Photo by Chris Harrison - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdharrison/4992493250/

Got an email in late August that Square, the iPhone mobile card reader / payment acceptance application founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, had begun shipping readers again.

Mine came this week – 2 of them actually. I’m pretty certain I only ordered one, so I’m not sure where the other one came from – both had the same address and name on them.

Square’s going to have a huge impact on independent vendors: artists who sell at street fairs, bands selling merchandize at shows, stalls at farmer’s markets, etc. The mobile application is free, the reader is free, and Square takes only 2.75% plus $0.15 per transaction when the card is present and swiped. I can even see this approach getting used in more traditional settings (think high end retail stores) in order to free the staff from the old point of sale terminal. (Not sure if Square will offer better percent-of-transaction terms to enterprises who do a certain volume once the rush of free accounts settles down, but I would if I were them).

Tested it out by paying myself $5. The app is fantastic (they were used to sell shirts at Drupalcon San Francisco so I’d already experienced the end user portion): easy to set up, easy to use, clear, and quick.

Here’s the main screen when you launch the app:

Enter the amount to paid, and an optional note- including a photo if you like

Once you’ve entered the amount and associated note, you can swipe the paying party’s credit card through the reader, and the Square app checks for authorization, and allows the user to sign:

Sign using your finger (No, this is not my real signature).

Once the person has signed, Square gets authorization, and allows the user to send herself a receipt. Here are the receipts for charging party (right) and paying party (left):

Note that the link goes to a page on square where the user can see full info about who they paid – including a map of where the transaction happened. The charging party can log in to Square and review all the transactions.

Square takes 2.75% of the transaction plus 15 cents, if the card was present and swiped, or 3.5% plus 15 cents if the card number was typed in. (Yes, you can set up an account and use Square even without the reader by typing in credit card numbers manually – you can also use it in this mode to accept cash, in which case Square keeps track of the transaction but doesn’t charge anything).

Retweet Shirt Photo by Deb Hanson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/debspace/3766841512/

Just released an update to ReTweeter (1.1), which now uses the Twitter API for Retweeting. This means that instead of the traditional “RT: @username” syntax, the retweeted tweets will now show Twitter’s little retweet icon and the link to the original tweet (where it says “about 4 hrs ago”) preserved, and the retweeting user’s name at the bottom, like so:

Screencap by Jeronimo Palacios - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeronimo_palacios/4093181811/

Instead of what Retweeter used to produce, which looked more like this (rt: @username):

Or this (username: tweet):

Thanks to Cody Wilson at QC Co-Lab (@qccoloab) for the patch for this. Of course, if you’d like to keep the old format, you can just set ‘USE_OLD_FORMAT’ to true in the configuration section, and retweeter will keep using the older format.

I’ve also started storing the md5 hash (required for OAuth) in the database instead of recalculating it each time retweeter gets called. (If you ever need to change your md5 hash, say because you’ve regenerated your OAuth token at Twitter, just delete the row in the ‘conf’ table and retweeter will create a new hash the next time it runs).

Note that you will have to alter database tables if you’ve previously used a version of ReTweeter from 1.0 or before – but I’ve included the necessary SQL statements in the README included with the download.

The Fail Whale in Legos - Photo by Bjarne Panduro Tveskov - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tveskov/3387394098/

The 140 Characters Conference in Boston yesterday started off with three strikes against it, in my mind:

1. No coffee. I’ve greatly cut back on my own caffeine addiction, but who starts a conference at 9am on a Tuesday and doesn’t serve coffee?
2. No wifi. Well, there was Wifi, but I couldn’t ever get on any of the available networks.
3. No power. Well, there was power in the building, but the power cops facilities people from the venue would not allow attendees to plug in to the wall outlets, as the cords crossing the aisle represented some kind of hazard.

That’s a steep uphill climb for any conference to overcome, but it turned out to be well worth it. The saving grace was not just Boston’s always active, engaging, welcoming, and supportive social media community (as embodied in folks like @pistachio, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, CS Penn, and way too many more to name them all) but also excellent editorial curation and content pacing.

Favorite panels for me included “Investing in the real-time web” with @bijan, @leaddog99, and @ScottKirsner – which got best quote of the day:

(This was from an article quoting a “Silicon Valley Investor type” – and got the best laugh of the day, despite the fact that the whole conference was witness to the strength of the “Real Time Web” broadly and the tremendous impact of Twitter in particular – including local startup oneforty ).

Also excellent were panels on the “real time news” phenomenon (@universalhub, @dabeard, @mleccese, @kordmiller, and @tmcenroe – with counterpoint later from Jeff Cutler on the difference between “citizen journalism” and “citizen reporting”), a panel on the impact of real-time and social on Health, and a music panel matching @amandapalmer with @matthewebel, @spinaltap, and @cyberpr. Although no music was planned, an impromptu version of the Sesame Street theme on iPad did occur, taking advantage of the talent on the panel.

Christopher S. Penn happily scrapped the talk listed on the schedule – a likely valuable but a bit sleepy “How To Measure Internet Marketing ROI in the era of the Real-Time Web” – and instead geeked out on comic superheros, arguing that the real time web gives all of us super powers and reminding us all that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

The crowd also heard @dewittn‘s story of being one of the disappeared children of El Salvador, and the story of @andydixn, YouthTurns.com, and social media barn raising in Nashville.

Ultimately it felt a bit like Twitter itself: sipping from a fire hose, sampling from a veritable flood of interesting talented people driven by both mission and entrepreneurial spirit to leverage the tools the internet provides (including but not limited to Twitter) to make their mark on the world. The trick being to connect with those folks and carry the conversation on beyond the conference, beyond the twitter-stream and into real projects. (But isn’t that the real trick of any conference?).

Check out the full schedule and as expected tons of coverage via twitter under the hashtag #140conf.

All was well and good until the OAuthpocalypse arrived:

The OAuthpocalypse was the end of basic auth, the mechanism involving storing your username and password, which earlier versions of ReTweeter used. Well, Twitter did shut off basic authentication, though in reality it took a bit longer than the announced August 31:

Photo by Bruno Pedro http://www.flickr.com/photos/bpedro/4951321821/

Luckily this weekend I found time to update ReTweeter to accomodate OAuth – get the new ReTweeter 1.0 and give it a try. I’ve used Abraham Williams’ OAuth for Twitter library, which itself relies on Andy Smith’s OAuth library for PHP. Both are MIT licensed and are included in the download.

You’ll need to register your retweeter with Twitter at the register an application page, which will give you a “Consumer Key” and a “Consumer Secret” – you’ll need to copy these values into the configuration section at the top of retweeter.php.

Twitter Application Settings (Click for Full Size)

Then, making sure you are logged in to Twitter as the username for which you will run Twitter (the account which will follow people and where the retweets will be posted), click on the “My Access Token” button in the right rail of the Application Settings page. Here you’ll need to copy the Access Token and Access Token Secret to the appropriate places in retweeter.php:

OAuth Tokens for ReTweeter

Now that you’ve got all the info, open retweeter.php and (in addition to the existing configuration like username, database username, database password, database host, and database name) fill out the OAuth section of the configuration:

// we'll need some OAuth stuff here
// register your retweeter at http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
$consumer_key = 'Consumer Key';
$consumer_request = 'Consumer Secret';

And:

// then click on "my token" on the resulting page and get these (make sure
// you are logged in AS THE USERNAME you intend to use, as these keys are
// specific to the user:
$retweeter_oauth_token = 'Access Token';
$retweeter_oauth_secret = 'Access Token Secret';

That should do it!

I’ve also updated Retweeter to follow the RT convention, so retweeted tweets will now look like this:

(@drunkjeckman is an old account which I no longer use except for testing. I expect my twitter followers to determine my level of sobriety based on the content of my tweets, not my username).

First, ReTweeter has been updated to 0.9.4. The fix here was primarily to deal with tweets which, when retweeted with the username prepended, were longer than 140 characters.

Second, WPBook has been updated to 1.5.3. This includes a new option to enable publishing to the wall of a Fan Page independent of publishing to the author’s personal wall. (1.5, 1.5.1, and 1.5.2 all could publish to Fan Page walls, but also published to the author’s wall, which in many cases results in duplication for many of your friends and fans.)

Also in 1.5.3 is some improved error checking (fixed the “activation on PHP 4 hosts” bug and added more Try/Catch pairs around Facebook client calls) and the ability to support old school permalink urls with query string parameters.

Good to be home on the weekend . . .

You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).

So, you’ve got to decide which service (Twitter or StatusNet) you intend to actually post to, and which you want automatically fed cross posts.

• Post to Twitter, auto-cross-post to StatusNet. This is what I’ve decided to do. I post to twitter, through all the usual methods, and I let Twitter Tools cross post my tweets to Identi.ca. I have different friends/followers on each, and this way the conversation gets shared.
• Post to StatusNet, auto-cross-post to Twitter. This you can do with existing StatusNet instances, and if you do, be sure NOT to install the StatusNet plugin for Twitter Tools.

Hope some of you find the option useful.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing an increase in twittering of dubious value. For example, automatically following (or stalking, as Ari Herzog put it) folks who mention a given term, and overly friendly twitter accounts purporting to be young women who want you to see their ‘special’ photos on other sites. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s also seen lots of new followers whose usernames look suspiciously like they were generated by a script – JohnSmith18273, JaneDoe45039.

This week, for example, Ann from MarketingProfs mentioned that her dogs – King Charles Cavalier Spaniels – are staying with my wife and I while she’s out of town. Then rt_cavs retweeted it:

Indiscriminate Retweeting

The problem, of course, is that her dogs have nothing to do with the Cleveland Cavaliers. I don’t think Cavs fans are so enthralled with their team as to be interested in the dogs, or the cars, or any of the other things cavalier might mean.

When keyword matching twitterbots are at their best, they can broadcast tweets of interest to a broader community who might otherwise not have seen it. In cases like this, though, they just reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.

Photo by Uncle Bartelby

Adina Levin wrote earlier this month (Twitter, Facebook, and the unselfish API about the differences between Twitter and Facebook not in terms of how they treat their users but in terms of how they treat external developers.

In short:

Twitter’s API is unselfish. Using the straightforward REST API, developers can and do write clients, search tools, mapping tools, recommendation tools, analytics, personal organizing – a wide range of extensions. Twitter doesn’t do anything to constrain developers other than a rate limit.

Whereas:

Facebook’s API is build to serve Facebook more than developers.

She goes on to discuss the shift towards Facebook Connect, away from the emphasis on the application platform, but notes that even then:

The problem is that when sites use Facebook Connect, they have minimal connection to their user base. An an application or community site wants to create the policies whereby the site communicates to the community, and the community talks to each other. With Facebook Connect, those rules belong to FaceBook. . . . With FB Connect, all your member database are belong to them.

One could argue, of course, that it isn’t a fair comparison. Twitter’s platform is more narrow than Facebook’s, with a much simpler privacy model (protected or not, versus groups, networks, friends, and per-application settings), and much less potential for exposure (photos, videos, and detailed personal info being in Facebook’s direct control versus external services like TwitPic). Facebook would argue, I imagine, that they’re trying to create a high standard for privacy for their users, rather than allow every third party app to set it’s own rules, and that this requires them to maintain more control.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the “Open API” approach – impose as few controls as necessary – is ultimately more web-native and will succeed, while the “Controlled API” approach – only release the functionality absolutely necessary and control use with strict Terms of Service (ever read the FB Connect terms?) – calls to mind the old days of walled gardens like Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL, before they joined the real web.

Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).

TweetScan is one of several services offering email alerts based on keywords

Personally, I’ve been using TweetScan to track these terms I’m interested in:

1. Optaros
2. open source
3. Newburyport
4. vegan
5. jeckman

To avoid the “stalker effect” I don’t immediately reach out and @reply to anyone who mentions any of these terms, though I do often follow them to see if it is a common part of their conversation, which would suggest I might be interested in their stream.

Unfortunately, as the folks behind Tweetscan recently announced, they’re going to start charging for this service:

Tweet Scan is due for some improvements and the volume of queries and emails we’re handling isn’t sustainable on a hobby budget. So we’re going to start requiring a small annual payment to keep an account with us.

Please use the subscribe link below and let’s take this site to the next level! It’s $15 per year if you sign up by April 22nd. After that it’ll be $20 per year.

I can certainly understand the need to monetize an application that becomes popular and starts to generate a high volume of usage, but I’m not yet ready to pay for an account for personal use, so I found a few alternatives. (Note Tweetscan can also enable you to download you tweets since December 2007, and can be used as a live Twitter search engine).

TweetBeep

TweetBeep also sends email alerts based on the mention of specific keywords in Twitter, and can track specific URLs, whether they have been url shortened or not. TweetBeep lets you set frequency of alerts as well.

(It seems, though I haven’t verified this yet in practice, that the alerts based on domains – so an alert set for any reference to optaros.com or openparenthesis.org, for example – can’t be scheduled into hourly/daily as keyword alerts can, but are set to “live” – which may mean immediate? This might be an issue if you have a domain frequently referenced in Twitter streams.)

TweetLater

TweetLater, which is most well known for its “schedule a tweet for posting at a later time” feature, also provides a feature they describe as “Track keywords on Twitter” as part of their free account. They also provide other features:

• Auto DM to new followers (which I find frankly annoying)
• Automated following of folks who follow you (which I don’t do, but is not annoying)
• Automated unfollowing of those who unfollow you (hmm, that might be interesting)
• Vet new followers (this one I haven’t tried yet – not quite clear to me what it is except perhaps an easier way to act on new followers – follow, ignore, or block – rather than the one at a time approach twitter offers)

TweetLater also offers a professional / premium account for $29.97 a month which adds other features and is worth checking out for serious users.

What tools are you using to monitor the twittersphere?

As described in this earlier post, I’ve modified Twitter Tools to use Identi.ca endpoints rather than Twitter ones, since I have my Identi.ca account set to auto-cross-post to Twitter.

Here’s a revised version of what I’m calling Identi.ca tools – just replace the twitter-tools.php from the 1.6 release with this one (rename it from twitter-tools.php.txt to twitter-tools.php of course) and you should be good to go:

twitter-tools.php.txt

Photo by Andrea Mercado

Thanks to Karen Huffman (@slakm) who raised some issues she was having with an installation of ReTweeter, I’ve tracked down the bug and uploaded and released 0.9.1.

Turns out that in late December of 2008, the Twitter API servers started sending a 417 Status Code response to many clients, including ReTweeter. (See Alex Payne’s announcement on the Twitter API Google Group and this message from Tom Morris which identified the necessary fix for CURL based clients).

In addition to squashing that bug, this update also better handles error responses from the Twitter API in general, which is to say it actually identifies to the user what status code was returned to enable better troubleshooting.

Remember to copy your settings from your old version before overwriting with the new.

So, Ubuntu has a pretty famous Bug #1:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
The title is “Microsoft has a majority market share”. I think it’s a great part of the Ubuntu culture, because it focuses people on what they want to do with Ubuntu.

Our bug #1, by the way, is “/doc/contact”.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1
Since this was long-ago fixed, I’d like to wipe this ticket* and replace it with an overall project purpose, like Ubuntu’s. But what would the bug be?

It got me thinking – and not just about Identi.ca and open microblogging as a federated, distributed alternative to centralized approaches like Twitter.

Moose and Squirrel - photo by Paul Lannuier.

Remember Boris and Natasha, and their plans for world domination? They ultimately failed because they always decided "but first, get moose and squirrel" – they chose the wrong bug #1. (See 21 Things I Wish My Broker Had Told Me).

At its core, having a bug #1 is really a geek-centric way of having a mission statement. What’s wrong with the world as it exists without your effort, and what would it look like to solve that problem?

This could even be adapted to personal goals – you could have a shortlist of “bugs” with the world you hope to focus on, and while you may not ever close each of those bugs, you should be able to tell whether your work is headed in the right direction – whether you feel like you are contributing to progress in that direction or not.

One concern might be that phrasing each goal as a bug limits innovation – the old FUD that open source imitates, but doesn’t innovate, for example – but describing a broad problem you hope to solve doesn’t, in reality, limit the innovation you might create.

Side note: it’s really interesting to read the threads associated with Ubuntu’s bug #1 and Evan’s question (view by thread in laconica-dev archives) – both are core cases of a “reflexive public” in the process of defining itself (see Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software for more on that concept).

Alex King‘s Twitter Tools is a great little WordPress plugin for integrating your Twitter presence with your blog. It can show your latest tweets in a sidebar widget, create a “digest” post daily / weekly with a list of your tweets, and announce your blog posts to your twitter account.

In this post I’ll show you what changes are necessary to make it work with identi.ca instead of Twitter.

Why would you want to do that?

Identi.ca is often described as “an open source twitter” which it is, but it’s also the first instance of the Open Microblogging standard, which I believe will become increasingly important. Where Twitter users all share the same service, and are entirely dependent on Twitter for their ability to reach other, Identi.ca enables subscriptions across services, removing the need for a single point of failure.

Twitter Fail Whale, screenshot by John Rees

In other words, Twitter is a bit like the early days of email, when Compuserve users couldn’t email AOL users, and neither set of users could email the Internet. (I quality that with “a bit” since the Twitter API certainly makes possible clients which can do more than just post to Twitter). Identi.ca (or laconi.ca, as the software project behind identi.ca is called) is more like modern, decentralized, global-address-space email.

When identi.ca first launched, many folks were left stuck between the two alternatives: use identi.ca, which was more open and federated, or stay on Twitter, where a strong, rapidly developing community already existed (and, frankly, where many of the folks you were already talking to and listening to were unlikely to be persuaded to move en masse).

Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca (photo by Zach Copley)

This ability means that for me, a version of Twitter Tools which would post to identi.ca (and let identi.ca cross-post to Twitter) was preferrable. Luckily, identi.ca has also implemented an API which responds to the same commands in the same way as the Twitter API.

This means that the changes needed are very simple.

In version 1.5.1a of Twitter Tools, lines 67-72 define the API endpoints to be used:


define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/show/###ID###.json');
define('AKTT_PROFILE_URL', 'http://twitter.com/###USERNAME###');
define('AKTT_STATUS_URL', 'http://twitter.com/###USERNAME###/statuses/###STATUS###');
define('AKTT_HASHTAG_URL', 'http://search.twitter.com/search?q=###HASHTAG###');


The key is to change these to map to the corresponding identi.ca API endpoints:


define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/show/###ID###.json');
define('AKTT_PROFILE_URL', 'http://identi.ca/###USERNAME###');
define('AKTT_STATUS_URL', 'http://identi.ca/notice/###STATUS###');
define('AKTT_HASHTAG_URL', 'http://identi.ca/###HASHTAG###');


For the most part, this just means replacing ‘twitter.com’ with ‘identi.ca/api’ except that the individual post urls and hashtag url have to be handled differently.

If you’re planning to use the sidebar widget, which includes a link to hashtags when you use them in a notice. , you’ll also need to find this line:

$hashtag = urlencode('#' . $hashtag);

And change it to:

$hashtag = urlencode($hashtag);

Finally, I also chose to update the “give credit” line, which occurs in two places in the code (not to remove credit for Twitter Tools but to point out the changes):

First, at roughly line 403 (this one is used in the blog post digest of tweets):

$content .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

I changed that to:

$content .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/25/identica-tools">Identi.ca Tools</a>, a modified version of <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

And again later at line 768 (this is the one used in the sidebar widget):

$output .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

Which I changed to:

$output .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/25/identica-tools">Identi.ca Tools</a>, a modified version of <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

This same approach could also be leveraged for other laconi.ca based sites with little effort.

Remember that these changes will get overwritten if you upgrade to newer versions of the Twitter Tools plugin.

(Here’s my modified copy of twitter-tools.php – just change the extension back to .php)

It’s got some interesting stats, though I’d wonder if the self-selecting audience of folks who tried Twitter Grader isn’t a bigger problem in terms of the basis of the analysis.

More charts in the report itself, but here are two I found interesting – histograms of twitterers by number of followers and number following:

That puts me in a pretty small minority in both cases. Does that make me?:

a) Weird
b) Extraordinarily prescient
c) Just Plain Nuts
d) ______

• Identi.ca (The report refers consistently to Identica, not Laconi.ca – I know Evan’s mentioned simplifying things by renaming the Laconi.ca software to match the site name, but for now the software still lives at the Laconi.ca url)
• Jisko
• OpenMicroBlogger
• Yonkly (which doesn’t mention open source on the site, but does exist as a GPL v2 project at codeplex. Site runs ads for a SaaS version.)

As well as Prologue, which does not get grouped in with the other open source options though it is available under GPL v2. (It gets a separate group as it isn’t purely a microsharing application btu a theme for WordPress.)

It’s a good overview, though I would have liked to have seen more coverage of the difference that the OpenMicroblogging protocol (which is supported not just by OpenMicroBlogger but also by Laconi.ca) will make, in terms of real interoperability across networks. But I guess that would be less relevant to the Enterprise scenario, since the whole purpose of the enterprise scenario is to have a closed network.

(See also my post from earlier this summer listing open source microblogging options, as well as this recent post suggesting Twitter themselves could get on the open microblogging bus.)

If you’re not familiar with Coulton, two quick gems. First, Code Monkey:

Second, his great cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back:

In the interview (transcript here if you prefer reading to listening – I’m quoting from the transcript), Coulton talks about his use of social media to create direct relationships with his audience, and why some approaches have been more effective than others:

Facebook and Myspace are essentially duplications of my blog and my email which I already have a blog and email so you know, I don’t, I sort of don’t understand why bands use something like Myspace unless the answer is they can’t, they don’t know how to make their own website

Guess it helped that Coulton was originally a software developer. More to the point, Coulton identifies the risk of closed social networks and cloud platforms:

I was always suspicious of Myspace because for the very simple reason that you don’t have direct access to your network, you only have it through Myspace. If Myspace ever goes away your network winks out of existence, you don’t have your emails you don’t have any way of getting in touch with them. You are completely dependent on Myspace.

And you know you look at what happened with Friendster you know, guess what social networks rise and fall pretty quickly. That what happened with Friendster and it’s sort of what’s happening with Myspace I guess and no matter how great and eternal you think a social network platform is it’s an illusion it’s going to go away. And so to spend all your time building up this Myspace network is I think has the potential to turn out not so well.

Well put. I also really liked his point about creative commons licensing, which he leveraged very effectively early in his (recent) career and continues to use:

. . . you know it was kind of a scary thing but I really just rationalised the thing, well let’s just get the attention now and worry about making the money later, and you know, if the worst thing that happens is a million people get one of my songs for free, like you know, that’s okay, that something I can build on. And I would rather have that happen than make $15 from my friends who buy it and nobody else can hear it, you know.

The interview also touches on Eventful, rickrolling, Wil Wheaton, Ze Frank, podcasting in general, YouTube, and (of course) Twitter.

Well worth a listen, especially but not exclusively if you’re and independent musician or wanna-be independent musician.

As I tweeted at the time, the timing could not have been worse, as I was already feeling bad about not having been as productive a blogger as I’d like to be over the last month or two (I’ll spare you the obligatory “blogging is important to me but I’ve been really busy and I feel bad about it and I promise to be better” post), so hearing that blogging was at best futile (since spammers and professional authors have taken over the blogosphere) or, worse, was a marker of just how “out of it” I am.

Boutin writes:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Or, in his later psuedo twitter speak:

@WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won’t find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

So I was overjoyed this morning to find Doc Searls coming to the defense of blogging, and not just to refute the argument that it is out of fashion but more importantly to reassert its centrality.

Doc’s argument has three key bits, all of which resonated with me, the last most of all:

First, Doc points out that the goal should not be to simply chase the latest buzz – the goal for most authentic bloggers is not just to turn up high in search results, but to say something meaningful. Doc writes:

First, why give a damn about buzz? Here are the main things it’s good for: 1) popularity, by itself; 2) driving eyeballs past advertising. Nothing wrong with either, as long as substance is involved. Even if all you want is ad bux, it helps to remember that there isn’t a 1:1 ratio between traffic and click-throughs. Quality still matters, and buzz isn’t its only driver.

Second, Doc points out that blogging provides a mechanism that is not equaled by twitter (or other microblog applications), Flickr, YouTube, or Facebook. All are wonderful services and well used by most bloggers, including Doc (and me):

As personal journals on the Web go, blogs have no substitute. Twitter is fine for 140-character micro-postings, and for the ecosystem surrounding it. But micro-posts are not journals. Flickr is great for posting, tagging, organizing and annotating photographs, and for allied services such as creating groups and the rest of it, but it ain’t blogging. Facebook has some blogging features, but at the cost of forcing the blogger to operate in a vast hive of non-journalistic activity — and flat-out noise.

Third, and most importantly, the blogosphere is a fundamentally open ecosystem, whereas many of the cloud based services are less so. While Flickr and Twitter are reasonably friendly to openness, and allow you to expose content via various APIs, blogs are at their heart about sharing discussion openly:

To the credit of Flickr and Twitter, they are mostly friendly to the open Web, and not roach motels tricked out as friendly walled gardens. No ‘fence, but that’s what Facebook looks like to me. (Argue that if you like, but you still have to admit that it’s a private space rather than a public one.)

Meanwhile, blogging is free-as-in-freedom at its core. It’s something you do as an independent human being.

Although most blogs run on hosted services, those blogs are still ours. Do it right, and the constraints are minimal. http://doc.searls.com is a WordPress blog on a Harvard server, but if I want to move it elsewhere, I can do that. I have data portability, and service substitutability.

Freedom matters. Independence matters. Not being utterly dependent on any single service provider not only matters, but is an essential virtue too rarely visited and too lightly respected. What Richard Stallman said about clouds (that they’re “a marketing hype campaign” and “You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software”) has more than the ring of truth to it. His is a warning as righteous as those made by responsible forecasters of the financial meltdown.

Blogging at its best is free speech working in open spaces. That virtue persists, no matter how many slums get built in blogging’s hosted services, and no matter how passé it seems at the moment.

Can I get an amen!? Data portability and service substitutability – that’s the core of what made the web and it will continue to be.

(Photo from Marc Amos via BrightKite)

You can find her own recap here (with slides). Here’s some random notes I jotted (on my phone to evernote) I found interesting:

Don’t try to actively manage identities / profiles / updates on the 600+ sites out there. Don’t let your profiles rule your life.

Instead, choose just three: she chose Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Why? Those are the ones which seem most useful to her for locating clients, getting key news updates, and keeping in touch with friends. Your three may vary.

[I feel a need for closer to ten: Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, BrightKite, Dopplr, TripIt, Last.fm, and Identi.ca. I guess if I were to choose between Linked In and Xing, between Dopplr and TripIt, and between Twitter and Identi.ca, I'd be down to seven. Still can't quite get to three. That also leaves out project specific ones like Drupal.org or WordPress.org where I have an account/profile associated with a specific community, or broad aggregators like Chi.mp, Strands, and FriendFeed, not to mention my own johneckman.com - but then I don't update those directly, they copy content from other places.]

Half of her clients (as a social media consultant) she advises not to focus on Twitter. For example, law firms or regulated industries which have significant privacy concerns – even with “protected” accounts it has happened that Twitter has inadvertently exposed private messages. That said, though, one of her clients – La Casa De Las Vides winery in Valencia – founder her on twitter as she was tweeting with someone in Spanish. (They’re having a Boston Blogger Wine Tasting this week).

This doesn’t mean, though, that you should ignore the sites you aren’t going to keep as your primary networks. You should regularly claim your name: get your logo, picture, link up. This is important to prevent others from claiming your name and acting as you.

She uses repeater services like ping.fm to post to her secondary networks once or twice a day – just so the accounts don’t fall dormant – but doesn’t push all updates everywhere as that gets too spammy.

Her social toolbox includes:

• Evernote (great notetaking client for Mac, Windows, Linux, and many phones)
• Shareaholic
• Ubiquity / Firefox 3.x
• Ping.fm
• Twhirl / Tweetdeck
• Textexpander [see Texter for Windows]
• Quicksilver
• Google Tools: Mail, Calendar, Docs, Analytics, etc

She also includes as a tool her phone: HTC Mogul (Windows Smartphone) running iCal and SyncMate for Mac.

She also discussed FriendFeed, Strands, SocialMedian, SocialThing, Yammer, and SocialCast, as well as TweetBeep.

Are you able to limit your activity and profile management to just three sites?

Tripit’s mechanism for adding trips is superior. The ability to simply forward (or even set an automatic rule to forward) confirmation emails is a major step forward . . . Where TripIt seems better at pulling data in, Dopplr seems to be better so far at pushing their data out, or letting people pull it into other contexts.

Well, now Dopplr’s gone and added some new import mechanisms of their own. This post from the Dopplr blog (ok, it was posted back on July 8th, but it has been sitting in my queue to write about) lays out three new options: Twitter, SMS, and Email:

Today I’m really happy to say we’re taking the wraps off a number of new ways to get your future into Dopplr and share your travel information with those you trust: Dopplr by Twitter, SMS and… Email!

Although I love twitter as a notification service (a way of letting me know something relevant happened) I don’t see myself using it as a data input service. For those of you who would like to, just follow the dopplr user and send direct messages with your trips, like: d dopplr a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd. (Nicely, it also happily accepts @dopplr posts, in case you want to announce your trips as well as put them in dopplr). SMS is another option – you associate your SMS number with your Dopplr account and you can text message the same types of messages to Dopplr’s number.

Finally, they’ve got email working at trips@dopplr.com (wonder how many people will confuse plans@tripit.com with trips@dopplr.com – did they make plans@dopplr.com an alias?).

Interestingly, you can use the same kind of shorthand messages used for Twitter or SMS – “a trip to London July 28th to August 3rd” – or you can forward confirmation messages from booking services (which is how TripIt handles import). This is because Dopplr did not set out to parse all the complex formats used by different agencies, but took a simper approach, as explained by MattB:

There are an awful lot of ways to format a travel itinerary. When people asked us to extract trips from emails, we looked at our long history of e-tickets, confirmations and reservations, and scratched our heads.

Inspiration came in the shape of Apple’s last OS X release, Leopard, and an intriguing feature called “Data detectors“.

We realised that instead of creating a piece of code to decode every email format out there, we could look for patterns of dates and place names in the text (and later, other information too) and turn those into trips.

A happy side-effect of this approach is that as well as extracting information from automatic reservation emails, it works well with short text strings like “I’ll be in San Francisco from 3rd July to 7th July”. This means we can work with many hand-written emails, with Twitters, and with SMSes too.

Of course it won’t work with every variation under the sun (for example, it’s most reliable when an email contains just a return trip in a single hop), but we’ve had very satisfying results in our testing. And of course every email you send us will be added to our test suite so that our engine can get better and better over time.

In other words, rather than specifically targeting all the different potential formats, and parsing them in some structured way, Dopplr looks for some specific patterns in the text and tries to understand their meaning without knowing the format of the email in advance.

I wonder how different this is from what TripIt actually does behind the scenes – how much they plan for specific formats they know in advance – and how successful it will be “in the field.” For now it is enough to convince me to turn off my automated importing and give trips@dopplr.com a try on my next few confirm messages. Then, I can automate a rule in my email such that travel confirmations get auto-forwarded to both plans@tripit.com and trips@dopplr.com, and be sharing my travel plans painlessly.

Here’s a shortlist of those projects I’m aware of – please do let me know in the comments if there are others I’ve missed.

• Sweetter 2.0 – an “open source and fun microbloging service . . . being develop[ed] by SUGUS (group of GNU users from the University of Seville).” Go here for code. Based on TurboGears, a python-based web application framework. Affero GPL (AGPL)
• Jisko – Affero GPL (AGPL) licensed framework for microblogging, PHP 5 and MySQL. I had to use Google Translation to try to read the wiki, as I no hablo espanol.
• Yonkly – written in ASP.NET by Emad Ibrahim. Code hasn’t yet been fully released but you can get an early version here. (License is not yet specified though it is described as “open source.”)
• Twoorl – a GPL (3) implementation of a microblogging service in Erlang using ErlyWeb. Started (and entirely written?) by Yariv Sadan
• Prologue – not really a microblogging platform per se, but a WordPress Theme which could be used as a microblogging platform. (Note that the Prologue post itself kills Firefox 3 for me – caveat browser). Prologue is available under the GPL, as is WordPress itself.
• Laconica, which is the software which powers Identi.ca. Also Affero GPL (AGPL). This is perhaps the most robust, and is based on the Open Micro Blogging protocol. It also embeds creative commons licensing on the content people publish, which I think is great but others may have issues with.

Am I missing other open source twitter approaches?

Has anyone created a Movable Type theme which does microblogging?

Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all).

For now, it’s just fun to play around with.

I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin – get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page.

Here’s what the output looks like:

It’s a kinetic sculpture of the Fail Whale, an illustration by Yiying Lu which is often seen by twitter users.

Anyone care to write a greasemonkey script that will replace the default fail whale with this video whenever Twitter displays it? At least then it will feel like things are moving . . .

Now Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy have brought a similar visualization approach to Twitter with Twistori (click for full sized image):

It’s wonderful – simple, clear, lightweight, easy to watch, and elegant. I’d love it if it were possible to create your own twistori terms – maybe they’ll release the code?

Read more about it on Amy’s Blog: love & hate: from knuckle tattoos to the internet’s emotional pulse with Twistori

Went better than the WordPress talk yesterday, in terms of time – easier to describe Twitter (which everyone already knows) than to try to cover the WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the plugin I wrote to connect the two all in less than 30 minutes.

Xefer has created an intriguing mashup using data from the Twitter API, a Yahoo! Pipe to some basic transformation, and the Google Chart API to display results:

To get your own, just replace with your twitter username to the end of this url: blog post describing the project:

The most interesting aspect of this project is that, other than the static files being served up by xefer.com itself, no other server-side processing is being done here; all the processing is being handled by Yahoo Pipes and Google, and of course Twitter itself which is ultimately hosting the raw data.

Who knew I tweeted so much on Sundays?

Note that the data seems to be, as per the comment on the blog post, in GMT, so you’ll need to do offsets in your head for your local timezone.

Here’s mine (click to see full size):

I wonder how much this changes over time, or how far back they are able to grab tweets.

For WordPress, check out MBLA+, which is an avatar plugin (shows people’s avatars in comments) based on MBLA and hAvatar. I’ve been using it here and on Goatless for a while, and think I’ve got most of the kinks out, though it should still be considered beta at this point.

For Movable Type, check out Action Stream plugins for Amazon wishlists, Last.fm recent tracks, meetup profile, and a generic YourBlog template. I’ve been using these (with MTOS 4.1) over at JohnEckman.com.

I’m also working on a Twitter application using the API to turn a twitter account into a group. (All tweets by followers to a given account beginning with a specific preface get re-tweeted so that all other followers see them). Hope to have that done in time to be useful for VegSXSW (twitter).

The same is true when you use SMS or IM to interact with Twitter.

However, if you use a Twitter client, what happens?

On Twitterific, nothing. The message appears to be sent, nothing shows up your timeline, no error occurs.

Is this a limitation of the API, or of the application’s handling of it?

Update:

@Twhirl tells me (via Twitter) that:

twhirl should display an error message informing you about it.

Maybe time to change? I sent the twitterific developers a note letting them know of the bug.

What does your twitter client do? Tell me in the comments, please.

Tuesday night Mike Krigsman (twitter.com/mkrigsman) organized a “tweetup” at the Boston Beer Works in the Fenway. I won’t try to list all the attendees, but a few notes on folks I talked to:

• Silona (twitter.com/silona) was in town from Austin (League of Technical Voters, Transparent Federal Budget, We Are All Actors)
• Met Laura “Pistachio” Fitton (twitter.com/pistachio) – now I won’t be just another face in the crowd of her ~1500 twitter followers
• Met David Fisher (twitter.com/tibbon) who works with Nate at Jazkarta
• Nathan Burke (BlogString, twitter.com/?), who works with Michelle at MatchMine
• Met Jack Vinson (twitter.com/jackvinson) from Aspen Technology, who lives in the Boston area despite his Twitter account saying he is in Evanston IL.

I also met Dan Bricklin, which is really a brush with greatness. (No offense to my fellow tweetup attendees, but dude basically invented the spreadsheet).

Not bad for a tweetup on Super Tuesday (also Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday), in not so great Boston weather. Apologies in advance if I left anyone out – I did have to run out early to catch a train.

Last night (wednesday) was the February BostonPHP meeting, on “Choosing a FOSS License for your project.”

Karen Copenhaver and Ira Heffan presented, but it was less about formal presentation and was really a conversation with the whole group – we talked about different classes of licenses and degrees of reciprocity they encourage/require, GPLv3 versus Affero GPLv3, CPAL, etc. The audio was recorded and will probably turn up as a podcast shortly.

After the meeting Mark Withington, Ira Heffan, Greg Rundlett and I went out for drinks and talked about life, the universe, and everything. ;)

Tonight, I’m headed to the North Shore Web Geek Meetup in Newburyport – although this means missing out on Silona’s presentation to the Berkman Thursday Blog Group.

Sheesh. So much to do, so little time. Good to see a vibrant local community.