Incremental Blogger

Twitter hasn’t been runing all that smoothly this week. The Twitter Blog admits this. At this time, they’re not sure what the problem is.

I feel for the Twitter team. Here’s hoping they figure out what the problem is. Their blog says they’ll be putting in more instrumentation to try to determine what’s going on. Sounds reasonable. I’m guessing that as they peek and poke at the system that it changes the behaviour though. That’s a total guess. I’m also guessing that someone’s not going to get much sleep tonight. Hang in there!

Most people know nowadays to be careful with what you blog. Whatever you post is likely going to be out there for a long, long time. Long past the time that you thought this or that was so important or cute that you just had to share what was on your mind.

For the most part people self-regulate themselves in blogs now. Makes sense. They’re usually signing their name to each and every post.

After today’s egging event with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, I started browsing around some of the comments. I was expecting to read quite a few highly negative comments about Microsoft on Gizmodo and the like. Sure enough some pretty obnoxious comments were sprinkled about. What’s always so interesting about situations like this is that people post these comments annonymously. Again, makes sense, since most of the time they’d never make them in public. Only when they are cloaked in annonymity or wrapped in the masses of others are they eager to make their claims.

Then I decided to check Twitter, via Tweetscan, to see what people were saying. Sure enough, there were similar, albeit shorter, comments that I’d read elsewhere. But there’s a big difference here. A few people are using their real names or identities that are easily discoverable with a little Googling.

I’m not sure if these people are really thinking through what they’re doing. Do they really want their names or reputations as a designer, IT person, or whatever aligned with someone that stands up and throws eggs at a presenter in a classroom setting? You want the next company you pitch for a job, or to sell your next venture to (several people have links to sites that they work at or have founded on their Twitter profiles), to read this? And further, is what you’re saying really the position you want to defend in five years? Ten? To your kids?

Maybe for a handful of you the answer will be a resounding yes, but I expect for most it’s not something you’d really want to have hang around.

And that’s the thing about Twitter. Whatever you say, you can’t delete (for most of us that make our Tweets public anyway). That’s a bit different than on a blog where you can’t take back what you just posted. Tweet something and it’s going to be archived in multiple places and searchable via Google for, well, as long as Google is around. So my suggestion: Think a bit before you post.

Every now and then I take inventory about which products and services I really use and rely upon.

In terms of the latest trending products, my list is pretty thin.

At the top is my blog, which you’re reading here. It’s still my number one way of archiving my thoughts and experiences that other can read. It’s meant to be public and shareable.

Next up is Twitter. Some call it a micro-blogging service, some liken it to IM. Both are right. It’s a must have for pushing out small posts as well as keeping track of what’s going on.

In third place are social news sites, such as TechMeme and Thredr. TechMeme I think most people know about. It clusters conversations taking place in the blogosphere and various media sources. Thredr is something I started, which is like TechMeme, but tracks topics that TechMeme doesn’t cover, such as news around R/C vehicles, Apple, Tablet PCs, Microsoft developers, digital photography, and soon Robotics. I check each of these three of four times a day to see what’s going on.

I’m also a fan of video. So I often check what’s going on with Qik as well as a couple other sites, though I’ve noticed that I’m doing this less and less. I’m getting too busy I think.

What’s most notable at least to me, is that Facebook doesn’t make my list. It’s too much of a walled garden to be interesting and there’s tons of junk applets that make it too MySpace-ish for me. I wouldn’t notice if Facebook fell off the edge of the earth. I’m not alone in this. Many of my friends that were giving Facebook a try have pretty much stopped using it too. No doubt students will still use it because of its strong social networking value, but for the rest of us, it’s not all that.

Likewise, I gave FriendFeed a short spin. Outside of the fact that I could see it becoming the epicenter for many online conversations, I don’t have that much desire to sit and chat and page through lists of….stuff.

Lastly, I might throw in an honorable mention to Linked In. Whereas Facebook reminds me of a highly organized high school event (that would place MySpace in the middle school social rung I guess), Linked In has maintained a fairly professional feel about it. I don’t use it all that much, but every now and then I get a link request and visit the site. It does maintain a network for me that’s a step above my email contact list in terms of who I might know. My email list is still more valuable overall, but still, I see how Linked In fits in.

What’s all this mean? Who knows. Since I often guess wrong on trends like this, I’ll use reverse psychology and predict that Facebook is going to be acquired for more money than any other startup and that Twitter and TechMeme–both services which I think have the greater value–will continue on their independent paths.

Update: Robert Scoble argues the locked-in feeling I get with Facebook has great value to Microsoft.

Talk is getting interesting over the idea of decentralizing the concept of Twitter. Could RSS be an element to the solution?

Is that Live Mesh I smell in the distance?

Beginning around the early 2000s I was a strong advocate for applying the Google test when hiring people to join a startup. Simply put, the Google test was nothing more than a Google search to see what you could discover about a person online. The more you could find, the better–assuming it was information you wanted to hear. On the other hand, if you couldn’t find one drop of information, then I argued this person probably wasn’t someone you wanted onboard. Today, lots of HR departments routinely check Google about prospective hires. It’s common sense now. It wasn’t back then.

I’m beginning to wonder if the “hire test” now includes a check of Twitter. In other words, if you’re trying to decide whether to bring someone onboard in a startup, should you look to Twitter? I’m leaning towards yes, however, I doubt that the test will be quite as useful as the Google test this time around.

The difference is that there’s a lot of noise on Twitter. Much of what’s battered about on Twitter doesn’t say much. In what ways, however, might Twitter be useful for getting a glance at someone’s online prowess?

1) Read through their tweets to see what they talk about. Is it all about drinking and partying or playing golf or some other leisure activity? Or is there talk about industry trends and news. The latter is more compelling. What’s the demeanor? Is it matter of fact? Confrontational?

2) How many followers/following are there? What’s the ratio? In terms of total numbers, a few hundred followers or following is not too bad. Numbers into the thousands or tens of thousands become more interesting. If the following number is huge, and the ratio fo followers to following is very small, then the person is probably reaching out to many and not getting a lot of return signal. It’s worthwhile re-checking their tweets. Are they essentially spamming people? That’s not good. Generally, a high number of followers is good. There must be some interest in what they are saying (though as spam followers continue to grow this guesstimate will begin to fail.) In the ideal–at least to me–you’d like to see a ratio of followers/following that’s close to one. So if the person has a lot of followers and if following a lot, then you might assume that they are influential and possibly good at reaching out–both which are great traits to have in a startup when you’re trying to spread the word. A ratio close to one and numbers at least in the hundreds, is where things begin to get interesting, but also may indicate that they may have trouble breaking out of a network that they belong to. It’s a tough call.

3) How often does the person tweet? Once, ever? Once a day or so? Dozens of times a day? I’m not sure what the frequency of tweeting says, other than the person’s acceptance of the Twitter concept. A more important measure, might be how often other people respond to what the person says or asks.

4) How long have they been using Twitter? If they started within a few months of Twitter’s debut it may suggest they are quite the early adopter.

5) How often is their Twitter name mentioned by others in replies or in general? A lot of mentions is probably an indication that they are active in the Twitter community.

I’m sure there are some other Twitter indicators. Maybe you have a couple.

I’m still a strong believer in checking Google first, but coming up a fast second is Twitter–at least in the startup world.

I’ve been using Twitter a lot over the last couple months and I’ve come to a few conclusions.

First, although Twitter has many similarities to an instant messaging app–in that people can use it to send and receive short messages with their friends and family–it’s not really one. Why? Not exactly because of how it’s implemented, but rather how it is used. IM is more of a terse conversational tool. Twitter is more like a 10-second limited megaphone. People most often use it to broadcast short bits of info. There really are few conversations going on within it.

So in practice Twitter may have more to do with micro-blogging than anything else. In fact, quite a few people broadcast announcements about what they’re blogging or broadcasting. Yep, there’s that megaphone phenomena again.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t mind the megaphone approach to Twittering. I often click on links people post. That could be just me, but it would be interesting to know how the numbers pan out. My guess is that people click on only a few of the many links posted and those that are popular are probably from well-followed Twitterers. So if you’re thinking that you would do well to use Twitter to gain attention about what you’re doing, think again. It probably won’t.

Twitter’s popularity and API has also lead to a bit of an impending mess. There are more and more sites that are aggregating Twitter content that if you Google for something that you know is unique on Twitter (try Googling for thredr, for instance which I’ve mentioned a few times on Twitter) you’ll find lots of duplicate content. This is rapidly devaluing the content.

Also on the spamming side, there are more and more “fake” Twitterers using the service. These people or bots are interested in promoting some product or other. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of Spitters (SPam twITTER) keeps going up to the point that we’ll track who’s following us with about as much gusto as watching trackbacks on our blogs.

Along these lines, if a person wants to follow me, I often check them out to see if I want to follow them too. The Spitters know this. But I’m getting more cautious with whom I check. I don’t want to give the Spitters the pleasure of even checking their info–whatever it is.

This brings me to another issue: What affect does the followers/following ratio have with what I think about someone on Twitter. If I’m interested in specific content that a person Twitters about, then the ratio means nothing. However, if it’s someone I don’t know, but a person I’m interested in broadly following, I’m more apt to pay attention to them (at least for awhile) if their followers list is large. The following number doesn’t mean too much too me at this point. However, if their following number is very high and the followers number is small, then I’m very unlikely to follow them. A small ratio like this makes me wonder if they’re setting up to spam people.

Finally, I’ve blogged in the past about how I’d like to see Twitter add other content types besides 140 character messages. It would be great to see images, audio, video, ink and the like. But how might this affect the quality of Twitter and how people use it? Overall I think it would help make Twitter more valuable–at least to me. I live in more than a text world and I’m not a heavy text messaging user. I realize that many others see it differently and admire the lowest-common-denominator nature of Twitter. These other content types could lead to some problems though if the Spitters take over, but in some ways I’d rather see the content than tiny links that I don’t know where they go to. The key here is that for the most part the people I follow I trust in terms of the content they publish.

Dave Winer revisits the idea of building a twitter clone–inspired by the frequent twitter outages as well as the company’s lack of progress in adding new features to twitter (such as not-textual media support).

It sounds like others are thinking similar things. Actually, it may not just be twitter’s growing pains as the main inspiration here–but in larger part its success. Success sparks competition.

I’m not counting twitter out at this time, however. They do have a large network of key users. I do, though, look forward to what other people might build. I just hope that whoever builds out the next infrastructure that they have somewhat of an open platform. There’s so much I’ve wanted to do with ink–particularly in mainstream messaging apps, such as Live Messenger, but the hooks haven’t been made available. The mindset is still one of walled gardens left over from decade-old fights with AOL and the like. The world has changed–if it ever was that way anyhow.

I look forward to twitter or any newcomers addressing this huge expandability opportunity. It’s long overdue.

There’s been much speculation over the last several weeks (or has it been months) as to why twitter keeps going down. Well, we decided to dig deeper to see what’s been going on and through our extensive investigative reporting we’ve uncovered the real reasons for twitter’s hiccups. And as you might imagine there isn’t just one reason. There are in fact ten. Here they are:

1. Everyone knows that Robert Scoble has almost 5,000 followers on twitter. Well, it turns out that he finally decided to reach out to all his following friends in a meaningful way and send a thank-you tweet to each and every one of them. The result? Twitter tanked.

2. Not satisfied with his follower count, Robert Scoble then tried to add the five thousand and first follower. Twitter choked. Face it Robert, there’s a hard limit on the Internet: 5,000 contacts is it. That’s all you get. Period.

3. After being dissatisfied with twitter’s limits, Robert decided to take his followers and go elsewhere. So he ran a script to export all his contacts. Twitter blew its stack.

4. You know that 140 character limit for tweets? Well, there’s unfortunately an off-by-one bug in the code. It really can only handle 139 characters. Any more than that and you know what. Unfortunately, Dave Winer’s Club140.org keeps hitting this nasty little gotcha.

5. You know that friendly little bird on the “twitter service is down” page? It’s not simply a logo or graphic that some engineer threw together. No. It’s a clue as to what really goes on behind twitter’s server doors. Here’s the low-down: It’s a little known fact that actually twitter relies on a flock of parakeets to repeat each and every message users type to their servers. A speech recognition system captures each tweet and then relays it to its destination. Believe it or not. Why all the complexity? Security. By decoupling the message-handling servers twitter figures it’s virus proof. Unfortunately, there’s the avian flu. More down time.

6. Twitter goes Green, then red faced. Company executives decided that they’d join the race to a Greener world. First they contemplated solar panels to power their server farm, but this idea was nixed since Google has those already. Eventually the marketing team came up with a better idea: Peddle power. Employees now bike to work, lunch, breaks, and everywhere else on generator-equipped bicycles. The only problem? The extension cords back to the servers aren’t long enough and keep coming unplugged. It’s the little things.

7. Twitter engineers were so enthralled by the iPhone that they decided to build a distributed messaging network all out of iPhones. It wasn’t easy. To get the computational power they needed, it took 1.4 million of those touch-friendly wonders. So now you know where all those iPhones went. Mystery solved. Unfortunately, the team is having activation problems, hence twitter keeps going down. Go figure.

8. Money. Yes, follow the money. In the Web 2.0 world you have to think different and twitter is. In a bid to raise more VC money they figure they need to create a need. And to that end, they are. They keep bringing down twitter to demonstrate that they need more money to keep it up.

9. People often say twitter is instant messaging (IM) on the web. Most people that use it say, this isn’t so. Well, it’s actually true. In fact, at its core, twitter is simply IM. More specifically, Twitter is built on top of Windows Live Messenger. And all those twitter-outs? It’s not twitter’s fault. It’s Live Messenger causing the outages. Now you know.

10. It’s my fault too. I’m so enamered with twitter, that I’ve been trying all manners of ways to leverage this most excellent tool. In fact, I’ve downloaded or run so many twitter clients, twitter aggregators, and twitter tools–searching for the ultimate set–that I’ve managed to overwhelm twitter more times than I want to admit. I’m so embarrassed. Sorry

Well, there you have it. Twitter has been going through some significant growing pains, but as you can see it’s only temporary. Everything is fixable. Good to know, because I have one more TechCrunch-certified twitter app I want to try…

I was a too busy with work yesterday to realize that Twitter was down for much of the day. Actually, come to think of it, maybe I got extra work done because Twitter was down. Hmmm.

Anyway, I do miss Twitter when it’s down. Along with blogging it’s one way that I keep in track with others online–people I don’t know all that well, but I find fascinating to follow. It’s also one of the channels I use for public micro-conversations with others, such as Warner Crocker, Rob Bushway, and even my sister, Lora. Simply put, Twitter has become a natural part of my online consumption.

So when it goes down, you can often hear me grumble. I miss it. Others do too.

Word is that the Twitter team has tried hard to improve their infrastructure in order to handle their traffic better and, I’m sure, be more robust. I can imagine building out a service such as Twitter is a significant task.

But I’m with Dave Winer here, after repeated outages, us users begin to wonder. What’s going on? Is there something we can help with? Is there something we can do?

Dave suggests that the next step is to open up some communication–maybe a “what’s going on page” and inviting a small group of community tech folks in for some dialog. In the era of blogging, this seems like a good idea. However, particularly for a small company this might be a really good suggestion. Why? It’s a rather simple principle. Because sometimes when you have to explain something, it helps you streamline the thought process and ideas. Further, with all the tech talent out there, someone might have some good suggestions–suggestions not particularly on more things to do (there are always those), but suggestions on things not do to. Things that would help them trim the daunting problem down and keep it even more manageable–something more scaled to the current size of Twitter.

I hope something not too intrusive can be worked out here.

Vasanth Dharmaraj is working on an ink-to-twitter app. Looking good. Rather than keep the post in ink, Vasanth converts the ink to text and then posts the resulting text.

You might ask, why not use the TIP (Tablet Input Panel)? Simple. Not all apps support the TIP, like my favorite twittering app, Snitter. Snitter is written using Adobe’s Air technology and although it provides cross-platform support, it doesn’t make for a great Tablet experience–the TIP doesn’t work (well, the TIP keyboard works, but when using ink my handwriting doesn’t get to the input field).

What we really need is Twitter to support content other than ink. Dave Winer has been one of the strongest advocates of this. I realize that non-text messages don’t fit the SMS model, but I think Twitter is so much more than that. There’s been talk of creating a more robust Twitter-like service–if so, this could be our opportunity to add support for ink.

I installed snitter this evening as an alternative to GTalk for tracking tweets on twitter.

Overall snitter does it’s job well. I would like to see addition though. It would be nice if snitter walked urls to see where they point. If it’s to a flickr page, why not pull the image and show a preview thumbnail.

GTalk does this if the URL is to flickr directly, but unfortunately twitter likes tinyurls so GTalk’s thumbnail feature doesn’t do me any good.

Ian Betteridge responds to the idea of adding functionality to Twitter as Dave Winer and I have been advocating.

I’ll say it again, the key to extending Twitter is to do it in a fashion that does not degrade the experience of those who are using it with an SMS model. I think this is doable. Dave Winer suggests one approach. There are others. There’s no reason why the Twitter service itself can’t manage which messages can get through based on the client being used. IM apps do it already.

In fact, to me, IM apps are a good model for how richer content can add to the Twitter service. MSN Messenger can send ink–except to an older client or on a Mac. It handles it with grace. Video? Sound recording? Photos? They’re all supported in one way or another. None of these I don’t degrades the IM experience too much. (Some send out too many notifications of what can and can’t be done, though.) One more other lesson from IM–there’s nothing stopping “meta” tags in the text itself, that are converted to graphics on the client side. There are millions of people that send short text sequences, such as LOL or whatever, that are converted to an animated graphics on client apps that support them. If the client can’t handle it or the feature is disabled, the text only version is displayed. Anyway, IM clients can be very rich, why can’t Twitter?

So I’ll put it this way: If a design can be implemented that does not infringe on the way that SMS users of Twitter want to use the service, would they still object to others using other features? The answer to this question may help everyone figure out the next step.

I posted a link to and a description of the InkGram Silverlight-based app yesterday.

If you want to dig right in, here’s a temporary link to the InkGram app. Once again, the program (which requires Silverlight so it requires Windows or a Mac) enables you to post a handwritten message or simple drawing to Flickr and optionally Twitter.

The program is one step along the way to a bigger app that I need to finish off now. What’s it? A notetaking-slash-whiteboarding-like app, written in Silverlight. I was working on some rather complicated pieces of it and Bob, a developer I work with, asked why I didn’t try a simpler Flickr and Twitter-based app first. And so InkGrams were born. InkGrams are also inspired by Dave Winer’s work and encouragement for expanding the supported data types of Twitter.

Now that the first pass at InkGrams is running, it’s time to get back to the notetaking app. I’m not sure if I’ll get to it today, tomorrow, or even this week, but I’ll give it a go. It’s one of those things I find easy enough to work on at an hour at a time here and there. So fingers crossed I’ll find an hour or two to get it going.

Here’s the first public look at InkGrams–a first pass tool for publishing ink messages to Flickr and optionally Twitter.

The basics? If you visit http://www.TabletPCPost.com/InkGram, shown here,

you are given the opportunity to sign into Flickr. Yes, you’ll need a Flickr account to save any drawings you make. There is no public Flickr account. Each person must have their own Flickr stream.

If you click right away on the “Ready to Draw” button, you’ll get a chance to sign into Flickr via Yahoo or Flickr itself. After you successfully sign in, you’ll be sent to the InkGram drawing page.

Before you sign into Flickr, you can also elect to have your future drawing sent to Twitter. You can either send the image to a shared, public Twitter stream of InkGrams or you can send the image to your own personal Twitter account. A third option is to not send the image to Twitter at all.

One more thing. Before we get started, you need to know that you’ll need Silverlight installed on your system.

OK, let’s say that we want to post our ink drawing to the public Twitter feed, at http://www.Twitter.com/InkGrams. You can do this by clicking on the radio button associated with “Post to the public InkGrams Twitter account.”

Now once we click on the “Ready to Draw” button we’re taken either to Flickr to sign in (if we’re not already signed in) or to the Drawing page shown here:

(Once again, you need Silverlight installed for this drawing page to appear.)

On the drawing page you can use one of four pens, a black one, a blue one, a red one, and a green one. There’s also an eraser tool and the eraser tip is supported for erasing ink strokes. Each of these tools corresponds to the first five icons shown in the Toolbar displayed at the top-left of the drawing page.

The last button is a publish button and will send your drawing to Flickr:

If everything goes correctly, you’ll get a confirmation dialog and when you visit your Flickr account you’ll see your ink drawing:

Notice that the Title and Description fields are set to “Test.” That’s because the code is still in test mode.

So far so good. The next step is to check out the Twitter InkGrams stream, to see if our drawing was successfully posted there. Since Twitter doesn’t currently support graphics, what you’ll see on Twitter is a message like this with a URL to the actual Flickr image:

Well that’s about all there is to it for now. You’ll notice some problems here and there. This is first pass code, but I think if you like experimenting with early versions of things, then feel free to give this a spin.

In a subsequent post I’ll go into some of the behind the scenes details and maybe list out some improvements I’ve made. Feel free to post your ideas here.

We’ll see how this experiment goes. Like Dave Winer points out with his Twittergrams, it should would be nice if Twitter supported other media that text. A graphic thumbnail with a link to an image would be perfect for InkGrams.

 Update: There appears to be a Firefox bug as well as a resize issue. I’ll track them down.

The drawing code is simple and needs some embelishing, but it’s getting closer–It’s close enough for starters.

Now I need to clean up the Twitter code too.