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Next Utah Social Media Developers Garage: May 13th at Bungee Labs

Posted on May 7, 2008 by jessestay

Our Utah Social Media Developers Garages (UTSMDev) happen every second Tuesday of every other month, and that is coming up one week from today. Our next meeting will be on May 13th from 7pm to 10pm at the same place as last time, Bungee Labs. We’ll bring the Wii or Xbox in case there’s time to play afterwards.

At this event, Bungee is going to show us a simple “Hello World” for Facebook using their Bungee Connect Platform. For those unaware, Bungee had “Platform as a Service” down before Google App Engine came out, and have recently even partnered with Amazon EC2 in order to provide full server access beyond their current platform. I have some videos of their stuff I took while at Web 2.0 Expo that I’ll try to post later this week in my “Utah Startups” series.

I am still looking for businesses to sponsor snacks and drinks (or even a full dinner – Bungee supplied Fuddruckers for our last event!) for the event – if your business would like some exposure I’ll be sure you get the credit. It could be a great way to meet new developers, Social Media experts, and bloggers!

As usual, while this event is targeted towards developers, everyone is welcome at the event, as it could be a good way for your business to meet developers in this area, as well as just learn a little more about the Social Media space! For future announcements of UTSMDev events, be sure to subscribe to our Google Groups mailing list here!

Bungee Labs is located in the old WordPress building on the second floor – you can find directions here:

625 E Technology Ave B2300
Orem, UT 84097

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=625+E+Technology+Ave,+84097&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.724817,82.265625&ie=UTF8&ll=40.325575,-111.679738&spn=0.008163,0.020084&z=16&iwloc=cent

Please RSVP on our Facebook Event Page.

Twitter Now Removing Blacklisted Accounts

Posted on May 6, 2008 by jessestay

(I’m beginning to move much of my activity over to FriendFeed lately. Scoble calls it the “World Wide Talk Show” – please subscribe to my feed to comment and participate!)

I was going to write a few more of my annoyances with Twitter today, but a few pleasant announcements have come out of Twitter lately that I thought I’d share.

First, just announced today, Twitter will be shutting down accounts entirely that they have marked as “spam” on their blacklist. What??? Twitter has a blacklist? Yes, you heard it right.

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted. It was the same with the API – it was actually a huge headache for me as a Twitter API developer because despite me following the user, Twitter would respond with nothing as though the follow went through, but the next day the user would show up again as not being followed. I checked with Twitter and they confirmed the accounts I was having trouble with were indeed accounts that were on their “blacklist”.

Today, Alex Payne confirmed on the Twitter Dev mailing list that from now on users marked as Spam on Twitter will have their accounts suspended entirely for violating the Terms of Service. He also confirmed that they would avoid the headaches Facebook has had (aka Scoble’s account being suspended) and contact the owners beforehand to let them state their case.

I strongly welcome this new practice – Twitter has all the stats on their end to flag accounts as possible spammers, and by removing their accounts promptly this will make Twitter a much nicer place to use. The only other thing I would suggest they add now that this is in place is a way for developers to notify them of possible Spam accounts. You can do this as a user by “blocking” the account in question – I have no way to do this as a developer that I’m aware of.

The second, very welcomed feature is the addition of a “since” variable when requesting the friends or followers of an individual. In the past on SocialToo.com I had to do a request on all of an individual’s friends and all of an individual’s followers, and do a compare to see which of those following you, you weren’t following. For several A-list bloggers with near tens of thousands of followers, this was taking a few hours to complete the entire script, not to mention increasing the number of HTTP requests back to Twitter’s servers, I’m sure further burdening their already overburdened bandwidth.

Now, with the “since” variable, I can keep a tally of when I last checked your following/follower ratio and only do a request on those friends that have followed you since the last check. I can now go from checking those you follow on a daily basis, to checking almost every minute!

Last, Twitter has added the ability to determine, with one API call if a friendship exists between two individuals. Now rather than having to get a list of those you’re following, and then those that have followed you, I can just get a list of those following you and check to see that a friendship exists.

It is very refreshing to see such an active effort on Twitter’s part to help out the development community. I hope they continue to maintain the relationship they have with us, and continue to listen – many of us really want to see them succeed.

Why I Hate the Twitter Syntax

Posted on May 3, 2008 by jessestay

I have disliked the Twitter syntax since I’ve been on it (you can find me via @JesseStay on Twitter – go ahead and follow me!). As a long-time IRC user, everything seems backwards! I have often referred to Twitter as “IRC 2.0”. I’m not sure I can fully embrace that concept though.

For those unfamiliar with IRC, it predates even instant messaging. It brought out the original concept of a “chatroom”, and exists even today on various servers throughout the world. Ustream.tv currently uses it for its users’ channel chatrooms. It is the home for almost any “live” activity of any open source project (log into irc.freenode.net to see – I’m often in #utah there, as well as recently #codeaway). Traditions have been established, and virtual friendships have been bonded. In many ways it could have been the original concept of a “social network”, the first concept of linking friends together in a single place on the internet.

I was at a Perl conference just last year, and was happy to see the #YAPC chatroom in irc.perl.org open during the banquet. We had a ton of fun with that! Now, just this year, when I go to conferences, I see speakers leaving up Twitter, and answering questions via Twitter. The two seem to be serving similar purposes, in different ways.

That’s why I was astonished when I got on Twitter for the first time, and started seeing public messages directed to individuals with “@” signs in front of them! Is there a source for that that I’m not aware of? I know of no known documentation that Twitter themselves created to establish that tradition. In IRC you simply type “username:”, and then your message, and it gets highlighted in that user’s chat window in most IRC clients. Better yet, I can start typing the username and it tab-completes. You can’t do that in Twitter. That tradition and method has been around for years, yet Twitter seems to break the mold for some reason.

IRC also supports commands – I can type “/nick newnickname”, and it switches my username, automatically! It’s a basic standard that all clients support, open, and available for all to use. Twitter I have to go entirely to their website to do anything, and it’s extremely limited in what you can do. To direct message someone on Twitter, I have to type, “dm username message”. In IRC it’s just a simple command, like all other commands, and I can always type, “/help” if I don’t know what the commands available are. I simply type, “/msg username message”, and it messages the user, and again, it tab-completes the username!

Why couldn’t Twitter just use the IRC standard in their platform, and then expand upon it to improve the IRC standard and bring it to a mobile world? By all means many of their scalability issues may have been taken care of had they done so. Not just that, but they would now be able to support groups, and less development would be needed to manage their platform. Twitter says they have an open API – I question that openness. It’s not based on much of an open standard, and IMO, it’s causing them problems now because of it.

Looking to start a project? Always look at the open solutions that are out there first, then build upon them – you’ll have much fewer headaches if you do.

(Photo courtesy GapingVoid.com)

Are You a Hot Up-and-Coming Utah Startup? I Want to Meet You!

Posted on May 2, 2008 by jessestay

I’m thinking about starting a series on this blog of hot startups that I find interesting in Utah. I’d really like to show to the world the great startup scene that Utah has to offer – hopefully other bloggers in the area can pitch in and join in this effort as well. I am relatively new to Utah, and am just getting to know the scene out here, so please don’t take this the wrong way. My hope is that this is only because I’m new to the area – honestly, I only know of one or two established startups. I know of many that are “in the works”, but only a few have an actual business model with customers and revenue stream (or venture/private equity/angel funding to hopefully get to that revenue stream). I’m hoping I am just not “in the know”.

Do you have an up-and-coming startup you’d like me to feature? Do you know of any that stand out to you? I really am hoping those in Utah can step out of the woodwork and share via the comments (I monitor FriendFeed as well so you can also comment there) what you know. I hope to then pick out the best and try to get the word out about what you’re doing. Speak up, or forever hold your peace!

Using Perl/Catalyst and Want to Use Sometrics? Try This.

Posted on May 2, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been analyzing various Social Applications Analytics tools lately, and have recently stumbled upon Sometrics. Sometrics handles full Analytics for your Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace applications, and will actually utilize the Facebook API to retrieve demographic info about those visiting your Application. As I examine the other Analytics solutions for Facebook and other Social Network Applications, I’ll try to post my findings of their strengths and weaknesses here, OpenSocialNow, and FacebookAdvice.com. If you’re not a techie, you may want to skip the next part, or forward it onto your IT department.

One thing I noticed about Sometrics is it seems to only provide code to paste on your Application pages for PHP, Ruby, and ASP.net. The code they provide is relatively simple, but in case you’re wondering how to do it in Perl, here is how I did it in Template Toolkit under Catalyst on Perl:

Enter this on all Application pages (I do it in my “footer” file):

[% IF Catalyst.request.param("installed") %]
[% ELSE %]
[% END %]

Then add this in the “post-remove url” subroutine for your Applicaiton (or create one and add the URL in your App’s config):

=head2 remove

  Page that handles App removal

=cut

sub remove : Local {

  my ( $self, $c ) = @_;

  if ($c->req->param(“fb_sig_uninstall”)) {

    $c->res->redirect(qq{http://halo.sometrics.com/met.gif?a=u&app=}.$c->req->param(“fb_sig_api_key”).qq{&uid=}.$c->req->param(“fb_sig_user”).qq{&age=&sex=&city=&state=&country=&friend=&src=fb});

    $c->detach();

  }

  return;

}

I’m Listening to Your Comments, I Promise!

Posted on May 1, 2008 by jessestay

I just realized I was missing about a week’s worth of comments from this blog. It looks like Google Reader at some point stopped tracking the comments (which is how I knew you were commenting), and I missed a few great ones, including one from BJ Fogg, whom I look up to. My apologies if it has taken awhile for me to respond to your comments.

If you want to track any of the comments feeds for any particular article, simply view the article, and append, “/feed” to the end and add it to your favorite RSS Reader. It will then send you updates of all comments for that article. Or, you can just click the checkbox next to, “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” below the Captcha and it will e-mail you updates.

My apologies if I have not responded very quickly lately – that should be fixed now.