Thursday, 10 April 2008

Friday, 22 February 2008

TwitterCooler v0.2 – Make Twitter More Like Office Chatter

(formerly TweetSpeak, changed as to eliminate confusion with TweetSpeak.com)

While I’m fond of the Twitter-as-water-cooler metaphor, there was something missing.

Namely Twitter is quiet, and offices are filled with loud, distracting chatter.

If you’re on a Mac you can now remedy this issue with TwitterCooler.app.

TwitterCooler downloads your friends tweets and reads them to you using the Mac’s built-in voices (selected at random).

Hey it’s Friday, you weren’t planning to get anything done anyway. 🙂

Thursday, 20 December 2007

Ask Not What Twitter Can Do For You

After playing around with Twitter for nearly a year, I’ve come to an understanding with it.

The less Twitter does, the better.

In reviewing Jeremiah Owyang’s Twitter Wish List, I only agree with #2, a white-labeled Twitter for workgroup/company use. If Twitter doesn’t want that market, that’s cool. I know of at least 1 company that does.

The rest feel like they’ll turn Twitter into something it isn’t;

  • Supporting non-private groups is an easy hack – create a ‘fake user’, have everyone in the group direct messages via the ‘@’. (Twitter isn’t Jaiku)
  • ‘filtering’ for ‘fake users’. What does that even mean? (Twitter isn’t YFly)
  • Weather? – my tweople are great at giving the weather and traffic conditions already. They’re also great at pointing me to stuff to buy, things to do, and places to go. All without a formal structure for doing so. (Twitter isn’t Facebook)
  • Threaded replies implies rigidly staying on topic. Something that isn’t guaranteed in the messaging systems that have threading today (Twitter isn’t email or forums)

I’m a little surprised not to see ‘remove 140 character limit’ on the list. :p

My Twitter Wish list:

  1. Improved stability and API.
  2. Block search bots (Google, etc) from indexing.
  3. Become invisible.

In addition to that, there’s plenty of work to be done that keeps Twitter.

For example, I wanted a Twitter client that auto-expanded shortened urls and did something smart with the resulting file, so I baked it into Cullect.com.

Here’s an example:

Thursday, 8 November 2007

If We Can’t Share Nothing

Hi.

Howareyou?

Whatsup?

Nothing.

Yaknow.

PrettyCrappyOutToday

TrafficWasHorrible

How many times have you had that conversation?

Today?

Banality in less than 140 characters is the foundation of our social interaction. It safely builds the trust required for a longer, more engaging exchange.

If we can’t share the meaningless, what can we share?

“Part of the power of Twitter is that, among all of these social tools we use to communicate on the Web, this is the one that truly feels social…I truly feel as though I’ve established some sense of a relationship with certain people.” – Mike Keliher

Then Mike says nice things about me. Twitter-hug.

Monday, 3 September 2007

What’s He Building in There?

Doing some testing today and I felt bad for not posting anything in nearly a week.

I’ve been building. Steady. Til midnight or 2am for the past week.

And it’s coming together real nicely, so I’m trying to keep up the momentum up through this coming week.

Until I get back to a more frequent posting schedule…

Here’s the raw audio from an hour-long phone conversation I had with a Stanford Grad student. She’s conducting a study on how people use things like Twitter, Flickr, and the like.

Garrick-on-Twitter-2007.mp3 [59 minutes]

I’m sure Ingrid’s tracking this conversation, so give her a hand and leave a comment on how you use those apps in your daily life.

Elsewhere:

“Twitter-mates are the same as workmates everywhere.” – Gary Burge

Thursday, 19 July 2007

Twitter Ends Friendship

In a move that should rock the ‘social network space’, Twitter just removed the vague, confusing, juvenile label of ‘friend‘, replacing it with the more descriptive ‘following1.

Aside from the label being more accurate 2 it creates a nice symmetry with ‘followers‘. You and I could say ‘friend‘ is the overlap between the two, but as Biz states, it’s not for a server to define.

“After careful consideration and user testing, we are no longer going to define people as your ‘friends.’ – Biz

The /following and /followers listing is also nicely cleaned up. Insted of the confusing ‘add‘ and ‘follow‘ links, ‘follow‘ is only offered for the people that you’re not (but are you). Within /follows a radio button specifies if you’ll get ‘notifications3.

Now, if we could finally kill off ‘user‘.

1. As of this writing, the URLs have yet to update.
2. Only ‘stalking‘ would be more accurate.
3 Still not a great label, I say ‘stalking‘ is appropriate here.

Elsewhere:
Robert Scoble outlines how to be his “friend” (Hint: live in Facebook) that’s after this childish outburst:

“He didn’t add me as a friend to his Facebook network…..they wouldn’t get access to my walled garden.”

Oh no, do you mean to say your feelings toward someone else aren’t reciprocal? Welcome to being an adult.

Steve Rubel laments the changing definition of “friend”.

The current usage of ‘friend’ in these ‘social networks’ is simplistic, heavy-handed, and juvenile. Even in IRL, relationships are more nuanced and asymmetrical (e.g. “fuck buddy”, “stalker”, “BFF”) – if these networks want to be relevant in a decade, they need to reflect the actual relationships. But then, most adults don’t need training wheels on their bikes or chaperones when they go out.

Sunday, 1 July 2007

Twittergrams: Guarding the Rhino


(photo CNN)

In Swahili the tick bird is named ‘askari wa kifaru,’ meaning ‘the rhino’s guard.’ The bird eats ticks it finds on the rhino and noisily warns of danger. Although the birds also eat blood from sores on the rhino’s skin and thus obstruct healing, they are still tolerated.

Take a look at what you need to pass to post a Twittergram; Twitter name, Twitter pass. Everything else, non-Twitter-specific and posting to your Twitter account is optional.

Imagine for a moment; Jaikugrams, Basecampgrams, Flickrgrams, Plazesgrams, Linkedingrams, and AnyServiceWithAnAPI-gram. The same exact Twittergram functionality riding atop each respective service 1.

Little birds flitting from rhino to rhino.

Ququoo.com has the same core functionality as another, much larger project I’m working on. Plus, I don’t need to write a login/pass registration system. In fact, that’s the rule w/ Ququoo development. It can’t have anything specific to Ququoo in it 2. Jen reminded me today of that. Her reminder has helped focus my Twittergram work – and dust off something this larger project needs desperately.

1. Number 3 if you’re following along.
2. Eric, maybe that’s the rule w/ Twitter as well 😉

5 July 07 Update: Yes, I think Twittergrams can be any kind of file and be larger than 200k. Maybe not with Dave’s service. But once you and programmatically decode a tinyurl you’ve got the idea.

8 July 07 Update: Feels like this accomplishes the same goal as OpenID…from a different angle. Where new sites ride atop older more established sites’ accounts – this solves 2 problems for new sites; needing to develop an account creation system and getting people to use the service. Scaling means supporting one more pre-existing account system.

Saturday, 30 June 2007

I’m hesitant to build too much on top of Twitter. Not just because of their historic instability, but because they’re a single silo – and each day brings a yet another silo.

With Ququoo.com, I’m relying on Twitter for registration. With the Twittergram work I’m doing, it’s that and a little bit more. Unlike Facebook, I don’t need permission to build these apps (a good thing), but with Twitter’s slower dev cycles, unreliable-ness, and not charging for anything (charging for something please! dev keys, anything!) I hesitate committing to much.

Today, to a great degree, the people that follow me, are following me on Twitter. 10 minutes from now, that may or not be the case. This post will be repub’d on Twitter, just as it is at Jaiku and Hictu, and in your own aggregator.

Just a reminder to work on projects that can easily go where the followers are rather than silo-specific projects.

Tuesday, 26 June 2007

Monday, 25 June 2007

TwitterGram – Front-end Napkin Sketch

sc00338b92

Like ququoo.com, I see Twittergram front-ends existing on-top-of, but for all intents and purposes independent from Twitter.com proper – using Twitter’s infrastructure for authentication, messaging, but otherwise very distinctive from Twitter as it has stabilized. The above sketch is heavily inspired by Twitterific, which is an OK fit. Something is still missing from it though.

I’ve got a couple *cast domain names that have been waiting for something like this. 🙂

28 Jun 07 Update: This is idea coming along. The mechanics of about 50% of the sketch’s functionality are in place. The next 50 is where it gets interesting.

30 Jun 07 Update: Started building out the interface. Not happy with how it coming along. It shouldn’t be this hard.