sent when synchronization between SnapTweet and Flickr occurs. It’s easily possible for this to happen many minutes after you’ve set a tag, which may be after you’ve already sent your own updates to Twitter. This gets confusing, and it’s never fun to wonder when your tweet will post.

Tagging via an email upload is a royal pain. Using the tag method as a way post announcements on the go isn’t optimal and there are more elegant solutions out there.

The direct message feature requires your knowing the most recent image on Flickr. This is usually not a problem, but if you’re rapid-firing image uploads, you may cross up an update.

Verdict

SnapTweet follows the right philosophy for delivering your content. They let Twitter and Flickr host the data. They’re good for the Flickr lover who prefers spending time in Flickr over Twitter. I recommend SnapTweet for users in this category. The direct message to get the latest pic is a nice trick to keep handy for simpler image posting.

Overall, for users wanting to send pics with commentary on the go, my TwitPic + Flickr method is your best option. SnapTweet doesn’t do well in a real-time posting environment since it has to synchronize and you have to add the task of tagging your images.

:

When following a lot of friends in a flow environment and using XMPP, one sees the above numbers in less than ten minutes. I’d been using Adium, but Adium doesn’t smooth scroll between each received tweet. It constantly jerks messages upwards and has made it virtually impossible to have a meaningful experience. There are often times when I want to read each incoming tweet. A good, smooth, reading experience was needed.

iChat has a slightly smoother hit at each received message, and is therefore much more enjoyable to read. The interface is customizable enough, but nothing quite as nice as some of Adium’s minimal themes.

I was mostly hesitant to switch since Adium has outstanding AppleScript support. I’ve been thinking of prototyping something (given a couple hours – someday). Apparently iChat has something even better which I should have known about… Callbacks! A script can fire for each received message.

This will make dynamic, real-time, filtering a reality.

The start of something very cool…

Useful link: flow entries

Follow me on Twitter: sol

I read the flow of XMPP Twitter traffic with breakfast and in the evenings. I then scan it when checking email or if I catch a lot of added traffic on the IM window. The part which most people don’t understand is how this translates and how it’s even immaginable to distinguish signal from noise here.

It’s easy. I’m now following over 4,000 fellow Twitterers (Twitterites? Twitterans?). The TPM (Tweets Per Minute) ranges between 20 and 35. This equates to the Twitterers I’m following announcing, approximately, once every two hours (obviously some are once a day and some are every 10 minutes).

Reading the flow at this rate is easy. You have tweets coming in 24 hours per day, but you absolutely can’t follow it the entire time. Feeling like you have to read every Twitter announcement your friends send is the first psychological obstacle to get over. Once you get beyond that feeling of needing to maintain control, you free yourself to dip in to the news of the moment as reported by everybody.

To ensure I’m not missing any messages specifically to me, I keep a browser tab open (usually immediately to the right of my GMail tab) to the Twitter Replies page.

The main trick to keeping a strong signal is being selective in who you follow. By tuning this early, you avoid needing as much filtration later. To date I have only filtered out a single spammer account.

One last point is that some feel this approach is a pull technique in which I’m getting, but not giving back. I  disagree. I submit my status and the special news and information I come by. I encourage people to follow me so they’ll be able to have an insight in to my thought processes and activities.

Given the present rate of flow, I see 10,000 as the next step. It’ll take a while to get there with a selective approach. In the meantime I’m interested in metrics and whether Twitter will continue to be a best source of this data.

Any service could provide an XMPP flow… Imagine Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, etc, offering an XMPP feed of updates. FriendFeed with an XMPP flavor would be incredible.

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.

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).

Links: Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4 – http://twitter.com/sol – http://solyoung.com

This morning’s Twitter experience has found some bugs in the system. Last night I added a few hundred friends but didn’t go through my email for add announcements… Doing that now.

Most of the friends I added have added me back – I think making it clear I’m not a spammer and that I genuinely want to participate and learn from everyone in a flow helps here. There are some bugs with Twitter’s pages I’ve run in to.

As I go through my email I’m opening each person’s add announcement and visiting their Twitter page to confirm I’m following them. It would be great if the email described one’s own following status in relation to the new follower. As I visit a person’s page which I know I’m following, it shows the “Follow” button. Huh? When I click Follow, it immediately shows Updates as being on. My following count increases too.

Perhaps there is a difference between follow requests from a page and from the XMPP request? Maybe the AJAX request for following a person is getting bumped by the followup request to have notifications on?

In any case, I hope I’m not annoying people with multiple add emails this AM. If you’ve gotten more than one announcement from me, I’d be interested to hear about it.

As noted above, the flow is presently at 10 TPM. I expect the speed will increase by about 50% by 9:00AM. It’s pretty neat to see this kind of metric and have it readily available.

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!?