• 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!!!

Perry & Lucretia Noble

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.

… 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?

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?

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’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. ]

I blogged about the Obama/McCain twitters last November, about how Obama’s team really understood the concept early on, but McCain’s team just didn’t get it until very late in the play. Now I’m seeing something else about Twitter for President-elect Obama – according to TwitterCounter.com, on January 1 he had 152,041 followers; by Jan 2 another 1,130, the next day an additional 546, then 757, then an incredible 7,949 (8,000 new followers in a day!), then 2,913. Yesterday a mere 78 new followers picked him up.

Past Week's Obama Twitter Followers

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!

I’m not a particularly savvy person, but I noticed that both Obama and McCain used Twitter in their campaigns. I went to their Twitter pages to see their connections and such. Here’s what I found, looking only at the top page of each (the top page shows the latest 20 Twitter messages -

here’s McCain’s (click to enlarge)

and here’s Obama’s ).

Obama was communicating about 3 times as frequently as McCain

McCain stopped broadcasting on October 24 (11 days before the election) – his last 20 Twitters cover Sept 27 through October 24 … 28 days, or an average of about 0.7 Twitters per day. On the other hand, Obama stopped broadcasting on November 5 (the day after the election) – his last 20 Twitters cover October 27 through November 5 … 10 days, or an average of 2 Twitters per day.

The content is decidedly different

These last 20 Twitters break down as follows:

McCain: campaign info: 9; attack: 9; complaints: 2; references to opponents: 6.

Obama: campaign info: 16; attack: 0; complaints: 0; references to opponents: 0; 4 appeals, mostly to vote; 1 “thank you” at the end.

Across the whole campaign, Obama was Twittering 12 times as long as McCain and at about the same rate overall

McCain started using Twitter: Sept 19 … 46 days before the election, while Obama started using Twitter on April 29, 2007 … 555 days before the election!

Total Twitters throughout McCain’s campaign: 25, compared to 263 total Twitters throughout Obama’s campaign.

Obama built up a following more than 25 times the size of McCain’s

People following McCain: 4,863 – while a massive 130,340 people followed Obama.

My rough interpretation

1. Obama’s team understood the value of this technology early on in the run-up; McCain’s team did not. They both have nice web sites, but having a good web site was the “we’re impressive” thing to do back in 1996 – it’s de rigueur now. One of the ‘in’ technologies in the past couple of years has been Twitter. Obama’s team recognized it very early on; McCain’s team took nearly 17 months to catch on.
2. Cost of reaction vs action: time spent telling people how bad your opponent is is time and opportunity lost telling them how good you are. In a race that focuses so much on personality, it’s rarely useful to point to the other person for any reason.
3. Recall that toward the end of the 1996 election, Dole finally gave in to his advisors who had been recommending that he attack Clinton on character. It was a significant (and very noticed) volte-face. On the other hand, Clinton stopped most attacks, and came off looking like the gentleman politician. The impact was that the attacks hurt Dole a great deal more than Clinton. The public gets very tired of constant mud-slinging and wingeing. McCain’s team did not seem to have learnt this lesson. Again, toward the end, Obama’s team stayed relatively clean here, and he came across as the ‘bigger man’. Perception and name retention are everything in trying to sway voters at this late point in a campaign, so McCain’s team were in effect campaigning for Obama at this point.

The above clearly isn’t the single determining factor – or even necessarily a main reason – of who won and who lost. But it might well be symptomatic.

</politics>!

To create a Twitter-bot you need to be a web server. By definition, web servers are passive – ‘send me something and I’ll reply to you’ sort of thing. By definition many Twitter-bots are also passive – ‘I’m waiting for your command to obey it’, but some Twitter-bots are active. There are 2 types of ‘bot invocations:

• A ‘push’ sends a broadcast message. That means that the push functionality has to wake up at a time (say midnight) and push the message out to all subscribers (friends) … again, waking up to send a message is not a typical web function, but at least it’s only once a day.
• A ‘pull’ waits for a request and fulfills it. That’s great, just like a web site.

Unfortunately, it appears that initiating a connection between the user and my verse of the day ‘bot requires the user to add the ‘bot as a friend, and then the ‘bot has to add the user as a friend. How does the ‘bot know that the user wants it to add him as a friend? IT HAS TO LISTEN TO A ‘befriend_all’ LINK EVERY 30 SECONDS!!!!!

Gack! This is the old ‘poll’ technique that was kicked into the trashcan back in the ‘80’s (think RJE stations). It means transmitting an active message twice a minute from the passive web site. Not a smart design. (BTW, it doesn’t have to be 30 seconds, but – as I understand it – that interval gives reasonably responsive feedback to the user so he/she can see that they’ve been added and prevents frustration and multiple messages.) It also means that every Twitter-bot everywhere is sending Twitter an automated message every 30 seconds (or what ever their interval is) – just for a response that is almost always ‘no change’. No wonder Twitter is crashing so much from overload – every ‘bot in the Twitter-sphere is polling it every 30 seconds to check for a message that might show up a dozen times a day!

(I’ll insert my disclaimer here: the documentation for Twitter-bots is {or was!} very sketchy – basically just an API at the time I was investigating doing this – so I may have mis-read how the thing works.)

I wanted to do both: pull – serve a verse from the DB when the request came through from anyone, and push – serve the verse of the day from the DB at midnight to everybody subscribed.

Now Twitter handles different end-point devices differently:

• When someone is subscribed as a mobile phone user and is added as a friend, Twitter sends the ‘add’ message out to them.
• When someone is subscribed as an email user and is added as a friend, Twitter sends the ‘add’ message out to them.
• But when a Twitter-bot is added as a friend, Twitter makes it come look for the ‘add’ message. Why? Isn’t this a staggering waste of traffic?

So I propose a new type of ‘bot – the 2bot, if you will – where Twitter owns the timer and control feed. Here’s how it would work:

1. When I register my 2bot, I tell Twitter it’s a 2bot, and possibly the wake-up time (midnight) and/or the frequency (86400 seconds, in my case).
2. Every time someone wants to subscribe to my service, Twitter sends the 2bot their name and, like a good little web site, I’m woken up and register them, sending them a friend request in reply. When they accept back to me, I send an acknowledgement and go back to sleep. No more polling 2880 times a day for a dozen messages!
3. When they want info (pull), I reply as before.
4. When it’s time to push, I get Twitter’s chron message and send the broadcast out – actually, with this architecture the push just became a pull, didn’t it?

Result? A simpler web site on my side without chron cards – I go back to being a basic web site doing only what I was supposed to do – and a much, much lower load of traffic on Twitter’s side; both benefits leading to less down-time.

I think they should pay me a few mill for this.