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:
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).
