I've Been Thinking About This…

Congratulations to @NewSpring church, on their 10th birthday, where @perrynoble is the lead pastor. He Twittered this today:

• Hey @NewSpring…10 years ago today there were 115 people who gathered for our first worship service! We had NO IDEA that God would do…
• …All that HE has done! And…the best is yet to come! Can’t wait until tomorrow!!!

I passed the tweets on to my small group, and Pastor Ryan replied with this question – “What will we be shaking our heads at in disbelief at what God has done 10 years from now?!”

That got me thinking…

1. The rapture?
2. That there are now 1,043 people in our small group?

…or perhaps…

3. That our church (Praise Christian Fellowship, in Barkhamsted, CT) now has an average of 1,043 attendees, 85% of whom are striving to go deeper with the Lord, and who invited the other 15% so they can step into eternity also?
4. That we’ve run out of chairs 5 times over because members keep inviting friends?
5. That we have so many new believers that we have to rethink the way we disciple?
6. That, as we look back at 2010, we’ll be amazed at how ignorant, naïve, weak and foolish we were – but we stepped up to the mark anyway, took the risk and lived for Jesus – and it led to the hardest, most exciting and most glorious life-changing decade of our lives, totally dedicated to and utterly vindicated by Christ?

… or perhaps …

7. We’ll be shaking our heads about how life seems to be getting fuller and fuller, and that we can’t wait to see what He has next in His plan.

The best is yet to come. Always! Can’t wait.

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?

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?

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.

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. ]

Now it’s true that Twitter has had its problems, and it could be that the enormous number might be simply a reload of a number of followers who were deleted earlier (there was a massive drop from Dec 31 to Jan 1 of 5,757 followers – running a trend line over the previous points of the graph would suggest they didn’t actually stop following him, and it does seem unlikely for such a mass migration in a single day).

Nevertheless, the point is clear – his last Twitter was on November 5, when he had 117,021 followers. In the 2 months since then, 48,393 people have added themselves as followers to a feed that has sent nothing – a rate of 768 per day! And why? In order to add yourself as a follower, you usually go to the person’s main twitter page, where you would see that nothing has been sent out since the election ended.

More significantly, as President, and by extension as President-elect, anything he puts onto Twitter becomes instant public knowledge that cannot be pulled back (rather like the Presidential Records Act on steroids). There’s no way anyone with a brain would add that risk to all the others that go with the job already. Keeping the account clean and untouched since the end of the elections is much smarter.

So why, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the account has been dormant for 2 months and that it is unlikely to be used going forward, are people piling onto it at such a rate? I suppose the logic is ‘just in case’ and ‘if he doesn’t send anything it won’t matter anyway’. One sad possibility – he’s following 5,000 more people than are following him, which suggests an automatic response to the follow request; I suppose there could be twitterers who want to boost their ‘twitter grade’ by following him – although that would be taking the picayune to a whole new level.

I tell you this, though: with this many followers, if he does post anything, it may bring Twitter to its knees!