Disruptive Conversations

Social media: Where brevity is appreciated, where clarity and simplicity win

This morning by way of Skype's publicist Chaim Haas, I learned of Renee Blodgett's interview with Robert Scoble Skype's chief blogger Peter Parkes (direct link to video). The interview itself was quite interesting as Peter spoke about the role blogging in particular plays within Skype and about his role as "chief blogger", as well as how it has changed since he began in 2006. Robert Scoble also gave his perspective on how corporate blogging has evolved. It was an interesting discussion.

One phrase of Peter's, though, stuck out in my mind as being so accurate about Twitter and really the whole current state of social media:

It's actully quite refreshing to be able to work in an environment where brevity is appreciated, where clarity and simplicity win.

Indeed. A nice concise summary.

As I wrote about way back in December 2007, using Twitter is my daily lesson in attempting brevity. As I wrote there, it's hard for an old-school trainer who wants to be sure that everyone completely understands to learn the art of conciseness and brevity. I keep trying ;-)

The full video, which is worth watching, is here:

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Technorati Tags: socialmedia, skype, scoble, robert scoble, blogging, peter parkes

Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week in Boston

This week, I (Dan York) am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today through Thursday at the Westin Boston Waterfront in downtown Boston. The keynote panel I'm on, The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise, doesn't happen until Wednesday morning at 9:15am... but I came down early as a good number of the sessions are of interest.

If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.

You can also follow along with the conference "backchannel" on Twitter by following the hashtag "#e2conf". Here's an easy search URL:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf

I expect to have a very cool Voxeo announcement out on Wednesday, too... but more on that then... ;-)

P.S. And why do I do the silly "I (Dan York)" construction at the beginning of this post? Because I see my content being scraped and so "I" alone doesn't make sense in other places the content winds up :-)

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Technorati Tags: e2conf, voxeo, danyork, dan york, enterprise 2.0, boston

Twitter's SPOF Stupidity Continues: Ever hear of redundancy?

While much of the blogosphere is currently dwelling on how great it is that Twitter is postponing its maintenance to allow Iran-related communication, my mind is still reeling from reading the Twitter blog post, particularly this part (my emphasis added):

A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight.

Like Chaim Haas, my reaction is... why is that "network host" singular?

Given the millions of people now using Twitter on an ongoing basis... given the incredibly large ecosystem of applications and systems linking in to Twitter... given the very real communications uses that Twitter has evolved to have... given all of that:

why does Twitter not have redundant connections?

This is really "Network Infrastructure 101" when you are supplying a hosted service. Anyone providing a cloud-based service should ensure that they have redundant network connections... redundant providers... redundant everything. Coming from a company (Voxeo) that provides a hosted application platform, it boggles my mind that Twitter would need to take its system down for "network maintenance". We would never do that... our customers wouldn't stand for it!

And that is perhaps the issue... we have customers... Twitter has users.

We ensure that we have multiple redundant providers and networks... because our customers pay us to ensure that their applications are always available. Twitter can get by on "best effort" - and on a single network provider - because no one pays...

Twitter continues to be a massive...

Single Point Of Failure

One company... providing a messaging infrastructure... obviously based on one network provider.

This is my personal frustration with Twitter. I've been using it for now 2.5 years or so and continue to see so many benefits to Twitter, yet as someone who has been involved with computer networks for 25+ years, the very idea of a SPOF is hideous. I'm much more interested in distributed architectures like what we see with Laconi.ca and Identi.ca,(As I wrote about a year ago.) or what Google seems to be promising with Wave.

Yet Twitter's simplicity... it's directory of users... it's easy APIs... it's ecosystem... all of those things keep us using its services...

So while I commend Twitter on listening to their users and postponing their maintenance window... I ask as a long-time user -

why do they need a maintenance window?

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Technorati Tags: twitter, microblogging, nomaintenance, identi.ca, laconi.ca, google wave

Initial thoughts on Nambu as a Mac Twitter client

Recently in a bit of frustration, I decided to shift from using an Adobe AIR-based Twitter client on my Mac over to using Nambu, a native Mac OSX app. My frustration is due to the fact that all of the major AIR clients - Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck and Twhirl - seem to suffer from the problem of consuming a serious amount of CPU usage on my MacBook Pro. I don't know if this is an inherent issue of using the AIR abstraction layer, which is another layer sitting on top of the operating system, or if the problem lies more in the programming of the applications themselves.

Whatever the case, in frustration this week when my CPU was yet again high and the Activity Monitor showed that the second highest app was one of the Twitter clients, I went off and installed Nambu to give it a try. (The application which is inevitably sucking up the most CPU on my Mac is Firefox... which is why I'm dearly waiting for the real build of Chrome so that I can find and kill off tabs of poorly-written web pages!)

So far, I've been very pleased with how Nambu works. Most importantly for me, I can use multiple Twitter accounts. (I tweet from both @danyork and @voxeo and occasionally a couple of others.) All in all the experience is very similar to that of Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck. There are, though, some differences which I thought I would note here while I think of them:

• "Compose" field is at the bottom of the screen, versus the top as in TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop. (Not bad, just different and takes some getting used to.)
  
  
• "Compose" field doesn't stay open after you tweet. So if you flip to the Nambu window you can't just click in and start typing. You have to either click the "Compose" button at the top or press Cmd+N to start a tweet.
  
  
• Both TweetDeck and Seesmic (and other Twitter clients) have this UI component where you can go over the picture of someone and have actions right there to either reply, retweet, direct message, etc. In Nambu you have to either click the gear icon on the opposite end of the tweet and then go down to a menu choice... or click on the tweet and click on one of the buttons on the menu at the top. (For me, one value in a desktop Twitter client is speed and the ability to just quickly scan through and act on various tweets. Single-click action buttons are nice for this.)
  
  
• Inability to resize the columns. Ideally I'd like to see more columns on the single page (so that I can visually monitor a bunch of searches at the same time). I'd like to make the columns smaller if I want. (Note that I can't really resize the columns on Seesmic or TweetDeck, either.)
  
  
• "Sent" column doesn't differentiate between tweets/replies and direct messages. All are just shown as "sent". It would be nice if there was a visual clue as to which ones are direct messages.
  
  
• When you click on someone's twitter name, such as "@danyork", you get a list of their recent tweets - but I couldn't see any way to reply to a tweet from that window. I had to click a button to go to their Twitter page to do that.
  
  
• That I could see, there was no "in reply to" feature that would show that a tweet from someone was in reply to another tweet. Now... Nambu does have a VERY cool feature that replies to a tweet are threaded underneath the main tweet... if you can find that original tweet. If you can't find that tweet, though, you are left not easily knowing what the original tweet was.

Again, overall I've been quite pleased with Nambu in the few days that I've started using it... I'll write more here as I use it more.

Comments are, of course, welcome.

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Technorati Tags: twitter, nambu

140 Character Conference next week in New York...

Are you interested in the disruptive role that Twitter is playing in the media / communication landscape? If so, are you planning to head to Jeff Pulver's 140 Character Conference next Tuesday and Wednesday, June 16 and 17, 2009, in New York City?

Alas, my schedule takes me elsewhere (Orlando, Florida) next week, but if I were available, I'd definitely try to be there at the event. The schedule looks great and the speaker list (aka "cast of characters") is a veritable "who's who" of the social media space.

It truly does look like Jeff has put together a great show... and I expect we'll see LOTS of twittering early next week! (You will be able to watch here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=140conf )

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Technorati Tags: 140conf, twitter, microblogging, jeffpulver

Revisiting "The Dark Side of Status Updates" - a home potentially burglarized after Twitter updates

Back in November 2007, I wrote a post here called "Twitter is Terrific for Thieves - The Dark Side of Status Updates" about the danger in giving away too much information on Twitter (and Facebook, etc.) and how that could potentially lead to someone burglarizing your home. At the time it led to some interesting conversations on Twitter and in the comments.

Fast forward 1.5 years and many million more Twitter users... it appears (and I must emphasize appears) that precisely that kind of thing did happen in Arizona:

Home burglarized after owner 'twittered' he was leaving town

The homeowner very unfortunately was robbed of thousands of dollars of equipment. The Twitter connection was mentioned here:

"Every one of them that reads my tweets that I sent out knows that I was heading out of town," said Hyman, "I've got it set-up where Twitter goes into Facebook, so it could be someone I know about on Facebook."

However, and this is the part that needs to be emphasized, there is really no way to know if the thief/thieves were watching Twitter or if it just happened to be a random theft. As the article says:

Unless the crooks are caught, Hyman said there's no way to know for sure if this was a random act or if he was targeted.

And that's exactly right. It might have been someone who saw equipment in the house through windows. It might have been someone who knew there was a tech business operating out of the house. It might have just been someone randomly breaking into homes.

Or it might have been someone monitoring Twitter.

We may not ever know. As I mentioned in my original post, though, it's important to think about what you say in Twitter or Facebook status updates. Do you really want to tweet that you home is going to be vacant for the next two weeks? Do you want to post the update that you had to leave the 72" plasma TV on the back porch until you could clear up the wall space? :-)

Ah, the brave new (open) world we all live in...

P.S. Hat tip to Todd Van Hoosear for re-tweeting about this Arizona article

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Technorati Tags: facebook, twitter, security, privacy, microblogging

Have you looked at the Twitter Fan Wiki lately? Amazing number of tools...

Wow! Have you looked at the Twitter Fan Wiki lately? It is at:

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

I wound up there late last week for some reason and realized that it had been many months since I had visited the page... what an incredible number of apps built around Twitter! There is no official "count" that I could see, but dumping the page source to a file and grepping for <li> in the relevant part of the file gave a count of close to 700 listings.

If you haven't taken a look at this view of the Twitter ecosystem lately, it's worth a look. (And if you are looking for topics for your blog, you could just start at the top reviewing Twitter apps and you'd have no end of things to writing about...)

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Technorati Tags: twitter, tools, microblogging

The Great Gmail Fail - and the collective panic/meltdown on Twitter...

In case you weren't watching your Twitter stream this morning (US Eastern time), Google's Gmail has been down. You can read about it on Mashable, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and probably a zillion other blog sites by now. It's probably back up by now.

But if you were on Twitter this morning, you would have DEFINITELY known that Gmail was down. Here's the state of search.twitter.com after I left the tab open for a bit:

Yes, that's 22,057 messages since I opened the window - all mentioning "gmail". In the time it's taken me to write these few paragraphs, the count has now climbed to 22,601.

The Twittersphere is experiencing a gigantic collective spasm of worry/panic/meltdown, along with a healthy dose of amusement thrown in at all of the worry/panic/meltdown.

Many of us have spoken or written about Twitter as an "attention lens" where it helps point you to what others find important at the moment. This morning it wasn't so much a "lens" as it was a giant screaming sledgehammer!

It was, in many ways, absolutely fascinating.

Kind of like standing on the side of the highway watching a giant wreck/collision. Or watching similar scenes on TV. It was mesmerizing to a certain degree. I also learned of the site http://twitterfall.com/ via the page to watch 'gmail' tweets:

It was admittedly interesting to have on my screen in my hotel room as I did an early round of email checking. With the sheer volume, though, I did have to bump up the speed from the default to "4 per second".

The reality is, of course, that the collective focus probably did absolutely nothing to help Google bring the service back online. Instead, you had 7 zillion people repeatedly checking their browsers - or rushing to configure IMAP because IMAP access to GMail was working, albeit with slow spots. The amount of traffic heading into GMail's servers must have been rather massive.

Scattered amongst the plaintive wails of anguish were naturally those pointing to problems with so many people relying on Google's services... and pointing out the problems of pushing services into the "cloud"... etc.

All of which are valid concerns, of course, but I suspect the reality is that in a few hours or a day or two this will long be forgotten. Google's Gmail was down for a few hours. Next topic....

Google just makes Gmail so seductively easy to use. I imagine people will just keep on going (although one hopes people will look into either IMAP or Google Gears so that they do have a local copy).

Meanwhile, the tweets continue... (as now everyone needs to tweet that the service is back up for them, of course!)

P.S. And I should say that I am as guilty as anyone as tweeting about Gmail being down.

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Technorati Tags: twitter, google, gmail, gmaildown, gmailfail, cloudcomputing

Twitory, Twithority and the quest to rank Twitter search results by authority

Do we need a tool that ranks Twitter search results by number of followers?

That's been one of the big debates circulating through the Twittersphere / blogosphere since Loic LeMeur kicked off the conversation over the weekend. I haven't had the time to weigh in, but Neville Hobson put up a good post about two search sites: Twitority and Twithority. (And yes, there are two web sites that do almost exactly the same thing that have a one-letter difference in their domain names!)

In my own brief testing, I rather liked how TwitHority provided a two-column view of results by ranking and results by time. Nice to see. On the other hand, I liked how Twitority (no H) provides a Technorati-like way to search by degree of authority (although I have to wonder what they set a "lot" at, as it never turned up results for me).

Personally, I do like the option of being able to rank search results by number of followers. Yes, I understand that the number of followers is meaningless in so many ways... and that it can also be gamed by someone who, for instance, sets up tons of bogus twitter accounts. I realize that it's a very imperfect measurement. Still, it is a measurement that's out there. And the fact remains that if someone tweets something about you or your product/brand/service out to 10,000 people, odds are pretty good that it will potentially be read by more people than if someone tweets it out to, say, 20 people.

We'll have to see how these sites work out... but in my mind I'm glad to see someone trying to help us make sense out of all the data out there.

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Technorati Tags: search, twitter

Finding people on Twitter just got (a bit) easier with "Twitter Name Search"

One of the challenges of using Twitter has been that it's been very hard to find someone's Twitter account if you know they use Twitter but don't know what name they use. With no "people search" function on Twitter, you had to try to guess their Twitter account name - or just try to find it through something like Google.

Today, as the folks at Twitter announced in a blog post, they have released "Twitter Name Search" which allows you to search on a name. If you go to the URL, http://twitter.com/search/users, you'll get the search box shown on the right. Enter a search string and you'll get back results ranked by the number of followers that each person has.

You can also simply click the "Find People" link on the top of the Twitter web interface and instead of only being able to invite people to Twitter, the first tab now shows the search interface:

Now the search feature does have a few limitations. As Ev noted in his tweet, it searches only the Name field (although I found it also searches the "Username"). So you are, of course, limited to searching on what people put in there. For instance, I searched on "RJ", did not find the person I was looking for (our CTO) and then noticed that in his Twitter profile his "Name" field is the same as his Twitter username - which doesn't include "RJ". So naturally I won't find him.

The search also doesn't always seem to be complete. I did a search on "Udell" expecting to find both Jon and his wife Luann but was surprised to find that only Jon (and three others) appeared, yet Luann clearly has "Udell" in her Name field. In a couple of other searches that yielded a number of results, the ranking wasn't always exactly in the right order, as shown in the image to the right. One wonders if the Twitter folks are sorting into "buckets" of accounts that have similar numbers of followers and then giving those results back.

Regardless of these issues, which will no doubt be fixed as Twitter works on the newly-released functionality, it is great to finally have this feature and be able to do some searching of the Twitter namespace.

Naturally I'd like more... :-) For instance, I'd love to be able to search on the location field so that, for example, I could find the names of all the Twitter users within my region - or within a region that I'll be visiting at some point in time. It would also be great to be able to search on the bio or website fields....

Ah, but for the moment we can try the Twitter Name Search and see who we can find... (Thanks, Twitter, for adding that in.)

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Technorati Tags: search, twitter