Twitter Updates for 2008-03-31

Date Posted March 31st, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • Making dinner: Homemade macaroni with an asiago and parmesan cream sauce and lean sausage. #
  • Today during lunch I told my ideas for CHS to my friends. They seemed pretty interested in it. I’m going to start a business plan. #
  • @veronica Did you find Wordpress 2.5 easy to upgrade? I’m scared of breaking my theme I just finished a few weeks ago. #
  • Another morning, another Monday. Let’s hope for the best. #
  • Ack, ignore the Twitter spam. Updating some older posts in Wordpress and forgot to disable Twitter Tools #
  • Planning some fun things for my WoW guild for April Fool’s Day. I can’t wait to mess with peoples’ heads! #
  • Twitter spam. Bad, yes. But it boosts the number of people following me, making me look more interesting than I am. So it can’t be all bad. #
  • Do people really use the "favorites" feature of Twitter? Tweets seem so transient to me to be profound enough to revisit as a favorite. #
  • Maybe if I went all fanboy and someone like @drtiki or @feliciaday or @leolaporte replied to me, I’d make that a favorite. Otherwise, meh. #

Ruby Hackery

Date Posted March 31st, 2008 | Category Posted in development | Edit Comments No Comments »

I’ve had an idea for a quick one-off project that I can do easily with Ruby and deploy to my VPS server without much fuss. It involves looking at my friends and followers on Twitter, and showing me a list of people who follow me but I do not yet follow. I would implement it by using Net::HTTP to fetch the data and REXML to parse the XML feed (I could use json, but I am an XML guy and I totally love the REXML library now that I know how to use it effectively).

The idea is to help find people who are interesting in my Twitter social neighborhood that might be good to befriend. The problem with looking at just the unrequited followers is that a lot of those people are twitter spammers–people wanting me to follow them and click on their links. What an abuse!

So my idea is to look at my current friends, and get their friends list. Then I can compile a single list of say the top 10 people who show up on a majority of my friends’ lists that are not currently on mine. I can then show both lists along with their profile image, current status, and a link to their profile. Then I can choose to friend them or not. Each time I add a friend I would get better results!

I’d also like to take it a step further and find brand new people. I could try something with Twitter’s tracking feature where you get notified when someone posts a status update based on a certain keyword, but that gets spammy really quick and isn’t always the best way to find someone with similar interests. I’ll have to think about this particular problem for a while.

The only problem I see with this option is fetching the data for each user. The more friends lists I pull, the longer it takes, and the closer I come to exceeding Twitter’s rate limit. Ideally I could fetch all of my friend’s friends in one call, but right now as the API stands I would have to make one call per friends list. This means it will be hard to aggregate this data into something useful for this purpose. It’s just a small engineering problem that I’m sure I will resolve, even if I have to ask the Twitter guys for help or suggestions.

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-30

Date Posted March 30th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • Signed into Warcraft… hopefully I don’t get sucked in all evening, I’d like to get some ruby hackery done. #
  • last.fm, twitter, and ruby hacking at the same time makes me feel totally connected. #
  • Taking a break to consider how to accomplish my idea without totally exceeding my Twitter rate limit in under a minute. Heh. #
  • @drtiki Curse you! That’s twice now you got me. May that song be eternally stuck in your head. #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-29

Date Posted March 29th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • If you could take all the love, without giving any back, would you do it? #
  • Doing some online window shopping for mics and mixers. Yay! #
  • I’m playing with Aptana Studio and the RadRails plugin. Eclipse has never looked neater! #
  • It’s the weekend. Why am I writing unit tests?!?! #
  • I’m going to put the Ruby down slowly and step away from the computer. I’m gonna go read "The Clarence Principle" graphic novel. #
  • @istarman Yes, I certainly do. Raiding that much makes it a job and takes a lot of the fun out of it. That’s too much OCD for me. #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-28

Date Posted March 28th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • I guess if things were easy they would have no value. #
  • I’m in meetings all morning and I don’t have time to run to get coffee (yet I have time to update Twitter?). Ugh. #
  • All-morning meetings really drain me. I’m off to Panera to recharge for the afternoon. #
  • @wilw Thanks. Now that will be in my head all day. Let me repay the favor: http://snurl.com/22v2n hehehe #
  • ruby + rexml + xpath = fun. Yeah, it is a little clunky but now I have fun control over the twitter API with XML, bwahahaha #
  • Every time I start to write something in Ruby I get that stupid Kaiser Chiefs song stuck in my head. Darn you, catchy music! #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-27

Date Posted March 27th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • @veronica Just as you typed that I was listening to Richard Cheese’s cover version of "Creep". Get outta my head!!! #
  • @hornbeck Congratulations on your promotion! #
  • Goodnight Twitter! Time to cut myself off from World of Warcraft for the evening and actually get some sleep. #
  • I’m drinking the Irish Breakfast tea from Adagio right now. It’s pretty good but I like the English Breakfast tea better. #
  • I feel bad for not going to the gym today, but my quads are so sore that if I did any cardio today it would make things worse. #
  • I am attempting to get Ruby on Rails installed on my VPS server (which is running cpanel/whm) #
  • Suddenly I find myself in possession of a few tickets to the shrine circus tonight. I guess I better go. #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-26

Date Posted March 26th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • @davewiner the FriendFeed API looks like it will address issues I had using this service on my own site. Thanks for sharing! #
  • In WoW, we ran Magister’s Terrace for the first time (since the patch came out today) and got Kael’thas down! What a fun dungeon! #
  • So have you officially "arrived" on Twitter when you have more followers than those you follow? If so I’m not quite there yet. #

Steps Toward Social Convergence

Date Posted March 26th, 2008 | Category Posted in blog posts, development | Edit Comments 1 Comment »

I’m reading more and more about initiatives that are moving towards what I have been calling “social convergence”. The way I see it, social convergence is aggregating the assets from various online social mediums, and providing many views into that data. The views could potentially be a single page, or many. The important thing is that the assets have a relationship with each other.

But what are the assets? An asset could be a blog post, a tweet from twitter, an event shared in Pownce, an image uploaded in Flickr, a Facebook status update, and so on. You get the idea. It’s any content created on any social networking website.

Assets are more than that, though. Assets should include your identity: your image avatar (if any), your profile, and most importantly your friends. Your friends are what make social networks social, and not just a database of your own thoughts. It is vitally important that those carry on to different sources.

Consider how frustrating it is right now. I create an account on Twitter and make a bunch of friends . Now I create an account on Flickr or Digg and a majority of those people are on that service too. But now I have to remember to look them up, add them to my friend’s list, and hope they sign on and approve me as a friend for the millionth time.

Robert Scoble talked about this very same thing in a blog post on data portability:

When a new social network comes along (say your company turns one on this morning) I’d love it if it noticed that 15 of my friends who join up there are also on Twitter, etc. Why is that important? Because if there were some way to bind these social networks together they could do a lot more for you. For instance, I know that Scott Beale is on almost all of my social networks listed above. Why don’t the systems know that?

Thinking about this problem has made me realize that the problem of social convergence is a lot larger than just aggregating data feeds from various services into one location. At that point, it is just data. It isn’t meaningful and nor does it have any real context outside of the person the data is being aggregated for. To be really useful, all assets, especially friend data, needs to be propagated and shared from one participating service to the next.

One big issue I see is the question of authority. Who takes the lead on maintaining this data? Should we go the full-on Data Portability route and use OpenID along with other services? And at that point do you really know who controls your credentials and friend assets? And what happens if that central source is compromised? Having a single source of this data makes it very valuable to malicious people.

Maybe there is a good compromise that can meet security and privacy concerns while at the same time allowing our social networking converge to actually happen. Maybe authentication and authorization can be left in the hands of the individual service providers and each of those services can utilize a service to share the assets. But even doing that doesn’t address Scoble’s concerns about what happens when your authentication information (like an e-mail address) changes.

This is a difficult problem, and the person to come up with an elegant solution to converging our data in a secure and easy fashion will make quite a name for himself.

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-25

Date Posted March 25th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • Just finished off a very smooth Heroic Mechanar run in WoW tonight. 100 Badges, only 50 more to go for the epic weapon coming in 2.4! #
  • Using Inkscape to create a website design. I like the program, but I might eventually pony up the dough for Fireworks. #
  • World of Warcraft patch 2.4 hits the live realms today! I know what I’ll be doing tonight! #
  • @istarman Do you like Spaz better than Twhirl? #
  • Spending the morning working with CSS, creating a testbed for our new application. I really love working with CSS and XHTML. Standards FTW! #
  • @istarman I decided to try it too. So far I like the look of Spaz, but prefer the features and feel of Twhirl. I need to learn Air now! #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-24

Date Posted March 24th, 2008 | Category Posted in twitter | Edit Comments No Comments »

  • Just finished a homemade steak dinner for Easter and watched Appleseed Ex Machina. The food was great, the movie was… eh… #
  • I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the ideas I’ve been having. I hope I can get others as excited about it. Things can really take off! #
  • Goodnight, Twitter. Time to strap on some headphones, listen to a podcast, and fall asleep. #
  • @istarman I do E-mail -> Firefox -> Eclipse -> Pidgin -> irc -> then twitter. But really all at the same time. #
  • Good morning Twitter! Time for loads of coffee and wading through the Monday Madness. #
  • RSS feeds: Full content or teaser to pull users to your site? Myself, i’d much rather prefer full content in an RSS feed. #
  • Mmmm… English Breakfast tea from Adagio. Very tasty. #
  • Friendfeed’s atom feed contains a lot of CSS in the content. I’d prefer class names so I can control the CSS myself. #
  • Does Socialthing have invites? I’d love to try that out and compare it to FriendFeed for my convergence needs. #
  • @JasonCalacanis if Mahalo is spam then pass me another slice. #
  • I’m dead. My trainer put me on a new workout circuit and it is mega tough. It’ll pay off though. #
  • @hornbeck Do tell! I want to hear your awesome news! #
  • "Live humans answer the phone!" Do some companies have zombies for CSRs? "Hi, I forgot my password." "Uggh.. new one is BRAIINSS" #
  • Thank the FSM for apps like soapUI. It makes my job soooo much easier. http://www.soapui.org/ #
  • Ah! Reading the latest from @wilw reminded me to look for a good used drum stool online. Would a fog machine be too much for Rock Band? #
  • Considering using jQuery and YUI components for my latest JEE project. #