A YouTube video spread like wildfire around the iofy office today…
At a startup you look forward to the day when people recognize your product and respond with positive words. At iofy we’ve received many many positive letters, thank you notes and feedback, but this is the first video we’ve found reviewing our audiobook chip product. It was entirely unsolicited.
386 – 7 minutes:
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.
The start of something very cool…
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
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.
Today is the day for geeks to go out and find sites like ThinkGeek which have terrific April Fools day pages. For me, April 1st has an interesting story.
At age 17 in 1994 I had been running my own small ceramics manufacturing business for three years. I bought a brand new Mazda MX3 with my own money on December 31st, 1993 (my birthday). On April 1st, 1994, I totaled the car by taking a corner at a great rate of speed on a gravel country road.
The crash was noteworthy in that the car was jumped off a cliff, hit a giant oak tree, sideways, in mid-air before falling the remaining distance. I walked away without a scratch. My passengers, two of which weren’t wearing seat-belts, all walked away with nothing more than bruises (the two in the back seat bonked heads from making out at the time).
Take your corners a little slower today… Calling a family member and convincing him or her it isn’t a prank is hard to do!
After doing my flow entries on Twitter I decided to take it to the people on the street…
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.