Category: Prediction

Flow – Day 9 – Open it up

Posted on by Sol Young with 2 Comments

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.

Posted in Education, Facebook, Flickr, Flow, Pownce, Prediction, Social Networking, Twitter, Web Services, XMPP

‘Flow’ – day 7 – My Twitter thousands

Posted on by Sol Young with 3 Comments

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).

Posted in Education, Flow, iofy, Prediction, Social Networking, Software Development, Twitter, Web Services, XMPP

Salaries way up in Asian IT, articles pointing to brain drain

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Keyboard

Something that has piqued my interest in the last year are trends for technology professionals overseas, especially Asia. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I believe it’s important to have an understanding of where the worlds employment markets are…

ZDNet Asia is more frequently featuring stories of significant salary hikes and movement. Local papers and blogs describe brain drain between Asian countries.

This is all interesting because in the dot com bubble days of the late 90’s until about 2003, articles pointed to a brain drain of talent from Asia to the US. Now we’re seeing talent shortages there as countries attempt to equalize the ex/im of intelligent personel. It would make sense that if salaries rise beyond what American firms are willing to pay, we’ll see a reverse brain drain.

Posted in Asia, Hiring, Prediction

Twitter ‘Flow’ – Day 4 – Application Ideas and Metrics

Posted on by Sol Young with 7 Comments

Day 4 brings inspiration – this type of stream is like the Internet before Google…

A Flowing Pipe

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):Continue Reading

Posted in eBooks, Education, Flow, Prediction, Twitter, XMPP

Integrate an announcement service (Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku) in your next release

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Pitchfork Tines Bronze

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.

Posted in Blogging, Etiquette, Jaiku, Pownce, Prediction, solyoung.com, Toilet