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

Video update about the Philadelphia Geek Dinner on August 5th, 8pm.

Having some fun with the iPod Nike+ and Nokia GPS at the same time while running down to the John Kelly statue along the Schuylkill. While stretching decided to shoot a quick video (didn’t Qik).

The results for the Nike+ are extremely accurate. Since the iPod measures pauses, I believe both devices were pretty much in sync.

Results:

• Nike+
• Nokia SportsTracker

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!

On June 28th, 2007 I waited in line for the iPhone (and spent 3 days talking to AT&T to get it activated). The experience was a good one… The stench of rotten trash from a nearby McDonalds dumpster and seeing a full-grown man get beaten by his girlfriend and her purse for spending the $500 are favorite memories.

Normally I’d be all over the line parties (seriously)… This year I slept in and am happy to wait for it to arrive in the mail. Maybe next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A quick post for T-Mobile subscribers trying to figure out their voicemail number. I just picked up a Nokia N82 and had to set this manually. It took a decent chunk of time to find it on T-Mobile’s site and I don’t want you to have to waste your time doing the same…

The magic number: +1 805 MESSAGE (+1 805 637-7243).

Why you should use their US number…

For the longest time I would just dial my own number and it would go straight to voicemail. Works great if you’re on T-Mo’s US service. If you’re roaming, especially abroad, you’ll incur double roaming charges plus international calling (roaming call while dialing out, long distance calling abroad to a US number, and another roaming call for the forwarding back to your roaming phone). Dialing the 805-MESSAGE number results in a single roaming call.

This video was a fun experiment in video blogging.

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

Hey, I’d like my phone back. If you found it, please do the right thing and email phone@solyoung.com or ship it.

I’m not in Philadelphia this weekend - got out of town! For those in the area and enjoying the city, here’s some links on how to take part in the biggest Independence Day celebration in America.

You read that right. Philadelphia has the biggest Independence Day celebration. It is the birthplace and we’ve got Independence Hall. Fireworks are launched behind the Philadelphia Art Museum over the Schuylkill River.

This year the concert on the Ben Franklin Parkway, at the base of the Art Museum steps, is headlined by five time Grammy winner, John Legend.

- Best links to help you today -

America’s Birthday - Sunoco’s sponsor page

GoPhila - Best resource, especially for fireworks and evening concert details

Philly dot com - Events Schedule for 4th of July

City Search - Additional resource with links to restaurants and shops

Enjoy!

I wrote a quick note a few days ago about Roz Savage and her efforts to cross the Pacific Ocean on a row boat (she’s doing quite well and just wrote her day 39 entry). It’s an extremely cool adventure.

Since then I’ve been catching the daily entry on the blog at http://rozsavage.com/blog/.  Something pretty cool has surfaced in her writing, at least to me… Audiobooks! She’s got an iPod with 300+ audiobooks and has been commenting on them along the way (check out day 38, day 19, day 9, day 4, etc).

She’s generating podcasts with Leo Laporte as well.

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.

Galina and I are heading to Bozeman, Montana for a family reunion in a couple days. Family will be flying in from all over the place… Some from Florida, a large portion from California (my home state), and obviously some in Montana.

Should be a gorgeous locale for the 4th of July weekend!

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.

.

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.

Just got an opt-in email from BlackBerry on the new BlackBerry Bold. Not sure if this is a “keep you hungry” note or more along the lines of “we’re almost launching.”

In the email:

“Stay tuned for more updates - we’ll let you know when service providers in your region begin offering the exciting new BlackBerry Bold smartphone!”

Now it’s down to “in your region” - no mention of carrier names and obviously no official release date. Curious if we’ll see a July 11th iPhone 3G vs. BlackBerry Bold cage match.

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense

Just a couple ideas on GPS, tied to proximity of a mobile phone…

• Proximity based ads (walk by Banana Republic and get a coupon via SMS)
• Location based music (Last.fm channels playing artists from your location)
• Mobile OnStar

Think of your favorite services on the net and add a GPS component… It probably enhances it.

view in Google Earth

This morning’s run was notable. Honeysuckle and other sweet flowers filled the air next to the Schuykill River… Far better than the expected dead fish, exhaust, and port-a-potties.