Identi.ca ‘dents’ vs. Twitter ‘tweets’ - Twitter Wins Again
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 | AIR, Beta, News, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Many different services have been touted as the “Twitter replacement” recently, including FriendFeed, Pownce, Plurk and even the Google-owned Jaiku. All enter the scene with much fan-fare, typically gaining temporary popularity as Twitter users migrate over to check out the new service, ultimately returning to Twitter after giving up on having to build a new community/following. So far FriendFeed has been the closest in becoming a viable alternative to the ever-growing Twitter community in that it allows for users to comment and track posts to a variety of different social media services (including Twitter). It’s basically a way to combine all your social-media/blogging habits into one stationary form for easy cataloguing of conversations. Conversations? If you’re like most people, upon reading that word you are either scrathing your head or are skipping the rest of the post to hit the “Post Comment” button - Twitter doesn’t allow for traditional “conversations!” Well, I hate to admit this, but FriendFeed enables you to not only hold a conversation by pinning all related comments to a post, but also export them in a variety of ways including a custom RSS feed. Because of features like this, bloggers have been continually talking about the merits behind FriendFeed vs. Twitter. When Twitter goes down, people scamper over to FriendFeed…when they succumb to information overload, they scamper back to Twitter. Now there’s a new dog on the circuit - Identi.ca.
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AT&T Allowing Home Activation For New iPhone 3G!
Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Apple, Business, News, Twitter | 2 Comments
Contrary to what AT&T and Apple have both been telling everyone, some stores are quietly selling iPhone 3G’s to customers and telling them to activate it at home via iTunes. A massive server overload this morning has rendered Apple’s Activation Servers useless at this moment, however representatives from Apple have already acknowledged this and are working to get them back online.
Until the activation servers go back online, anyone trying to purchase a new iPhone will find out that they have a “bricked” version - only allowing for Emergency calls as it will not have been synched with the wireless account.
Users trying to upgrade their 1st generation iPhones or iPod Touches will also “brick” their device, making it useless until Apple fixes their servers.
News of this, along with updates from stores all across the country, has been widely talked about on Twitter.com. A quick and easy way to search through ‘the noise’ on Twitter is to use a free service called Summize.com. Summize enables you to easily search for specific topics and arranges them based on the time/date that they were ‘tweeted.’ For example, to see all the messages posted to Twitter regarding the iphone activation servers, search on Summize for “iphone + activation.”
Apple should have been able to predict that there would have been a heavy strain on the servers with thousands of users trying to register, synch, and activate their Apple products simultaneously. This makes you think twice about using Apple’s server hardware in any production environment….bad move on their part.
Yahoo Wants You To Stalk Your Friends - Introducing Fire Eagle
Friday, March 7th, 2008 | API, Beta, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, their first Rails-based web-app that enables you to share your location with other users/services in a variety of ways. It’s still in “beta” mode, but they were smart and came up with a clever way for you to instantly get an invite - By using an already-made mashup incorporating the instant updates. In this case, they chose to use Twitter to interact w/ their api. And after looking at the sample code, it’s pretty easy to setup too. In order to get an instant invite to check-out this beta-release for yourself:
1) First you must have a twitter account (which if you’re reading this blog i’m assuming you already do, even if it was only used once to see what the whole “Twitter” thing was about), you will then need to “follow” DangerDay. That can be done by clicking on the follow link in his profile page or by simply twittering “follow dangerday”
Danger Day will then immediately return the favor by following your twitter account as well, thus enabling you to be able to direct message each other.
2) Now that you’re following DangerDay, you need to get an invite, so next up is direct messaging dangerday with the word “invite”. Once again, this can be done by twittering “d dangerday invite”
DangerDay will then respond with a link for you to follow, enabling you to sign-up on the FireEagle page for an account…what a nice guy
3) Now once you’ve got your account squared away, why not test it out with dangerday? In order to update him as well as the entire Fire Eagle Service as to your location, all you need to do is direct message him again with “u location_here”.. for example: “d dangerday u Atlanta, GA” - that will let dangerday AND Fire Eagle know that I’m currently in Atlanta, GA.
This service, like all other social-dependent ones, will live or die based on whether or not developers get involved and come up with interesting mashups. Right now there are already popular sites that could benefit from being able to twitter or IM an updated location (or be automatically fed coordinates via GPS enabled phones), a good example would be the social travel site Dopplr. This dependency on developers adopting their free Yahoo service isn’t something that I feel is lost on the guys behind this project either - they’re using standardized, open-source tools like OAuth that coders are already familiar with. If they make it easy to incorporate, then they’ve got a better chance of someone using it in their application, even if just for fun. If it was incorporated into a web-app, just using the user’s IP would result in knowing their location and being able to update the service….so the possibilities are endless.
It’s already been incorporated into Facebook so that you can easily stalk follow your friends, I’m sure they’re always just dying to know where I am at all times. Although I will say this - A service like this could come in handy if you were part of a big group trying to meet-up in a crowded location (i.e. somewhere in Austin this weekend for SXSW). One SMS sent to Fire Eagle and then all your buddies would know where you were (i.e. “Already at the bar waiting for you guys to get here!”). And if your phone has GPS enabled, I wouldn’t have even had to send the text, Fire Eagle gives you the option of letting your phone auto-update their service with your whereabouts. Now to find out where another user is, you would only have to use something as simple as the twitter or AIM example from above. So to show you how this works, let’s go back to our good friend dangerday. Direct message him with “q brentter” and it’ll respond with my most recent location (for you non-twitters, that means you’d type: “d dangerday q brentter” but without the quotes).
With the recent release of the iPhone SDK, I can only imagine this service being experimented with alongside the new framework - Erica Sadun in fact has already released an application for your iPhone called firefindme that does just that but without using GPS. Instead she uses another Yahoo service called Zone Tag, which was initially released as a way to geo-tag your Flickr photos based on specific “location tags” that you would assign them (or if you had a phone w/ built-in GPS, it would automatically do it for you).
So far the Developer section of the Fire Eagle site has been steadily growing, with it currently showcasing quick starts, examples api code (right now though only in javascript, php, perl, python, and ruby), and options on various open-source ways to authenticate user sessions. It also looks like they’re hoping to build an application gallery/showcase into the site.
This has some pretty good potential, although personally I feel it’s somewhat of a stretch for it to be utilized in anything major.
And i’m not even going to get into how privacy goes through the window if your phone is sending a webservice updates on where you are. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb shares similar concerns about the idea of allowing others to track your every movement (You are given the option of it not automatically pinging your GPS enabled phone to update your location, but just like when Facebook announced their new “mini-feed service,” it just gives give me a the creeps)
[source for some of this information came from Jesse Newland's Blog - SoylentFoo]
Video of Twitter Broken Down Into Plain English
Thursday, March 6th, 2008 | Twitter, Video | No Comments
Found via one of Chris Brogan’s tweets, this is a shining example of what happens when you realize the need to explain a social trend/community, have a camera handy, and enjoy making collages/paper cut-outs.
Created by the folks over at CommonCraft, this is a great 2.5 minute video explaining Twitter - from it’s beginnings to it’s common usage in today’s society and more importantly, why you should be using it too. Really nicely done, this doesn’t look like it was just thrown together in a few minutes, it even sounds like they put some effort into making the narrator’s voice come out clean and crisp…i.e. actual production values… As far as I’m concerned, this is the new PSA for Twitter.
Nicely done.
You can read more about it and even see some of the great comments left on their original post - CommonCraft Explains Twitter in Plain English
Botanicalls Twitter DIY - Your Plants Are Now Online
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 | Mashup, Twitter, Unusual | No Comments
Yes, The title is true, now you can stay updated on the health of your plants via Twitter. From the people who enabled your plant the ability to talk to you on the phone (yes, this is no joke) - Botanicalls, they have now incorporated it with a DIY setup for incorporating Twitter. For those of you thinking this is a joke, being able to actually “hear your plant” talk to you is all done via a DIY setup that incorporates PHP, some light soldering, the open-source Asterisk phone system, and a solid afternoon. For information on how to get your plants talking, first visit their website and read how - www.Botanicalls.com. Then continue on to incorporate Twitter.
Well, if you followed the link above and were successful, it is now time to take it a step further. Why not let your plants automatically twitter you when they need to be watered? They’ve even made it so that you’ll receive insta-gratification after feeding it with a polite thank you, letting you know that your plant appreciates all the work you’ve done setting up the communication system. For instructions on incorporating twitter with the Botanicalls system, go to www.botanicalls.com/twitter/ and follow their instructions (step by step photos are included as well).
Pretty interesting usage of twitter. This is the result of people who have way to much time on their hands, love their plants, and are addicted to twitter…. that aside, it’s pretty cool if you ask me. It could also be considered the ultimate “mash-up” - plants + phone + instant messaging + open-source + twitter.
If you want to see it in action, here’s their flickr page, to add to it just tag your photo with botanicalls or botanicallstwitter.
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