Category Archives: Twitter

Initial thoughts on Nambu as a Mac Twitter client

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nambulogo.jpgRecently 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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140 Character Conference next week in New York…

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140charconf.jpgAre 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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Revisiting “The Dark Side of Status Updates” – a home potentially burglarized after Twitter updates

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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

twitterburglery.jpg

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

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239F0ED3-565A-4A5B-8B96-F77D463A8AB2.jpgWow! 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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The Great Gmail Fail – and the collective panic/meltdown on Twitter…

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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:

gmaildown-twitter2.jpg

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.

gmaildown-twitter-1.jpgThe 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:

Twitterfall.jpg

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).

gmaildown-twitter-2.jpgMeanwhile, 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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Twitory, Twithority and the quest to rank Twitter search results by authority

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

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twitternamesearch.jpgOne 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:

twitter-findpeople.jpg

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. twittername-sortorder.jpgIn 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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Corporate/enterprise microblogging – my review of Yammer, Present.ly and Laconi.ca

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What are the benefits of microblogging within a corporation or enterprise? What value does it bring? How can it be used? And how do these new tools like Yammer, Present.ly, Laconi.ca and others measure up?

Over on a Voxeo blog, I went into lengthy detail on all of those points in a post called “Yammer, Present.ly, Laconica and pushing enterprise microblogging into the cloud“. I basically laid out:

  • The benefits and use cases we’ve seen for corporate microblogging within our company over the few weeks we’ve been trying it out.
  • Our experience with using Yammer – the positive and negative aspects and how it does and does not compare with Twitter.
  • Some thoughts about how Present.ly compares to Yammer.
  • Some thoughts on how the open source Laconica could be used to build a corporate microblogging service.
  • Some thoughts on the wide range of companies leaping into the space right now.

Along with some general thoughts on what to think about when investigating these solutions and some pointers to the great work done by Laura Fitton and Jeremiah Owyang among others.

This was also somewhat predictably the topic of my weekly report into the For Immediate Release podcast today.

Rather amusingly, on the same day I published my review, the New York Times came out with two articles on the same general theme – one as an “article” in the main site and one as a blog post:

The comments on the NYT blog post make for interesting reading. Obviously we at Voxeo are not alone in experimenting with Yammer.

I’m sure lots more will be written in the months ahead about corporate microblogging – and I’m sure I’ll be writing more on it here. Meanwhile, please do enjoy my review of the tools and please do let me know what you think (either here or there). Have you tried Yammer? or Present.ly? or Laconi.ca? Or one of the other options? Do you see a role for microblogging within an enterprise?

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Twitter invades the daily comics (well, Zits, at least) – and the annoyance of copyrights prohibiting embeds

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So there I was this morning in the usual daily routine of having breakfast and reading the comics in the daily newspaper (yes, I still get a daily paper – two, in fact), when the world of social media landed in the comics. There in the “Zits” comic strip, Jeremy and his friend Pierce are gasping at the thought that students actually passed notes on paper in the time “B.T.”, as in “Before Twitter”! I admit to laughing out loud and getting perplexed looks from other household members.

You can see it for yourself (click on the image):

comic-cannot-be-embedded.jpg

And I would have loved to embed the comic here, but I definitely respect copyright notices and the notice on the page for the comic is very clear (my emphasis added):

© 2008 Zits Partnership. This feature is presented with the permission of King Features Syndicate, Inc. and is furnished solely for personal, non-commercial use. Redistribution in whole or part prohibited.

That last part would indicate to me pretty clearly that I can’t just go and embed the graphic in my post, which is too bad, as it would be a lot more interesting for readers to see the comic in the context of my commentary here. But between someone applying stock copyright terms and probably someone else’s desire to have the page viewed “on the property”, it means viewers here have to go over to that site to see the comic. Some will… some won’t. It’s just annoying.

Now if they provided “embed” codes for the comics like you have for, say, YouTube videos (or most other video sharing sites), the publishers would be able to ensure they gather statistics but they would also get the added publicity of having their comic strip embedded on other sites and increase the number of people who have seen the strip.

But I digress…

My main point today was merely to point out that it was fun to see a mention of Twitter on the comic pages today. I’m sure there will be a lot of readers of the comics who won’t have a clue what this means… but for those of us who do understand, we can laugh along. (While simultaneously realizing again why some schools are futilely trying to ban cell phones.)

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Business Week’s “CEO’s Guide to Microblogging” – and my part of the Debate Room piece

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Want to explain microblogging at sites like Twitter to your upper management? or clients?

Business Week just published a “CEO’s Guide to Microblogging” that may help with that task. The package of articles consists of:

All in all I think it’s a useful package of articles to have out there. It doesn’t necessarily break new territory for readers of this blog or listeners to “For Immediate Release” but it gets it out into a “mainstream” publication like Business Week that does get a good bit of reading from the CxO / management crowd. Taken all together, it does show how some businesses are starting to use Twitter and microblogging in general to help in their work. For that alone, it’s good to have out there and should go far to help explain what value there is in this wacky Twitter thing that we are all participating in. 🙂

A WORD ON ‘The Debate Room’ PIECE

As you’ll note, I’m the author of the “CON” side of the Debate Room piece “Twitter Distracts and Annoys“. It was a bit odd in one sense due to the “double negative” aspect of my part. When some folks learned I was writing the “CON” side of a Twitter article, they were a bit surprised… but the CON side of this piece was actually the PRO-Twitter position. You can see that in the comments to the piece as well, where folks talk about being “pro-twitter”… which means they support the CON side of this Debate Room piece. Fun, fun, fun.

The piece itself was interesting to write. Readers will see obvious similarities between that piece and my articles back in December 2007,
“Top 10 Ways I Learned to Use Twitter“, and April 2008, “Revisiting the Top 10 Ways I Learned to Use Twitter“. The largest challenge, of course, was to reduce all that writing into a piece of about 200-250 words. I rapidly learned this fact:

Writing a 200-250 word article is the journalistic equivalent of ‘140 characters’.

Darn tough to do.

My first version came in around 450 words and, to me, read quite well. But as followers of my Twitter stream knew at the time, I had to slice that by half. I got it down to around 325 words… sent both versions to the BW editor who ultimately edited it herself to bring it in around 290 words or so. Overall, I was quite pleased with how she edited the piece.

ADDRESSING THE ‘PRO’ SIDE

In reading the entire piece, I find that I do actually agree with several points of Ilise Benun’s “PRO” side of the debate. Obviously I disagree with her outright rejection of Twitter. I think that’s a bit short-sighted without understanding the value that can be found in Twitter. Especially if she is with a marketing organization.

However, I definitely agree that Twitter can be abused in a rude way. As several people noted in the comments, there does seem to be an increasing degree of “rudeness” in our society. You can see it all around us with people who talk loudly on their cell phones in restaurants… or in theaters or movies. Should we really require those announcements at the beginning of events reminding people to turn off their cell phones? Shouldn’t that be common-sense? At a movie theater, should they really have to display a screen reminding people to be quiet and not talk to each other during the movie?

Aren’t those things called… um… “good manners”?

Likewise, it certainly can be rude if someone you are meeting with is constantly checking their BlackBerry for email… or tweeting or reading tweets.

But those aren’t issues with the tools, they are issues with the PEOPLE!

We do need to be respectful of each other… to pay attention to the people we are with… to have that real contact Ilise mentions. But that’s a choice we all make. Do we take that cell phone call when we are in the middle of talking to someone? Do we spend the meeting looking down at our blackberry sending out email? Do we spend the time we are with one viewing and sending messages on Twitter?

It’s our choice – and it’s up to use to choose wisely.

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