After doing my flow entries on Twitter I decided to take it to the people on the street…
A lot of people asked how to order their own… You can get one for $20.00 at reactee.com. They ship pretty fast. I ordered on a Friday and received it on Monday (today).
UPDATE: I signed up for an affiliate program with them after getting the shirt. I’ll keep a tally and update this blog entry with the number of people buying them.
I completely dig Scoble’s method of using Twitter. I’ve been wanting to consume mass tweets and watch information pass… It’s simply not possible to ‘flow’ when you’re using apps like Twitterific and only follow a hundred people (this setup is great for smaller numbers).
I’d been using Twitterific for a while, but it was clunky and limited to an update every few minutes. This required scrolling backwards in time and seeing what people had written as I broke one hundred friends. It was neither real-time or indicitive of a large enough audience.
Twitter supports XMPP (Jabber/GTalk). I’ve set up Adium with a GTalk account and switched my Twitter connections to update to the IM account. This has made it so all tweets are in real-time. Suddenly Twitter seems terribly slow as tweets scroll by as a trickle.
I’ve gone from a hundred to five hundred connections and it still seems slow – I’ll keep growing it. The major drawback to this setup is that you can’t consume it at all times. Your phone would blow up if you had this traffic going to SMS (it’d be great if Twitter offered separate SMS and IM settings). My personal preference is to follow the flow in the mornings during RSS reading and in the evenings while writing a blog post or other catch-up activities.
Wild thought… I wonder if the number of simultanious connections in the ‘flow’ will become a sign of one’s intelligence?
As developers, if you’re building services your customers can share, you need to plan on announcement integration.
I keep thinking back to February when I wanted a better way to integrate Twitter. Others wonder about Twitter being a source of lost content, as Cartoon Barry describes well. If a visitor is on my site I want to ensure they can consume everything they’re looking for without bouncing. If they prefer to consume the content elsewhere that’s fine… but they shouldn’t miss it here.
Dave Weiner was looking for a way to integrate a daily links entry back to his scripting.com (he was posting to Twitter and skipping the daily post). Dave started using the prefix “!” so he could have a service read his Twitter feed and build a daily post. This is a good start, but my thought is that this isn’t the way to go. My ‘starred items’ idea is also not the right approach. Both are moving from Twitter to the blog. Twitter is the announcement service and if we can automate its announcing of what we’re doing, we don’t have to do anything special.
Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc are announcement services. Their power is in providing an API other services can hook. The best solution is to intelligently connect Twitter to what you use and to encourage the services you use to integrate with Twitter. Or if you’re building sites and services, do it so your customers get this benefit.
The web-world I see in the next year offers announcement service integration. When I find a site I like, not only does StumbleUpon or Google Reader suck it up and share it for me, but an announcement is fired through my service(s) of choice. When I make changes to Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn profiles, an optional announcement is fired outside their gardens.
This approach doesn’t neglect the social networking aspect of these announcement services. A response should be pulled back as a comment, if available/applicable. All of the announcement services have response API calls. The social aspect of these services is retained and the content becomes more valuable as it is connected with its target.
Think efficiency and value for your customers – Bring announcement to an automated state.
This weekend my wife and I got an early start Friday to finish off our bathroom’s tile. I’ve been photo-blogging it to Flickr and periodically putting up notes on Twitter. The last couple weekends have been similar, doing plumbing, floor tile, prep work, etc.
Though there is so much to do (more blog posts, tons of iofy priorities, and building in a certain web service), this is still satisfying work… Something everyone 1/2 interested in real estate should do at least once. I’m a software engineer and dev team manager because I love to build things. I think other developers should feel this way too.
More pics after the jump…
Google Reader has a great feature for sharing articles. It’s been a terrific way to share interesting and pertinent information affecting iofy and to give like-minded folks easy access to my favorite RSS feeds.
You can access my shared page here.
Or pull the feed here.
And with any luck, a drop of the most recent items will be on the sidebar of my blog… Sharing is caring.