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12seconds.tv Scratches the Surface of Twitter Integration

12secondstweetbox

I got an email from 12seconds.tv the other day about their new Tweetbox feature. 12seconds is basically the Twitter of video, allowing you to post quick 12s videos via web or mobile. Their Tweetbox feature grabs the latest tweet about your 12seconds video and displays it on your profile.

Oh how we love Twitter!  We love it so much that we’ve decided to create a special feature that allows your Twitter friends to publicly comment on your videos.  All they have to do is include the Tiny12 link from your video in their tweet and we’ll automatically pull it in and put it right into your TweetBox.  You can find your TweetBox sitting right on your home and channel page.

12seconds Gets It Right

You can probably think of a million services that post to Twitter for you. Why do they always make this the priority? I can think of a few reasons:

  • From a developer stand-point, posting to Twitter is easy once I have your credentials
  • Posting a link to my service in your Twitter stream helps my service gain popularity
  • Some integration with Twitter, however half-assed, leads users to believe your service is on the bleeding edge

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing any service that makes an effort to integrate with other services, but there is a piece missing here that always bothers me. This is especially true of services like FriendFeed and Pikchur, where comments enrich the value of the service.

Discussion Fragmentation…Again

Let’s talk about FriendFeed. I import my updates from Twitter. People that see my item in FriendFeed have the option to comment on it. They also have the option to have that comment sent to me as a reply on Twitter.

What ends up happening is I get the reply in Twitter and continue the discussion on Twitter. Meanwhile, back on FriendFeed, there is a bunch of discussion going on that doesn’t get sent through Twitter. Not only that, but the discussion I’m having on Twitter doesn’t go back through FriendFeed. So, I’ve created two separate discusion threads from the same FriendFeed item.

What would be great is for FriendFeed to grab items from Twitter that are in-reply-to FriendFeed items. I’m not sure of the technical details here, but I think it’s possible. I also think it’s possibly difficult, but I have my blogger hat on right now, so I’ll leave the technical discussion alone for now.

12seconds Could Do It Better

As it stands, 12seconds only grabs the single latest tweet about your videos and displays it on your channel page. There is no Tweetbox on the individual video pages. The context of the comment is pretty much stripped away as it’s unclear which video the tweet is about. The remedy for this would be to grab all tweets about a specific video and display them as comments on that video’s page.

12seconds has set themselves up for success here because they can simply (again, speaking as just a blogger) grab any tweets that mention their URL’s and correlate them to their user’s and videos using their own database.

FriendFeed also has it’s own URL shortening service and could possible do something similar. I believe the Twitter API also includes a method to find out what tweets are in-reply-to other tweets, so there should be a way to grab entire threads of tweets that correspond to FriendFeed items and apply them as comments for those items.

Obviously, this is mostly speculation, but if we don’t attempt to do what might seem impossible,  all this will get boring real quick.

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Save Space In Your Sidebar with Tabbed Widgets

I am engaged in an ongoing battle with my blog’s sidebar. I’ve never been sure what I’d like to put over there or how I want it laid out. When I recently switched to Tarski, I decided to revisit my widgets (hey, I made a funny) and see what I could do to make things easier.

Let me give you a little background. I like hacking code. Doesn’t matter what kind of code it is or even whose code it is. On the flip side of that, I don’t like re-inventing the wheel or making things harder than they have to be. I have no problem digging into my WordPress plugins and themes and fiddling with the PHP code in order to bend it to my will, but if there is an easier way, I’m all for it.

The Quest For a Tabbed Interface

Tabbed interfaces are pretty popular. They let you squeeze lots of info into a small space and help your interface to look cleaner and simpler. I was originally using the Javascript tabifier to achieve this type of widget in my sidebar, displaying my Recent Posts, Popular Posts, and Disqus comments.

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Should You Be Using Gubb Instead of Remember The Milk?

I recently came across another task/list management web application called Gubb. Now, as you all know, I’m a hardcore Remember The Milk fan. I’ve written extensively about it’s Smart Lists and Tags, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore a good thing when I see it. Also, it seems there are some core features lacking in Remember The Milk, that are pretty important to some people. Here are a few features that Gubb has that are missing from RTM:

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LeapFish: Just Type It, But Will Anyone Use It?

Image001LeapFish is a service that provides search results from multiple search engines all in one place. They have connections with all the major search portals like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others. As you type your search, the results are pulled together using their “proprietary hyper-threading technology” in conjunction with the API’s of each service. Basically, LeapFish is a meta search engine.

We’ve created the first multi-dimensional information aggregator and search portal in the world. Our goal is to gather, organize and render the most relevant information from the internet’s most valuable destinations for each users search, in one single simple shot.

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A Few People To Check Out

I like promoting interesting people, so I posted a message asking for people to send me their links. These are the people that actually responded. If you don’t already follow them, you may want to check them out. I would have liked to link to you as well, but you didn’t respond, so I guess maybe next time. 🙂

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After an Intense Debate, I’m Back on Disqus

Intense Debate and Disqus   

Intense Debate and Disqus (Image by inky via Flickr)

Let me start by saying that both of these services are great and I value the work they have done and continue to do. I would recommend either to someone looking for a hosted commenting system.

I had originally switched from Disqus to Intense Debate because ID imports comments from FriendFeed. Disqus has been talking about this feature for quite a while now, but it still doesn’t exist. I’m a FriendFeed fanatic. I need this type of integration. The FriendFeed comments plugin has been my main standby for this, but I crave an all-in-one solution.

ZOMG! Where are my comments?!

I was alerted by @nukirk on Twitter that all of my comments had disappeared from my post on the Blackbird browser. Now, as you can see, I do not have a huge blog. I do not get much traffic and I don’t really get many comments, so it was highly unacceptable for all of the comments to disappear from one of my most discussed posts. I tried frantically to restore my missing discussion. After resetting the Intense Debate plugin, disabling WP-SuperCache and everything else I could think of, I just ended up getting rid of Intense Debate entirely.

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I Have No Excuse for Not Blogging

ShrugSure, I have been busy. Working a lot and spending time with family, but this is all no excuse. It doesn’t take that much time to write a blog post. Am I running out of ideas? No. I’m just not writing any of them down. I’m still writing posts over at BlackWeb 2.0, so obviously is just a case of neglect.

I should be ashamed of myself.

New Blog Layout

I had to change my blog layout. Wicketpixie is a nice theme with some nice features, but it has a few bugs on the back-end and I never did get it to render correctly in IE. I needed something clean and light-weight, so I went with Tarski (thanks mjc). It’s simple, but also has a few configuration options on the back-end.

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Professional Resolutions Meme

2008 Taipei City New Year Countdown Party: The...
Image via Wikipedia

This post is about the professional resolutions for improvement that I intend to make in 2009.  I was tagged by @David_N_Wilson. I don’t really believe in “new year’s resolutions” because I think you should always have goals, regardless of the time of year. I’m making an exception in this case because I definitely have a few goals in place that I’ve  been working towards and which will be reached in 2009. Continue reading “Professional Resolutions Meme”

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Twitter Users Cling to It Like a Safety Blanket

image by Rivka5

I recently wrote a post on Blackweb 2.0 which discussed one of the many services and content management systems that aim to extend the usefulness of Twitter. I briefly touched on something that has been in the back of my mind for a while, so I figured I should elaborate. In the post I explained the reluctance of Twitterers to actually branch out and use other micro-blogging services:

Hardcore Twitter users do not like to leave Twitter. Most of them do not feel like exploring other services. Twitter is just too simple to use, too familiar, and all their followers are there. No matter how awesome another service might be, these people are not moving.

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Automation Defeats the Purpose of Social Media

An example of a social network diagram.
Image via Wikipedia

The fact that Twitter is so simple and so revered makes it a perfect example to use when talking about social media in general. It provides the most basic framework for what more complicated networking sites like Facebook and Myspace are built upon. You find people and connect with them based on the value they have to offer you. That is the most basic action that occurs and everything else builds from that simple choice of “following” someone.

Auto-Follow

When you follow someone, that’s supposed to mean that you’re interested in what they have to say. Remember, this action is the basis of a social network. This alone will make sure that your network is valuable to you, so what happens when you automatically follow everyone that follows you? As time goes on, the quality of your network approaches zero.

The proliferation of spammers and marketers is just one single variable that ensures this to be true. There are many other reasons you shouldn’t use auto-follow. There are a large number of people on Twitter who you would view as “noise” if you took a look at their Twitter time-line and those same people are going to follow you at some point during the growth of your network.

Let’s use a real-world example. You and I are both content creators. I happen to write about a subject that you could care less about, but I think your content is the bee’s knees. Do you subscribe to me just because I subscribed to you? Isn’t that being dishonest? Fronting? Perpetrating? Patronizing? You don’t care about what I have to say, why pretend?

Auto-Reply

Why? What is the usefulness here within the context of a social network? We keep forgetting the fact that “social” means interactions with real people. That is what makes it different from everything else. When you replace that interaction with a robot, you are telling me that I’m not important enough for your attention. You’re telling me that you’re not there. You’re telling me that you’re kinda rude.

What you’re actually telling me is that you don’t really have time to interact. You are not really interested in all this socal media stuff, but you know that it’s supposed to be good at building your brand or making you money, so you’re making a half-assed attempt at it. Keep in mind, these things may not be totally true, but it’s the impression I get.

Remember when you could call a company and a human would pick up? Wasn’t that nice? Now, you have to speak to an automated system that doesn’t even understand what you’re saying. You probably end up using foul language to get to an actual person. How does that make you feel about that company or brand? Do you feel valuable? Do you feel as if they care at all about you or what you have to say?

“Tweet” or Get Off the Pot

Don’t get me wrong, there are certain specific cases where automation is acceptable within social media. Some entities in this area are known bots and we are simply using social tools to get information from them (@rtm, @timer, etc). There are even cases where you may want to follow everyone who follows you for the sheer purpose of growing your network and kick-starting your ability to interact. Conversations regarding these are all over FriendFeed.

There is also a danger here. We may render our social networks completely useless because of the sheer number of people auto-following, auto-replying, pushing RSS feeds as messages, and sending out automated updates. This is not social. This is spam. This is getting ridiculous.

If you are not willing to put in the time and effort it takes to really be active in social media and to actually interact with real people, please delete your account. If you don’t feel that you have time to build real relationships and you need a robot to speak for you, please delete your account. If the majority of your social interactions are actually automated, you may need to rethink your strategy. Social media may not be for you. I hear mailing lists are all the rage.

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Blackbird Is Not About Tech, It’s About Being #blck

proud_to_be_black

Blackbird is a browser created specifically for black people. Now, it’s pretty self-explanatory, so here is a snippet from the website to explain it:

The Blackbird Browser gives you access to Internet sites just like Internet Explorer, plus more community-specific features when you want them. For example, Black Search moves important information from African American sites higher in your search results. Try the Blackbird Browser and see how we are customizing the web experience just for you.

I have seen some great posts on this browser and had some great discussions about it on Twitter (#blackbird). There are a bunch of different viewpoints and opinions that surround this #blck browser. Hate it or love it, it’s here. What I aim to do in this post is simply lay out just a few of the things I’ve heard about it so far.

IBIBSI Syndrome

I have to credit Karsh over at blackgayblogger.com for the nifty acronym, but it means: “It’s black, I’m black: Support It!” I believe this is usually a good mentality to have. We need unity in the community to succeed as a whole, but I also don’t think this syndrome is going to work once we start talking about technology and media. Look at the music industry as an example. We can’t just blindly support and endorse everything black. We will destroy ourselves in the process.

Black People Are Stupid

Are black people really having a hard time finding black content in two-thousand-eight-about-to-be-two-thousand-and-nine? I didn’t think that was the case. Most of us know how to type things into The Google just like other cultures do. That’s Internet 101. You search for stuff. Are black people so dumb that we can’t find things on our own? We need a browser that “gives you access to Internet sites just like Internet Explorer” to make sure we find black stuff on the web? If that’s the case, all you black tech bloggers (that don’t actually exist) need to step your SEO game up. First person that says Google is purposely burying black content gets a open-hand smack in the mouth.

Blackbird Is Not Innovative

Any tech person can take one quick look around Blackbird and see that there is nothing new there.  It doesn’t DO anything. Nukirk already talked about why Blackbird is not that special and they share a lot of my views AroundHarlem, but here is how you make Blackbird:

  • Install Firefox (you probably already did this, who the heck uses IE anymore?)
  • Get a black (as in color) theme, a hard to read one, with white text
  • Get these #blck bookmarks I saved for you on Diigo
  • These black video “channels” are a huge selling point and are included above (although I heard they’re a little dated)
  • Replace your default search with this black search to make sure you bury all the not-black stuff
  • Also, keeping philanthropy in mind, you’ll need this link http://dogood.blackbirdhome.com/

Technology has to bring something new to the table in order to succeed. It has to solve a problem or do something better than or before it’s competitors. Simply being black is not going to make Blackbird a competitor against Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, Chrome, Safari, Opera or any other browser you could think of because there is nothing that it does that no other browser can do.

Windows is not the best operating system ever created. It has never done the best job of operating a system. They succeeded because they made the first move and captured the market in a choke hold. Twitter actually kinda sucks. They had to disable nice features like IM and Track due to instability and they still go down on ocassion. None of that matters because they were first and anything coming later will have to rip Twitter’s users away, kicking and screaming, from their community they have built there. I don’t see what Blackbird can possibly offer anyone when they have decided to show up to the browser wars late and unarmed.

Good Idea, Bad Implementation

surf_blackbirdWhy is this a browser? Refer back to the “Black People are Stupid” section and you’ll see where I mentioned that the creators thought a download was simpler for black people to utilize than a browser plugin or link to a portal or social site. Oh, did I forget to mention that up there? Sorry.

I actually think it is a good idea to have a bunch of black content all aggregated, linked, and archived in one place. Being that it’s almost 2010 (I hear we’re gonna get flying cars), I would prefer this to be a website that automatically update itself by scouring the web for black content. Maybe some type of “spider” algorithm that could seek out websites based on keywords and then you could perform search queries to….oh, nevermind.

I don’t know these Blackbird people. I looked at the About page and it named three guys I have never heard of. I don’t even think they are the developers. They didn’t have pics or bios or even links to their Twitter profiles. I heard one of them used to have something to do with The Source back before they started posting malt-liquor ads or something, but what does any of that have to do with the price of tea in China? Who are they to tell me what is black? Why should I let them filter my content at all?

It’s a Teaching Tool for Kids

I have kids, 2 sons and a daughter. I would never let them anywhere near this browser. What if you had to buy a special television set so that you could see black shows? What if you could only get black books at a special library? What if you had to purchase a different type of CD player to listen to black music as opposed to everything else? What would be going through your child’s head if they had to use a special piece of software just to find out about their culture?

  • Why can’t we just use what everyone else uses?
  • Why do I have to use a “black” browser?
  • Is there a “white” browser or an “Asian” browser?
  • Does the “white” browser block all the “black” stuff?
  • Why can’t black stuff be on the same Internet as everything else?

I have heard people say that it’s good for kids to have things that “look like” them. That’s probably good for toys, books, and other objects, but I’m not sure that really translates to technology. Maybe next we can start teaching black kids in a school with nothing but black students, and only black books in the library. We could also make sure there were only black teachers. Of course, all the computers will only download black content via Blackbird. We could call it Segregation 2.0!

That’s All I Have

I don’t want to down any one’s hustle. I don’t want to belittle any one’s work. I just want you to try and think of the big picture regarding this browser. This is not a new black-owned business in your city. It’s a piece of technology and the rules surrounding it’s success are not the same as a brick and mortar business. You can’t come with a weak product and expect people to buy in based on cultural factors. That’s actually kinda disrespectful.

I also don’t appreciate the fact that I can’t share Blackbird content outside of blackbird. Go ahead and share something from Blackbird and see if it doesn’t tell the recipient they have to download Blackbird to view it. Did Blackbird make the content? No (refer to bookmarks above). So why is it locked inside their software? I see potential for shenanigans.

What do you think about Blackbird? Do you use it? Do you have ideas on how it should have been done? Do you love it as-is? Are you afraid to say anything because you don’t want to be tossed out of the black community? Speak now or forever hold your peice.Can you Digg it?

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Pownce Refugees Now Have a Home at Rejaw

After logging into my Rejaw account, I noticed a curious note at the top:

Pownce refugees: Import your old notes into your Rejaw account!

After checking out the link, it looks like the Rejaw guys have got the Pownce import game locked up. View the full shout for details and to ask any questions you may have.

I took a look at the actual Pownce import page and the process seems pretty simple. All you have to do is download your notes and upload the file to Rejaw.

Now you can easily move your old Pownce notes into your Rejaw account. Please be aware that we only import your public notes and any replies to those. We will ignore any private notes and notes to your friends, as well as replies to them.

As I said before, there are many reasons that Rejaw is the best place to set up shop for those that will miss Pownce. With the new import ability, you definitely can’t lose. Again, if you have questions about the import process, the devs are available in this discussion. Also, when you join Rejaw, make sure you shout at me.

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TwitterFeed: Yer Doin It Wrong

There are many different uses of Twitter that I find somewhat disturbing and annoying. At the heart of it is the fact that I don’t believe Twitter should be your personal billboard. It’s one thing to be highly active and engaged in the community, but it’s quite another to flood your followers with automated Tweets. One of the primary culprits of this is TwitterFeed. TwitterFeed is a way to pipe an RSS feed directly into Twitter. It checks your feed at an interval that you specify, grabs the newest items, and posts them to Twitter.

I’m quite positive that the person who developed this tool (@mario) did not intend for it to be a problem. I’m sure it was created to add value to the Twitter experience, but mostly it just gets on my nerves. After a heads up from @isthisstupid (her blog is here), I decided to check and see if there were actually some settings that could make Twitterfeed less…uh…evil. No matter how great a tool is, there is usually some training that needs to be done on the part of the user to make sure everything goes as planned.

Now, this is Chewbaca a screenshot of the Twitterfeed settings page for creating a new feed. As you can see here, you have the option to specify how often Twitterfeed is checking to see if there is anything new from your feed. Every hour seems pretty reasonable.

This is the other setting you can change on that same page. Twitterfeed also gives you the option to specify how many updates it will spit out at a time. I think this is where most of us are messing up.

These are the default settings, which means that Twitterfeed will check my feed every hour. If there are 5 new posts at that time, Twitterfeed is going to dump all of them into Twitter. All of them.

Take another look at the pic at the top of this post. Do you think your followers are interested in seeing 5 back-to-back, automated updates from you? What would you think if you saw 5 updates in a row from someone you followed? How about if you and a friend are talking and someone just busts into the conversation and talks nonstop for 5 minutes? I’m quite positive you’d both walk away.

So, in the interest of making yourself more valuable to your followers, check your settings. I would change that 5 to, at most, a 2. What you’re doing here is spreading your content over a longer period of time. This gives your audience a chance to actually digest what you’re posting at a normal pace, rather than seeing a huge set of links and just ignoring it entirely.

Are there any services that you think people are abusing or misusing? How do you feel about people pulling in automated Tweets? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.

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Why You Should Pownce on Rejaw

Image representing Pownce as depicted in Crunc...
Image by via CrunchBase

Six Apart recently purchased Pownce, shut it down, and scrapped it for parts. Their blog says Welcome Pownce Team, so the users of the Pownce service need to find another place to be accepted. The Pownce service will officially shut down on December 15th, according to The Pownce Blog.

It’s very unfortunate that Pownce users are being left out in the cold, but I offer a solution: Rejaw. There are a million micro-blogging alternatives out there. Let’s review:

  • Twitter – No videos, no photos, no audio, no media at all, period. No threaded conversation.
  • Identi.ca – Same issues as Twitter. It’s just not anywhere near what Pownce is.
  • FriendFeed – A truly awesome service. My home on the web. You can import all types of media, but it will usually only display if imported via RSS. Some people have also found FriendFeed to be a bit overwhelming at first glance.

What is Rejaw?

Rejaw is a new way to communicate in real-time with friends, family, and co-workers. You can shout messages to your followers, or whisper to your friends. Monologue or dialogue, micro-blog or status update, soliloquy or dialectic – how you use Rejaw is up to you.

You can also add links to images and audio within your shouts and they can be automatically embedded within your message. Threads build around each item or Shout posted. The interface updates automatically via AJAX, always showing you the most active discussions. The Whisper feature allows you to send private messages to individuals and groups.

Rejaw Tools

The Rejaw web interface is also the primary client. It provides you access to all features and updates in real time. There are also other tools available to access Rejaw:

Rejaw Radar

Rejaw Radar is a desktop application for Mac that keeps you up-to-date with the latest shouts, whispers and replies on Rejaw.

Rejaw for iPhone

Rejaw for iPhone is a simple, fast iPhone client that allows you to keep up-to-date with the latest shouts, whispers and replies on Rejaw.

There is also a Google Gadget, a Firefox Plugin and more available on Rejaw tools page.

You Can’t Lose

Maybe you lost a good service and I’m sure there isn’t a true replacement out there, but Rejaw may be an excellent substitute. Check it out. You can use it to send stuff to your friends. If you’re looking for people to follow, most of these guys rock.

Rejaw would also like to offer some support in making sure you retain your data from Pownce:

We would like to support Pownce import- if you have a Pownce export file, and you want to help us out, please forward it to support [at] rejaw.com, so that we can decipher the file format. Thanks! –(original shout)

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I Am an XML Superstar

I like making videos, so I when I came across this XLM Contest, you already know I had to put in my 2 cents. The contest is easy to enter. You can do a song, create a documentary, or make a screencast. Just about anything you can think of is fair game as long as it’s entertaining and related to XML, XQuery or DB2. Ok, it doesn’t really have to be entertaining, but why bother otherwise? The contest runs on a monthly basis and the highest rated video each month gets a cool prize. This month, you have the chance to get an 8GB iPod nano.

This IDUG contest (International DB2® Users Group) allows 1 entry each month, so you can increase your chances of winning a prize. You don’t have to know anything about XML or any of this stuff as long as you can incorporate the required subjects into your video. When you enter the contest, you’ll take a quiz before you can submit your video. This actually helps to teach you a few basics about XML, DB2 and XQuery. You get the answers before each question and the quiz itself is quite short, but the information will give you ammo for the awesome video you’re going to create.

Go join the contest so you can become an XML Superstar, you have until the 17th to win the December prize, but I think I have that one in the bag.

Find more videos like this on ChannelDB2

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