I've Been Thinking About This…

1. I wait a minute before I send a tweet. Did I really want to send that? – once its gone it’s not recallable. I’ve lost count of the number of tweets I typed and decided not to send.
2. I follow selectively:
   1. I don’t follow people who don’t add value unless they are a personal friend or a business associate – in which case they are already adding personal value.
   2. I assume that anyone who follows thousands of people cannot possibly be reading all their tweets, so they’re not reading mine.
   3. I also assume they’re only doing it for reciprocity – to build up the number of people who follow them. (Why would anyone even want this? If you gain 40,000 followers just because you followed them back, that doesn’t say you’re popular – it says you’re desperate!)
3. I don’t stalk:
   1. Responding to a tweet with a witty comment to simulate closeness rarely endears you to the recipient – it just makes you look like you want to be in their circle.
   2. Also: it may be corny and very old-fashioned, but I don’t follow many women, and – unless they are personal friends – I especially don’t follow married women. That just feels all kinds of wrong to me. Marriage is too precious a commodity and a tough enough proposition today without presenting yet another opportunity for its destruction.
4. I try to add value with my tweets. Say nothing nasty, private, deceptive, pointless or destructive.
5. Last year I stopped saying ‘hi’ to people just because they started following me. It seems a bit of an arrogant put-down, like saying ‘I was here first, but I’m so gracious I’ll welcome you too’.
6. I don’t spew a torrent of tweets. When I have a lot of points to make, I blog it and send a tweet about the blog.
7. I will unfollow people who
   1. try to sell me something,
   2. try to sell me on something about themselves to their profit,
   3. continually make up or pass along pithy quotes or
   4. violate points 4, 6 and possibly 3.

… and now I’m down to following 3 people.

Other thoughts:

• I won’t unfollow people just because they use ‘LOL’, ‘ROFL’ or smilies or other idiotic contractions, but it certainly doesn’t endear them to me.

• Twitter connectivity starts like this: ‘I find you; I read some of your tweets; I like them because they meet a need or interest that I have; I follow you’. But for some people the line of thought somehow continues, ‘… so I expect you to follow me back.’ This is then turned into ‘twitter courtesy’.
  This is the mentality that says ‘My self-esteem is built around getting a lot of followers. So I’ll follow a whole bunch of people just so they’ll follow me back – and if they don’t, I’ll accuse them of being discourteous!’ We live to the metric – gotta get those numbers up!
  I don’t get this mentality. If I follow you because I gain insights from your creativity, why should I expect you to follow me for free? I’d better be putting out some tweets that you find interesting too.

Any thoughts?

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8 years ago today, I was in California at the International Tandem User Group. Compaq had bought Tandem and DEC, and HP had bought Compaq, so this was now HP’s show – bigger, but a lot less fun than the old ITUGs. The stock market had begun tanking a year before, and the department that I ran was processing massive numbers of executions per day as people were selling at a frantic rate. Volume was through the roof. I was in the process of rearchitecting one of my main systems to allow for multiple instantiations, which worked well when implemented. And I was at the trade show to talk to vendors about hiring more consultants, or at least to maintain contact with the vendors I short-listed.

When the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon, every consulting house left for home immediately. They all felt – probably correctly – that they would need to be at their desks in order to provide crisis support via more consultants. Perhaps more strikes would come – nobody knew. Since all flights were canceled, trains were at capacity; people were hiring cabs to take them from California halfway across country. And I was stuck on the West coast. There was nothing I could do back at work; I called my 2IC several times a day to make sure things were running as smoothly as possible. The trade show was canceled. I managed to get my room extended, and sat out there and watched the carnage on TV. It doesn’t feel good to sit in luxury and watch helplessly while a place you’re intimately familiar with – I used to work in downtown NY on John Street and Water Street for some years – is being crushed.

It took nearly a week before I could get on a plane and come home.

My company had spent an enormous sum of money to protect their primary building. It had already been developed with disaster in mind – earthquake-resistant architecture, power feeds from different substations, multiple generators, and so on. Now we were going into a huddle about how to maintain the systems under threat of attack. Who would be evacuated from the building; who would be brought in to run the systems? The operators were in this building; developers in a different building. We went around the table; each department head said, “I’ll have so-and-so come over – he knows most about the systems we run.” I was getting more and more bothered. We had a disaster site 300 miles away – why wouldn’t we switch there immediately? This was obviously just an academic issue. But I felt intense pressure to go along with the crowd. These were VPs and SVPs – I was just a director then. I didn’t want to look like I wasn’t a company man. But I also felt that, as department head, I needed to be thinking about ‘my’ people. So when it came to my turn, I said, “All our systems are accessible to the programmers in the other building – we designed it that way.” (Which was true.) “My developers will stay in their seats and run things there – I’m not sending any of my people into harm’s way.”

I never caught any flack from that call, though I was sure I would.

Where were you? – Tell me in the comments.

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I wanted to play around a bit with Sparklines – cool little in-line charts and graphs that run off the jQuery library base. I’d found them several months ago in my regular trawling through the ‘net. So I took some of the CDC stats on N1H1 (aka swine flu) that they Twitter each day, and put this and this little Sparkline together. These are running on this page.

I also liked the Dow Jones Sparkline that they had on the screen, so I wrote a PHP server to get the closing prices from Yahoo! for the last 4 weeks and pass them to a Dow chart like theirs.

Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t let me include server-side scripting, so here’s a screen-capture of it.

I must say I’m pretty chuffed with it all…

[Updated this page 5/22/09]

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I’ve completed the next step on the votd Twitterbot list – the ability to retweet verses to others. Now when you Twitter

@votd John 3:16 esv > @tom, @dick, @harry

votd will look up the verse, send the original back to you, and retweet it on to the addresses you listed.

See the help page here.

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It’s been a while since I last blogged, because I’ve been building a free Twitterbot to serve the text of Scripture verses over Twitter – something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year. It’s finished now; I’ll get into the technical aspects in another post, perhaps, but for this post I want to tell about how to use it. The basic idea is simple – send a Twitter message containing the reference to the ‘bot (whose name is ‘votd’) and it will reply with the text.

Step 1 is being on Twitter. If you’re not a Twitterer yet, this step is fairly easy…go to http://Twitter.com and sign up. That’s all.

Step 2 is to type in the reference like this:

@votd john 11:35

After a while votd will wake up (it does this once a minute), see your message, interpret it, reply to it, and you’ll see this come back on your Twitter client:

John 11:35 - Jesus wept. (KJV)

In its basic form, it’s really that simple.

Verses that are longer than 140 characters (Twitter’s message limit) are wrapped into 2 (or 3, 4, 5 or even 6) messages.

By connecting to the Blue Letter Bible’s site and using the interface they provide to other sites, their translations are also available. If you want to read your verse in Latin, try

@votd john 11:35 vul

And it will come back with the Vulgate translation – BLB has 14 versions that they make available this way (besides the KJV which I have on my own site).

If you want to set a different version to be your default translation, type this:

@votd pref rsv

… then when you send in a verse request without a version, votd will use the RSV.

You can also subscribe to the automatic transmission of the verse of the day (that’s why it’s called ‘votd’, after all!) this way:

@votd pref votd=on

And, starting that night after midnight EST, votd will Twitter you the verse of the day, each day, until you unsubscribe.

Finally, if you’re not sure of your settings, or you want more detailed help, send this:

@votd ?

And votd will tell you what your defaults are and where the help page is.

Pretty nifty, no?

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Here’s another group of Twitter tools – this one for bloggers:

Twitter Username – by TechDebug/Lantrix

This converts any Twitter ‘@username’ string on your blog post to a link to ‘http://Twitter.com/username’, so that readers can follow that user or read their feed. This is running here, (temporarily, and will probably be deactivated because of the …)

Downside: It only works in the main post – not on comments or in the sidebar, which is disappointing – why wouldn’t the blogger want all occurrences identified and linked?

Twitip-ID – by Andy Bailey

This WP tool allows the blogger to add a Twitter field to the comment form, so the commenter can be reached that way.

Downside: Ever since WP 2.7, comments are not built by the code inside the comments.php file, so the documentation needs to be upgraded.

TwitterSplit and TwitterSplitter

When you twitter an interesting link to something, you send that URL as <your URL?interesting link>. When a user clicks on the URL you sent, it shows the interesting link in a frame with your banner on top.

Downside: Since I hate iframes and see it as just another cheap advertising trick, I can’t really recommend this one. But it’s a clever idea.

Twittar

Some people have a Gravatar – an icon that many types of blog engines support. For those that don’t have a Gravatar but do have Twitter, this plug-in pulls the avatar from their Twitter account (actually, it gives precedence to the Twitter avatar).

Downsides: Again, since WP 2.7, comments are not built by the code inside the comments.php file, so the documentation needs to be upgraded. Also, according to the comments on the site, it apparently loads slowly.

Bird Feeder – by Andrew Jaswa

When TwitterUpdater died (when I switched to WP 2.7), I found this plugin to send a Twitter message whenever a new post was published. Rock solid – does just one thing very well.

Downside (minimal): Doesn’t deal with all the events that TwitterUpdater did, but then I don’t use the other events either.

Tweetbacks – by Dan Zarrella

This tool is in beta right now. It works a bit like a pingback or traceback for your blog. Install it, and when someone references your URL in their Twitter, that Twitter will show up above your comment section.

Downside: The js code is hosted on Dan’s site, and things are getting very slow. So…

Quak Back – by Jeremy Hilton

…took the original code, improved the speed and made it run on the blog’s server. Then…

TweetSuite – by Dan Zarella

… turns the TweetBacks concept into server-side calls, along with a raft of other Twitter tools. An excellent concept, which I suspect will be improved and expanded over the next month or so. This one is now running on this blog – I’ve turned off Bird Feeder since that functionality is included here.

There’s a large listing of other Twitter clients and applications here (it’s not complete – it doesn’t have some of the ones in this post, for instance, but it’s a lot more complete than my little list!), so I won’t try building anymore lists – although if I find something I really love, I may document it at some time.

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