“I believe I’ve done all I care to do here at this point. Flesh and reality and silence are calling.” @trent_reznor, July 17th 2009 (account deleted)

It’s a stylish and absolute completion. What would your last words be?

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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.

Last year I ran Broad Street with 25,000 other runners and live blogged it (actually, live Twittered and Utterlied). It was a blast. I’m thinking about something similar this year, but probably a modification based on an iPhone app… More on that later this week.

Something cool happened this year that didn’t in the past. The organizers of the race appear to have implemented an automatic seeding algorithm for runners who have raced before. I got seeded 2025, which I’m proud of, but am in no shape to live up to.

We’ll see how this shapes up. My first run after about nine months off was a couple weeks ago. I’m hoping for a 7:30 pace. Runs last week ranged between 7:00 and 8:00 during 4 to 5 mile runs.

This is gonna hurt.

Let the Twitter backlash begin. Or not. If you have real friends, who cares? ;-)

“… 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…

If you’re a diehard fan of the Twitter service, rooting for their profitibility is counter-productive. You should realize a move towards real revenue is going to affect the Twitter experience, and almost certainly in a negative way.

Or at least in a way that will affect Twitter’s value to you.

Personally, as someone in technology and media, I want @biz to bring in the green and prove web companies can rake in cash. But I understand that when this happens, the value proposition of Twitter for my needs will negatively change.

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

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!

UPDATE: I saved the above post for posterity… Something blew up in my blog settings and tons of weekly Twitter blog posts were submitted.

Twitter is currently down for database maintenance.

We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.

I wonder what kind of hell will break loose when it comes back up and sucks in the queued SMS updates… My phone is gonna go nuts.

The 2,000 follower limit, it would seem, was put in place to prevent mass following and spam on Twitter. This was pretty frustrating for me since I fell in to their beyond-the-limit zone (I followed over 6,000 people because I loved the information, but couldn’t add any more).

I’m not complaining too much, as I’m enjoying the more traditional use of my Twitter account for now, but this is a ridiculously short-sighted fix.

I haven’t seen much attention drawn to the following facts (pun wasn’t intended):

1. People are more likely to recipricate a follow request from someone with a low following/friend count.
2. There isn’t a legitimate way to prevent someone from having multiple Twitter accounts (accounts are tied to email addresses).
3. The Twitter API limits are based on account, not where the call is coming from (one server can make many requests on behalf of other accounts).

From the above simple observations, one can see the easy way to follow an unlimited number of people.

1. Create a large number of accounts.
2. Follow a smaller number of people with each account (you’ll have better reciprocation).
3. Follow a lot of people (the API limitations will apply per account, so your follows-per-hour will actually be quite large).

The people running Twitter are great. They’re really trying to do the right thing. So maybe I’m completely wrong when I anticipate the above and say that this looks like a Facebook move. Facebook’s 5,000 friend limit works for Facebook. Facebook’s API is advanced and robust and complicated enough to not get terribly nailed by multi-account mass spam following.

Additionally, the information load on Facebook is different. You get a clear picture of who a person is that is friending you. You’re given enough information to make a decision. On Twitter, this isn’t the case.

So what’s going to happen?

1. Spammers are already adapting to the limitation, as described above.
2. Tweeple will stop trusting low follow-count users (do you trust an eBay user without feedback?)
3. Twitter’s servers will still be inundated and over capacity.

I blame it on Scoble…

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Image courtesy of Malingering on Flickr – it is not of either of the homeless men I met today.

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I started off the day by going for a great morning run. On my way home I realized my house key fell out of my shorts pocket, so I was looking around on the ground for it.

A homeless man asked if I lost something, and immediately followed up asking if it was a water bottle before I could respond. After telling him it was a key he informed me the water bottle he saw earlier was very nice.

I walked away cursing the fact I would have to break in to my house, but also thinking about a man with concern over my loss who didn’t have keys of his own to lose.

Breaking in requires scaling a tall wall, jumping through a window a-la Trinity escaping in The Matrix, and finally possessing the key to our inside apartment (which I still had).

At the end of the day I hit the bank for a friend and locked my keys in the car in the process… Two key losses in a single day. It would have been my first key loss in years if it were only once.

As I waited for my wife, bringing the spare key, a homeless man with a harshly weathered and flushed face approached. The conversation went like this:

• Homeless man: Hello, sir?
• I kept silent, posting to del.icio.us.
• Man: Sir, is that your car?
• Me: Yep?
• Man: <upbeat> Where are you from?
• Me: Here, Philadelphia…
• Man: Sir, I could use a cup ‘a coffee, could ya spare some change?
• Me: …
• Man: <poorly rehearsed> Sir, I’m homeless, hungry, scared, and need something to eat. Anything you can offer will help.
• Me: I’m sorry, but I won’t give cash, but I’ll get us cups of coffee.
• Man: <confused, back pedaling> But I’m hungry. I have 55-cents <jingles pockets> and only need a little more for coffee.
• I twittered
• Man: Sir, pay attention to me. I need some help.
• Me: I’ll buy us cups of coffee and a snack then.
• Man: <pausing again> But… I’m hungry.
• Me: <Genuine smile> Let’s go get a cup of coffee, Starbucks is two doors down.

He turned his back to me and walked off without another word. His “hello, sir?” introduction was repeated to each passerby.

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!

While doing my typical searches for new and interesting people on Twitter to add to the flow, I noticed something indicative of Spring cleaning. You see, when you search Twitter, you usually get pages of people who haven’t updated in a year or accounts with zero updates – ever – and six months stale.

None of those cases seem to be true for my latest search results. There are a couple accounts with no updates in a year, but they’ve got a lot of updates, so they’d likely not be pruned. Either Twitter created a better search algorithm (unlikely, since the results are haphazard and not chronological) or they pruned the dead accounts (makes a lot of sense – I myself got an old account). When I’ve worked at community driven companies, we’ve done plenty of account trimmings.

Twitter doing prunings makes a lot of sense. This is a benefit to the user base, and a huge benefit to Twitter’s load. If this is truly the case, you might do a search for your favorite name about now… And if it isn’t, at least rejoice in a better mechanism to find the people you’re looking for.

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.

How to is after the jump…

With all the web services and photo sharing systems, I’m amazed an integration of Flickr and Twitter hasn’t already happened. Twitxr came out and claimed compatibility in Dave Winer’s scripting.com comments, but it never actually worked. I’ve wanted a way to post a pic to Flickr and have it announced on Twitter right away. Nada.

I love to shoot pics on my iPhone and post them immediately. Live photo streams are terrific! Flickr makes it easy by allowing you send to an email to a pre-defined email address. All you do is send an email with a photo as an attachment to your Flickr upload email address.

Now TwitPic is offering a service for Twitter users just like Flickr’s service, but they store the photo and send an announcement to Twitter with a link. Whatever you put in the subject line of the email is set as your update in Twitter.

Combining these two services is easy. Just send an email to both services at the same time and the pic will be posted in both places. The subject line of the email will be set as your update in Twitter and as the title of the pic in Flickr.

If the above didn’t already give you the ‘Ah HA!’ feeling, here are the precise instructions (iPhone specific, but works with any email capable phone):

1. Set up Flickr so you can send email to your account. Do this by visiting http://flickr.com/account -> “Email”.
2. Save your Flickr upload email address to your address book. I named this contact “Flickr”.
3. Set up TwitPic so you can send email to your account. TwitPic uses your pre-existing Twitter account credentials for authentication (smart!). Do this by visiting http://twitpic.com -> “Log-in” -> “Settings”.
4. Save your TwitPic upload email address to your address book. I named this contact “TwitPic”.
5. SendPics (iPhone Jailbreak Specific): I recommend using SendPics to send full-rez images to Flickr, but the default photos iPhone app works good too.
6. Address the email, with pic attached, to your Flickr and TwitPic contacts, placing both contacts in the ‘To’ field.
7. Enter your Twitter update in the Subject line. This also becomes the Title of the image on Flickr.
8. Enter any additional tags and a description in the body of the email. This only applies to Flickr.

(interior picture from The Towers of Numar, by Michael Gagne)

It’s been almost two weeks since I started using Twitter as a primary source of news, links, and other fascinating bits of information. The approach has been awesome and I’ve discovered a ton of people and sites which I now return to. It’s been eye opening.

But I’ve been missing sites previously frequented. The time I’ve spent in the flow cut in to time spent reading feeds and visiting sites. And while my Google Reader feeds are grossly limited compared to the nearly 5,000 people I follow on Twitter, there is still some attachment and familiarity that goes missing.

I share my Google Reader items as a feed (RSS) or on a page (HTML), and of course it’s aggregated on my FriendFeed. I am ‘sol‘ on Twitter.

To do this, you need to set up Twitter so you’re getting (or also getting) your updates via a GTalk/Gmail account. It’s very easy:

First – set up Chat in Gmail

1. If you don’t have a Gmail account, get one! After logging in, go to “settings” and hit the “Chat” tab.

2. Choose to “Save chat history in my Gmail account”.
3. Save this setting.

Second – set up Twitter to send notices to your Gmail account

1. In your Twitter account, go to “Settings” -> “Phone & IM”.
2. Enter details for your Gmail account.

3. Save the settings.
note: Only updates from Twitterers you follow and are selected for IM updates will be sent to your Gmail account.

Last – Log in to Gmail and keep that browser open

1. Choose to Sign into chat. Your Twitter updates will start arriving in Gmail.
2. Keep a tab or window open. If you log out of Gmail, or close the browser or tab, the updates will stop arriving since Twitter only sends updates to users that are logged in. Simply keep a browser tab open (very easy to do if you’re already a Gmail aficionado).

:

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.

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.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

It’s been 4 days with a flow approach to receiving data. I skipped adding more people today and focused on getting used to the incoming content. It’s become easy to follow along, so I’ll be adding again. Last night I experienced a reading nirvana while reading Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations (on the Amazon Kindle)… My reading was faster than ever. Unexpected and a real thrill.

The amount of data one can ingest seems like it could become a real measure of intelligence, like a hybrid or modified number of pages one can read per hour. Unlike pages, characters or kilobytes are easily measured and this type of ingestion stat could become interesting.

Today Twitter’s XMPP went offline for a couple hours. It was odd to not see movement out of the corner of my eye. Having the flow is no longer distracting (except when it’s not moving). I have it on the right side of my right hand 24″ monitor, and I scan it for links and more interesting items when I spend time on email (once an hour or so).

The metrics for the day with 2200 friends (averaged over a period of 10 minutes – after the jump):

• 6:00AM EDT: 11 tweets per minute.
• 8:30AM EDT: 16 tweets per minute.
• 2:00PM EDT: 23 tweets per minute.
• 4:00PM EDT: 25 tweets per minute.
• 5:00PM EDT: 22 tweets per minute.

It’s easy, out of the corner of your eye, to see flow increase and decrease in speed as interesting topics pass by.

Dave’s blog mentions wanting a timed mute feature which doesn’t notify or remove a friend from your list. This would be so easy in an XMPP client. Just use the ‘off [username]‘ command via an AppleScript Adium Xtra. An iCal reminder could be set to reset it, or a more elaborate database could be built.

I’m still daydreaming of the perfect XMPP application for combining Twitter traffic and other features. A smooth-scrolling, highlighting based on friend rating (perhaps by popularity or personal setting), app with web service API harnessing contact management would be insanely useful.

To save Twitter’s servers from getting buried in XMPP traffic, I could see value in flows covering certain genres of people. This would basically be an XMPP rebroadcast people could subscribe to. XMPP could start getting traction because of this.

Google, with their search algorithms could be king in this space. I’d expect Yahoo! to be great here too with an XMPP version of Pipes. The whole flow experiment thus far feels like digging for information before Google came along and offered exactly what you wanted. Except in this case, you’re getting an obscene amount of what you want… And I can’t wait for more.

UPDATE & CORRECTION: In the original post I incorrectly identified Naked Conversations as being written only by Robert Scoble. Shel Israel co-authored the book with Robert and it was neglectful on my part to have not given him equal credit. I offer my sincere apologies and a thank you for the correction.

Additional links:

• Scoble’s take
• Dave’s block-with-timeout
• Steve Gillmor’s Swarmtracking

• Day 1
• Day 2 

Image courtesy of Komax Systems

Day 3

The question most people have been asking is, “What is the flow like?” Many have described this amount of flow as unmanageable and anti-social. Here’s what I’ve learned first-hand by Day 3…

After wrapping up yesterday’s post and promising to add 500+ friends per day, I destroyed my sleep cycle by obsessively discovering more than 1,000 new people. Since I’m a developer and VP of Engineering at iofy, I focused on developers and technology gurus. I’m also fond of the marketing and sales spaces as they relate to social networks, so spent some time beefing up that area of the flow too.

I do this by finding the most intelligent/witty/interesting people I can and spider through to their friends. Unlike a spammer, I only add a person if their tweets have been interesting and intelligent and I feel they’ll contribute to my education.

I woke this morning to a faster flow. At times today it closed in on my maximum reading speed, especially 9-5. With ~2,200 friends I’m now able to see instant changes in volume based on time of day, news, etc. Last night at 1:00am EDT, it was trickling. Before getting to the office it was still slow. Later, it drastically picked up. I’m getting metrics now and will share them tomorrow.

Our company president, @cart, supplied me with Steve Gillmor’s “Swarmtracking” this morning. Steve has a very similar approach but instead of using a Jabber client he uses the built in GMail web app and has search criteria. His article describes some good methods for tuning and searching, but the methods are distracting and require action (clicks). I also disagree with comparing this to a tracking system. One can use it that way, but it’s so much more powerful as a system for being fed valuable information.

What is the flow?

Reading and consuming the flow is like streaming a Google Search of the latest happenings that relate to you. Imagine a constant stream of somewhat relevant information. You scan as links and tidbits pass by. When something catches your eye, you click a link or respond with insight. Depending on one’s popularity, the flow splashes, much like a rock tossed in a river. One can see multiple splashes as multiple topics hit your flow at the same time.

The “Replies” page on Twitter.com works as an automatic net so I can listen to anyone speaking directly to me. It’s an automatic net and no further filtering is needed.

Unlike an RSS reader, this is real-time. My preference is to have an RSS reader open in 3/4 of my monitor and the flow open in the other 1/4. It’s immersion.

Additional thoughts and how-to (after the jump):

The tools I’ve been using are the twitter.com web site, Quotably.com, Adium as an XMPP/Jabber client, and email.

I use Twitter’s site for locating friends. I’m at the point where I’m almost ready to write my own API wrapper since their AJAX for managing friend additions and updating settings are buggy…….. <geek-speek>My dev team implemented a three-peat system at iofy for AJAX calls to avoid these bugs… AJAX calls for data frequently fail. I think Twitter just bombs out after a single failed try</geek-speek>. Their system would be more reliable with our approach and I wouldn’t have had to double and triple add people (sorry to those that received multiple add notices).

Adium is wonderful for reliably rendering the flow. You need to have a very easy to read font and have the updates spaced logically to differentiate them. Any more updates than present and it will be mandatory to have smooth scrolling. As of yet I haven’t found a smooth scrolling message plugin – please leave a link in the comments if you know of one.

My follower notifications have significantly gone up since describing this transition. Whenever I receive one I click the link to view the Twitter page. If they’re interesting and intelligent, I add them.

The iPhone is usable as a replies mechanism by using Quotably.com. I hope they’ll create an iPhone enhanced version soon.

Some utilities I want and we’re sure to see soon for flow management (hint, start writing these folks…):

• Powerful Twitter contact management and connection utilities.
• Twitter specific XMPP client. This should have automatic highlighting/tracking of replies, smooth scrolling, and a rating system for your users.

Lastly, the ease of finding intelligent people seems to be diminishing. I’m far from having a hard time discovering the new, but it takes more effort. This also could be because I’ve been become more selective as I discover the precise types of personalities I want to mix in.

A couple days ago, after months of thinking about how to consume more information, I was inspired by Scoble’s post to switch off of a standard HTTP Twitter API polling application (Twitterific) and move to a Jabber based client (Adium). It has been an amazing discovery.

Initially, and until yesterday, I was using Twitterific to read posts from ~100 friends. I had SMS updates coming in to the iPhone for friends beyond the normal scope of Internet friendship (wife, co-workers, family). I bumped my friend count up to ~500 before my first flow entry last night

I picked these friends by viewing the friends of some of my other intelligent friends. If I found the last 20 posts from a friend in their list to be interesting and smart, I added that person as a friend of mine. If I found that friend to be exceptionally intelligent, I would review their friends and do the same process to find more. A tree diagram for contact spread would be very interesting!

500 friends created a slow flow in Adium (Jabber client). Today I followed the same process of friend finding and upped the count to 1,100. It seems intelligent people keep intelligent company (thank goodness!) and locating other intelligent Twitterers is not terribly difficult.

The flow speed at 1,100 is roughly 100 updates per 10 minutes (1 tweet per 6 seconds). Sometimes it gets much faster, but it’s easily manageable. With an approximate average of 100 characters per tweet and an average word length of 5 characters, this translates to 200 words per minute. At this point it is at a speed where one could read every post if they weren’t focused on other things, but more is tolerable.

I’m looking to have a flow that is well beyond fully readable. It’s supposed to be a river. I’m guessing this will be in the 5,000 to 10,000 friend range, but as I adapt it should grow. I’ll be growing my group of friends by at least 500 per day for the next X days to see how this works out.

I’m way beyond the point where I can pick out closely related friend’s tweets from the flow without software assistance. This also means it’s impossible to re-route the updates to a phone when away (my wife is happy about this ;). My solution has been to create a second account used only for following family and co-workers. My updates are still sent from the main sol account.

A latent side-effect of making all these new friends and finding all these smart people has been that they (likely, you) want to follow me too. Approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of the people I’ve followed return the favor and follow me. If you’re in to marketing don’t count on this lasting – I’m sure unscrupulous groups will use this against us and we’ll get a lot more careful in who we befriend.

For now, for those I’m connecting with, it’s a pleasure to meet you and thank you for making us all smarter.

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?

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…

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

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.

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?

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.