Category: Twitter

The tools we use – I’m not Scoble yet – I was

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Chimp

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.

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Posted in Blogging, Flickr, iPhone, Photography, Twitter

Blog integration of Twitter starred items

Posted on by Sol Young with 14 Comments

Dave Winer has been asking in Twitter for a way to incorporate specific twitters/tweets in to his blog over at scripting.com. My suggestion is to use the starred items feature (Favorites) on Twitter.

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.

Posted in Blogging, Twitter, Web Services

iPhoto, Flickr and Twitter – tie the last two together

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

iPhotoI’ve finally made the leap away from being a directory-o-holic and landed in iPhoto from iLife 08. It does the organization automatically (“Browse Package Contents” in Finder.)

Flickr 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.

TwitterWhich 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?

Posted in Blogging, Flickr, iPhone, Jailbreak, Photography, Twitter

In the name of Twitternomics and style

Posted on by Sol Young with 1 Comment

http://twitter.com/solSo I got to thinking the other day about all the peeps on Twitter who have slick, short, names. Most I follow on Twitter follow this convention (ev, al3x, jack, biz, dick, iofy, to name a few). It’s not just a status symbol on the service, but also a matter of resource utilization.

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 ;)

Posted in Blogging, Etiquette, Twitter

Mentality of Twitter

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Lately I’ve re-discovered twitter as an outlet and connection to pretty much everybody. It’s a slick way to communicate what you’re doing without wasting time. Friends from across the country can stay up to speed on what’s going on in each other’s lives. Professional acquaintances stay in touch with achievements. It’s a very social social-network.

Twitter

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.

Posted in Blogging, Twitter