I've Been Thinking About This…

I’ve been enjoying Twitter for a while, and as the product has matured and stabilized it has gathered quite a few support tools. Some I’ve used, others I’ve just bookmarked. So, for your delectation, here’s the list.

I’m also playing with the idea of thumbnail previews of sites. These are coming from a repository at iwebtools; there’s a question in my mind as to how fast the thumbnails are built – of the 29 links in this post, only 4 were already built when I wrote it. (They claim the thumbnails are built within a few minutes, but I’ve been waiting for about two hours now.) Let me know in the comments if the preview (when it’s filled in) is handy or just an irritant to you. [Update: As of Feb 7 iWebtools still hadn't updated the thumbnails, so I've dropped the link.]

Clients

Twitter

Post up to 140 characters– like a teeny tiny blog, or your Facebook status line. It goes to people who follow you (your ‘tweets’); you can follow others, join groups.

Twhirl

“twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform. Some of twhirl’s features:

• runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
• connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmic accounts
• notifications on new messages
• shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
• cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku
• post images to TwitPic
• search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
• timeline filtering
• color schemes
• automatically check for new versions”

OutTwit (note: Not Outwit)

“If you are a Microsoft® Outlook® user, you probably have it open all the time. Now you can update your Twitter status and follow your friends without having to open any other applications. OutTwit seamlessly integrates Twitter into Outlook.

Some of OutTwit’s features:

• Update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.
• Receive your friend updates as Outlook messages.
• Archive, manage, group and search your tweets the same way you manage your email.
• Search, track keywords. OutTwit will automatically download ALL tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender. This feature is perfect for keeping up to date with the Twitter buzz on your name, brand, interests, etc.
• Group tweets by sender, topic, etc using the Search feature
• See new tweets at a glance.
• Assign custom folder and categories to new messages.
• Use Outlook’s “Reply” and “ReplyAll” commands to send twitter direct messages and @replies.
• Automatically sort new tweets into per-sender folders.
• Shorten URLs with tinyurl.
• See graphs of your Twitter usage statistics.
• Tweets sent to you (@replies and direct) are marked with high importance, so you can see them at a glance.”

Things I wish they’d implement/fix:

• If you type a message into the text area and then click somewhere else (to copy a link, for instance), the message vanishes. They say it’s because they’ve implemented the product using that function in Outlook, but I don’t find that a terribly satisfactory reason. Xobni and Lookout both run inside Outlook, and neither of them have this problem.
• I’d like to not receive messages that reply to someone I’m not following.  Of the last 100 Tweets I received from other people, 40% were replies I had no interest in.
• I’d like to have them pre-fetch pictures from services like twitpic/flickr and put them in the message, so I didn’t have to click through to my browser. 10% of my inbound Twitters contain picture URLs.

Thing is, this is my main Twitter pipe now. Other than the first 2 bullets above, I think it’s a tremendous product. I just want perfection (as I define it!).

HelloTxt

This client supports a huge number of services. Put your message in here and it will be sent simultaneously to any of the following that you’ve set up:

Bebo, BeeMood, blinko, Blip.fm, Blip.pl, Brightkite, Buboo, Custom Url, Facebook, Fanfou, Fazkut, Feecle, Flickr, Frazr, Friendfeed, Gozub, Hi5, Hictu, Identica, Jaiku, Jisko, Koornk, Kwippy, Linkedin, Meemi, Mexicodiario, MySpace, Numpa, Plaxo, Plerb, Plurk, Rejaw, Socialmedian, Tumblr, Twitter, Utterli, Yammer, you are.

You can define two groups (basically friends and business), and send messages to one or the other (or both) groups.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is like an extended version of Twhirl. Based on Adobe Air, it allows you to group feed into multiple columns by topic or group for easier focus. I found the interface a bit confusing – created columns I couldn’t get rid of easily/intuitively. Not bad, but needs some work. It is still in beta.

Sending

TwitSnip

Share text from other sites over Twitter. “TwitSnip is a simple tool for easily posting to Twitter. It lets you “quote” text on any web page. It does nifty things like looking up the @user for the website and linking back to the source. It shortens the URL too. It even tries to shorten the length of the tweet (when needed) using a twitabulary of short words.”

TwitPic

Share photos over Twitter. People can comment on the site, which goes back to you via your twitter feed.

TwitTube

Share videos over Twitter.

TweetShrink

OK, you want to type a bit more than 140 characters. How to squeeze it in? Use this service. Type in your message and it will compress it using SMS-style abbreviations.

That line became 13 characters shorter:

OK, U wnt 2 type a bit more than 140 characters. How 2 squeeze it in? Use this service. Type in yr msg, & it will compress it using SMS-style abbreviations.

Searching

Twitter search

Find a search term in the Twitter stream

Twitturls

“People post links in their twitter feed. We grab ‘em, visit ‘em, count ‘em, score ‘em and list ‘em. Today’s most tweeted links. This list is refactored every minute. A “what’s buzzing” on twitter.”

This site also displays the latest pictures and YouTube videos.

Twitt(URL)y

Tracks URLs in peoples’ Twitters, then finds who else is pointing to that URL to rate the popularity.

TwitPwr

Not sure I get the point of this. If you have a link to send to your tweets, put it in here. But if you don’t have links to send, you’d use another interface which will support the link anyway. Further, people visiting the link find it in a frame (blechh!) and your view is tracked. 2 Thumbs down.

TweeTree

“Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context. It also pulls in lots of external content like twitpic photos, youtube videos and more, so that you can see them right in your stream without having to click through every link your friends post.”

Supported content: Youtube, Flickr, TwitPic, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Lala, Blip.fm, xkcd

PeopleBrowser

A powerful viewer into the Twitscape. Build your own group or monitor someone else’s. Watch the entire Twitterverse go by. See the latest trends in the conversations. Track news sites. Search by keyword. Send Twitters.

Other

Twitter status

Color codes the status of the Twitter system, and gives explanations

TweetScan

Download your Tweet history.

TwitterCounter

For those who think followers are important in quantity. This gives you a little badge to put on your website, and graphs your (or another twitterer’s) growth over time.

TwitTangle

As the number of people you follow goes up, you may not want to follow them all as soon as the tweets come in. Very painful to get started, and I don’t see the value. 1 Thumb down.

TwitterVenn – by Jeff Clark

Put in 2 or 3 search terms and build a Venn diagram. It also provides a tag cloud and a running feed at the bottom, either of which can be clicked. It’s a bit difficult to put the words in – uses a non-standard keyboard reader – but otherwise nice.

TwitterSpectrum – by Jeff Clark

Similar to TwitterVenn – ways to visualize relationships between words.

TweetWasters

How much time have people wasted reading someone’s twitters? This counts it. 2 ½ hours if you’ve been following me.

FriendOrFollow

Who are you following that isn’t following you back? Who’s following you that you aren’t following back? Here’s the quick way to find out.

MrTweet

Suggests other people to follow based on who you’re following. Clever idea if you want to connect to the influencers of the people you’re already following.

Xefer

Look at the times of day/week a person Twitters

Qwitter

Find out who’s leaving you. Qwitter checks your followers and notifies you as often as it can, depending on how many people are using it and how many followers they have.

TwitterGrader

Compare a Twitter user against the rest of the Twitterverse and get a ‘grade’. Also available is the ranking within the geographic area. My grade is 78, and I’m ranked 38th in my state (whoo).

FollowCost

How annoying would it be to follow a Twitterer? Basically, how many Tweets per day.

Twellow

Reads Twitters and automatically places the author into one or more categories based on Tweet content. So if you want to find people interested in a category, say pilots or pastors, antiques or pets, go to the front page and click through. It also allows you to search for people geographically, when you click on the ‘TwellowHood’ tab.

[Update, 19 Jan 09: That last paragraph got cut off somewhere along the way, sorry. And here's #30:

TweetGrid

Allows you to track up to 9 Twitter search terms, each in its own frame. Nice if you're looking for a number of words or phrases at the same time. ]

Upgraded the blog to WordPress version 2.7 today.

I checked for auto-updaters, in the hope that this would be a no-brainer. Version 2.7 apparently now has one built in, but I had to get to that version first. There is an automatic upgrader plugin (‘wpau’) that is now retired. It officially supported versions from 1.5.2 up to 2.6.1; it unofficially supports through 2.7 … sometimes. Of the 16 comments I looked at: 7 people loved the wpau (although one of them subsequently failed when using 2.7’s updater, and another succeeded by skipping the backup step). 8 people failed with wpau and one person said to do the upgrade manually. It’s hard to see the group being more evenly split!

In the end, I took the painful safe route – I backed up the DB, then the other files, and then followed the steps in the detailed documentation. One minor note: The list of compatible plugins is a long way short of complete. This wasn’t a problem though; I turned on all the other plugins one by one and they all worked fine. I came out all right in the end, with one minor problem: There are three new security variables to be placed in the config file. Installing these meant that I couldn’t log on as the admin, even when I deleted my cookies. So I took the variables back out and everything was OK. There are no instructions for how to get around this issue; stay tuned for the resolution.

Running a quick cross-platform test, I also noticed that Outbrain doesn’t work in Opera, although it is fine in Firefox 3.0 and IE7. Running the error console on Opera showed a lot of width, height and null errors from the page, 3 or 4 of which were from Outbrain (and another 3 or 4 from Amazon) and none of which looked significant. (Interestingly, turning on the FF error console showed a completely different set of errors.)

So: not too bad a trip; nothing major encountered, and the blog is up and running on the latest platform version. And henceforth – automatic updates.

[Update Jan 12, 2009: Found out that Twitter Updater doesn't work anymore, so I have to put out the Twitters by hand. On the good side, I've successfully followed the instructions to set up threaded comments - not that I have that many comments to begin with...]

[Update Jan 13, 2009: Bumped into TwitterPress which supposedly does the auto-notification thingy, so I was going to try that with the next post. However, when I saved this comment, it sent out a tweet. Turns out it works by sending out a Twitter not for the initial publishing of a post but for any update, as long as it hasn't twittered about the post before. So if I update a post (like this one), it Twitters about it (once). Also, although it says it will put out the permalink, it actually puts out the deprecated post ID. So that had to go. I've installed Birdfeeder instead - that seems to be working properly.]

I’ve just installed the new version of Xobni – 1.6.3 – for Outlook. Xobni sits inside Outlook and acts as a helper, reading emails, indexing the content for searches and putting info about your contacts into a sidebar. I’ve used it quite a bit, although I have to say it puts a load on the system at Outlook startup time. Anyway, here are my thoughts on the new release:

• The download required me to uninstall the old version before I could install the new one. Not the best of approaches, but I did that. Then it re-indexed my email – again, not the most convenient approach.
• The new version links into Facebook to get certain pieces of information. I like the feature up to a point – problem is, a lot of my contacts have fairly common names, so I have to select the person I’m connecting to from a list – and there’s very little info about them, so often it’s just not possible to determine who this is. Not everyone on Facebook has a photo. When I do get a positive hit, though, it’s a winner.
• The LinkedIn connection from the previous incarnation is still there, and that’s a winner too. This time they’ve added Hoovers, which will go over ‘big’ with business-oriented users, and Skype contact support, which will go over big with a mostly different audience.
• There are some nice feature tweaks from the old version that I appreciate – the drop-down menu approach to the LinkedIn, Facebook & Hoover buttons; the new ‘Start over’ button (needed that!). I also like the more detailed aproach to the profile editing. The ability to pull info into the profile from verious sources available – photo from Outlook, LinkedIn, Facebook or Xobni; position & company info from Outlook, LinkedIn or Xobni – these are good additions. Behind the scenes there seem to have been a few adjustments – a little faster, I think, and the logic is definitely improved – it no longer confuses me with another Steve when it begins to build the indexes (it used to take about 30 minutes to figure out my correct name).
• Ranking still seems to be wrong based on the numbers – someone with 365 emails total is being ranked higher than someone with 366, and one friend with 3 total is ranked at 10, while another with 110 is ranked at 12! I don’t get that, but it’s not keeping me up at night.

At this point, the only confusion I have is – how do I merge profiles? It used to be that by giving 2 email addresses the same name, the profiles were merged. Now this doesn’t seem to happen. I liked the old approach, because it meant that I had all their current (and past) emails in one place (and it also merged their ranks); now if I click on someone I may not get the email I want.

My wishlist – include Twitter addresses, and allow me to send/receive my Twitters through the Xobni addon. I’m already using OutTwit for this – it has a few flaws, but combining products would be sweet. You could write the Twitter in the area currently used as the drop-down menu (hint, hint).

I’ve been looking at blog maps for one that does what I want. It doesn’t seem to be too much to ask…

1. Free!
2. Shows the visits on the map
3. Tracks visits for at least a month
4. Counts the total visits
5. Zooms in or identifies towns clearly
6. Widget thumbnail image scales well in the sidebar
7. Doesn’t distract the user from the blog post

(more…)

Wrote a little php program last year to scrape and parse a couple of pages in another site…

I’ve been involved in Tres Dias since 1989 here in Connecticut (CCTD #17, to be exact). Tres Dias is a type of community built around what is commonly called a “3-day weekend”. It started with a Catholic Cursillo in Spain in the mid 1940′s and has been growing and branching ever since. In 1981 my local Tres Dias started a teen group called Aventura. I was asked to be the music director for #8, and I’ve been involved with the teens ever since (we’re on weekend #26 now, holding one weekend a year). I wear several hats; one of them is that I write the newsletter for the group.

(more…)

I got all excited about 3 months ago and decided to write a verse-of-the-day Twitter-bot. I had just bumped into Twitter a few days earlier (we don’t have a lot of this techy-stuff out here in New England), and I thought ‘just the thing’. Then the trouble started.

(more…)