Category: 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

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

Posted on by Sol Young with 4 Comments

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

Links: Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4 – http://twitter.com/sol – https://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.

Posted in Education, Etiquette, Flow, QA, Social Networking, Twitter, XMPP

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