Flow – Day 9 – I switched to iChat for Twitter XMPP

iChat Count 386 – 7 minutes

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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.

iChat AppleScript

The start of something very cool…

Flow – Day 9 – Open it up

I’m used to the speed of the flow and it’s slow. It’s time to open it up and look for five-figures…

Useful link: flow entries

Follow me on Twitter: sol

Open it up

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.

I got my Twitter t-shirt today…

After doing my flow entries on Twitter I decided to take it to the people on the street…
Follow me on Twitter

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.

‘Flow’ – day 7 – My Twitter thousands

Day 7 – The flow rises, but as it gets faster I just want more… I wonder what Scoble‘s flow is like…

Here are my previous flow entries so you’re up to speed:

Volcano Magma

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).

This morning’s bugs with getting in to the ‘flow’ – starting day 5

Day 5 – 7:30AM EDT, 10 TPM (Tweets Per Minute)…

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

Waterbug Faucet

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.