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Make the Most of Facebook With Fox 13’s New Series

Posted on May 4, 2009 by jessestay

A few weeks back I was interviewed by our Local Fox station, Fox 13 KSTU about Facebook. I was interviewed by Arikka Von, Katy Carlyle, Nicole Hunter, and Nineveh Dinha about topics such as why you should join Facebook, Facebook Privacy, Security, and even Strategy on Facebook. The series ran all last week (now all my neighbors are wanting me to give them a class on Facebook), and I think serve as a great resource for anyone wanting to learn the basics of what Facebook can do for them.

For those wondering when I’m on Facebook–Now What??? will get a new edition, rest assured Jason (my co-author) and I are definitely talking about that, and hopefully sooner than later we will be able to begin working on that. We also have something else in the works (again if I can just get time to get my part done) that I think will hold you through in the meantime. Until we get any of that together, these videos by Fox 13 Utah serve as a great resource. Thanks a lot to the entire Fox 13 team for giving me the opportunity to share! I especially like the one showing you how to set your Facebook Privacy settings. Nineveh’s strategy segment was also very useful I thought (If you’re going to be running against Senator Bob Bennett this election, call me – I’d love to help you out!):

Facebook Fundamentals

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Facebook Etiquette

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Facebook Security and Privacy

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Facebook Strategy

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Is Twitter Seeing a New Form of Spam Attack?

Posted on April 23, 2009 by jessestay

Please note this in no way is inferring @nycgrl88 is in any way behind these attacks – it is simply an attempt to figure out why these bots are targeting her.

My friend Scott Lemon, who runs http://topfollowfriday.com pointed me to this. It would appear that someone or something has hacked the Twitter sign up process and is creating hundreds of bot accounts, all with the same messages, including one linking @oprah, @mrskutcher, and someone named @nycgrl88 to #topfollowfriday as a recommendation. You can see all the accounts via Twitter search result here. They are all posting exactly the same Tweets, all prefixed by 1luv, and complain of things like not being able to upload a photo or background image, a problem Twitter was plagued with yesterday.

Since @oprah and @mrskutcher are obvious names, I naturally looked at the odd one out in the #topfollowfriday recommendation, @nycgrl88. Her name is Jennifer Regan, and according to her bio, she goes to NYU and lives in New York. Oddly enough, all of the @1luv spam accounts are owned by a girl named Jennifer (with bio pics that all kind of look similar, but brunette), who lives in New York and goes to NYU.

Could this be a new type of spam attack on Twitter? I’m not saying @nycgrl88 is the one behind this, but it would not be very hard to game the sign up with a script, create hundreds to thousands of accounts, all that recommend @nycgrl88 to #followfriday, and benefit from top exposure on those sites to get more followers. Are spammers really that desperate?

Again, let’s not put the blame on @nycgrl88 until we know what’s going on here, but something fishy is happening – I’m trying to figure out the purpose behind it all. Am I missing anything here?

Mac Wins When it Comes to Twitter

Posted on April 21, 2009 by jessestay

With the launch of my new favorite Twitter app, Tweetie for the Mac yesterday, I wanted to see how successful it could be. Damon Cortesi, who runs TweetStats.com, stated he was seeing Tweetie (the number one iPhone app for Twitter) give TweetDeck, the current number one Twitter client, a run for its money. (Literally, considering Tweetie costs $14.95 and TweetDeck is free) After doing an informal poll via Twitter, I decided to create a SocialToo SocialSurvey around the question, and sent it to my Twitter followers.

From the poll, which is still running, at the time of this writing out of 138 people, 76 (55%) of people on Twitter use a Mac. 46 (33%) use a PC, a far drop behind. 15 (10%) use Linux, and just one uses another OS besides PC or Mac. These stats would explain the popularity of a client like Tweetie, which runs just for Mac and iPhone.

We discussed this on FriendFeed. The comments there ranged anywhere from those that were solely on a PC or a Mac, to those that used to be on a PC, but now were on a Mac. Others use the iPhone or a Blackberry mostly to access Twitter. Regardless, those that commented were still overwhelmingly Mac.

So it begs the question, with the new influx of celebrities and mainstream media on Twitter, will it continue to be this way? Mac owners are often the early adopters, those willing to try new things out. Will the PC eventually take over Twitter? It will be interesting to watch, and maybe in a few months I’ll try this SocialSurvey again. I’ll try a few other questions I think after this – what would you like to learn about Twitter users that we could poll on SocialToo?

In the meantime, please check out Tweetie Desktop for the Mac! It’s clean, elegant, and very worth the price. You can read more of Louis Gray’s review of it here.

I Should Have Heeded My Own Advice About Twitter

Posted on April 21, 2009 by jessestay

About a full year ago, I wrote of developers leaving the Twitter development platform due to Twitter consistently removing features, making changes without warning developers, and effectively putting developers out of business with just a single change of policy. I advised other developers to be careful building a business model around Twitter, adding that it was a risky move, much more risky than many of the other platforms out there. It would seem I should have taken my own advice.

It was this time I started SocialToo, a service that originally we built around the auto-follow concept. I named it such because I did not want it to work solely on the Twitter platform. It was clear Twitter was on an unstable architecture, and their relationship with developers was also quite shaky. For this reason, I added in features like Facebook profile redirects at the time (a simple “yourusername.socialtoo.com” which redirects to your Facebook profile). But Twitter, at the time, was the easiest solution to build around, and made the most sense for where we had started so I figured we had to make what we did with it perfect. Here we are, one year later, and I’m still trying to make it work perfect, but not because our code sucks – it’s because Twitter keeps changing their system, and the rules that go with it!

Today Twitter pulled the rug out from under its developers once more by, with absolutely no notice, announcing that (paraphrased, in my words) since their way was the right way, they were discouraging auto-following, and would only allow a user to follow 1,000 people per day. What Twitter neglected was that, while not many, myself and others were building business plans around the users that would need this. A little notice would have been helpful, but is very consistent with the way developers have been treated over the past year or more by Twitter. Yes, I’m a big boy and we’ll survive, but that’s besides the point. You can read more about what developers are experiencing over on LouisGray. Put lightly, I’m not happy.

Twitter Needs a Firm Terms of Service

I know I’m not only one to say this when I say that I don’t have a clue what to expect from Twitter any more. Any developer out there is prone to this type of treatment, and I can pretty much guarantee it will affect every Twitter developer out there at some point until something is done about it. The reason for this is that Twitter really has no firm Terms of Service around its platform. I am not required to agree to any way of using their platform when I write software for them.

Some might see this as a good thing, but what they are neglecting to see is that a Terms of Service gives developers a vision of what to expect, something we don’t have now. This needs to change, and soon – we as developers need to know what we can and can’t do on the platform. Can we write apps that auto-follow? Can we write apps that auto-DM? What about mass-DM? Can I store data and what data can I store on my servers and for how long? What is the definition of spam? There are lots of rules for Twitter users that we agree to, but nothing a developer must agree to when writing apps. This is why you’re seeing so many apps out there gaming the system, causing these ridiculous rules to have to be made, when it can realistically all be settled before-hand with a simple agreement all developers must agree to before developing apps for Twitter.

If I knew what I could or couldn’t do on Twitter I could avoid it in the first place. Unfortunately Twitter hasn’t defined that and it’s pretty darn confusing, not to mention extremely risky, to write apps for the Twitter platform right now. With Facebook, on the other hand, I’m required to agree to a very specific agreement, and they’re very clear when they’re going to change any of the terms, giving developers plenty of warning. It’s well written out and well defined. It’s a platform with little risk and high reward for businesses because they give developers time to work with any changes they make to it.

We need notice, Twitter!

These “day of” announcements are very immature and something a 15 million user company with millions to billions in the bank shouldn’t be doing. They were doing this type of stuff a full year ago, and even today they haven’t changed their ways, even though they said they would. Twitter needs to start notifying developers of these changes or a lot more are going to be put out of business at the drop of a hat.

Every day on the developers mailing list I’m seeing other things like this happening – OAuth technology being removed without notice (I recognize it’s beta, but we still need to know!), no notice to developers on what’s happening when site slowness happens, when things are fixed on the platform, and when they’re broken, and more. As a developer with 12-15 years of experience in these things, the entire Twitter platform is a joke! You just don’t do these types of things in the real world of software development! I worked at places I would have gotten fired for this type of activity!

Developers will continue to leave if this doesn’t change

I have to admit, I’m re-evaluating my strategy to stop working on what I was doing in the Twitter environment, and move more to other platforms at the moment. When I do that, no, I won’t remove the existing Twitter technology, but I will admit it will be very easy for the users on my service to get the same value they’re currently getting on Twitter on other services, and as they experience similar treatment by Twitter they’ll be leaving as well (as I’m already seeing). I know I’m not the only developer in this boat right now – there are a lot of frustrated developers out there with almost no signs of change from Twitter. I know developers that now refuse to develop on the Twitter platform because of the way they were treated, and that will continue to happen.

I have to admit I had to send out e-mails to 20 or 50 or so of Twitter’s very top users today telling them that Twitter wasn’t allowing them to auto-follow. Those are tough e-mails to write, especially considering the influence Twitter has allowed these individuals to have and the audiences these people are capable of engaging. I’d like to make Twitter look good for these people, but Twitter isn’t making it very easy.

Twitter, it’s time to get your act together. Hire some more smart people, get people in management that know how to make these decisions right, and make us believe, not by words alone, but by actual actions, that you’re going to do something about it. If you don’t, as I’ve said before, when the developers leave, so will your users.

Come follow me over on FriendFeed over at http://beta.friendfeed.com/jessestay or over on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

Automatic Data Compression With DBIx::Class::CompressColumns

Posted on April 19, 2009 by jessestay

UPDATE: You can now get the DBIx::Class::CompressColumns module on CPAN here or via CPAN command-line shell.

I’m going to get geeky on you for a minute, but you should find this interesting. One of the challenges I’ve had with SocialToo recently has been the massive Social Graph data we’ve had to story and process and track. We cache a lot of the data so we don’t have to hit Twitter’s servers as often, and also to enable us to track new follows and unfollows regularly on behalf of our users.

If you are a SocialToo user you may have noticed that your data hasn’t been as accurate lately as it should. The reason for that is we have had a) 20,000+ users all wanting to auto-follow or have their follower base tracked, and b) all 20,000+ of those users have anywhere from 100 to near 1 million followers that we have to store and process. It’s not an easy task! And our database, set up in a relational manner of followers to users, just wasn’t cutting it in regards to being able to retrieve and process so many followers at a time.

So I took a cue from Bret Taylor and FriendFeed, who talks about how they denormalized their database, and now reference “bags” of data that they can then process in their code. I went for a hybrid model, and with each user entry I now have a single column on that table we reference, in BLOB format, which contains all the social graph data for that user. In Perl, I simply create a hash structure of the data, freeze it, and then store it in the database in our social graph column. To retrieve it, we pull it from the database, thaw it, and we have an entire social graph we can play around with and do with as we please.

The issue I was running into however is that plain text, stored in a single column, for a user with 1 million followers, gets to be quite a large amount of data we need to pull through the pipes. I needed an easy way to compress the data before inserting into the database, storing it in binary format, and decompress. I also wanted it to be automatic, so no coder would ever have to worry about this extra step – it would just happen magically.

So today I’m releasing DBIx::Class::CompressColumns for all you Perl coders out there. What this module does is it sits on top of Perl’s DBIx::Class database abstraction libraries and allows you to monitor a single column. Any inserts or updates into that column get compressed in Zlib format, and any selects/get_column calls to that data (you must use get_column) get de-compressed, meaning you don’t have to worry at all about that extra step, the data is a significantly smaller footprint, and your throughput is much less, causing much less load on the database. For one-million followers, I measured just 4 Megabytes in space taken that has to go in and out of MySQL.

Approaching Graph optimization in this manner has significantly sped up our processes, and I’m already seeing huge benefits from it. There is much less load on the database, it’s much faster to retrieve and process the data, and we’re getting through our users’ followers much faster now.

The module namespace is currently being applied for on CPAN at the moment, and I’ll post a link there as soon as it is approved, but for now you can download the Makefile-compatible gzipped library here. I hope some of you find this useful, and please feel free to modify or send me any updates or bugs you think I missed!

The link for the download is http://socialtoo.com/DBIx-Class-CompressColumns-0.01000.tar.gz

Oh, and TMTOWTDI so please if you have better ways of approaching this I’d love to hear your ideas!

Photo courtesy rp72

Goodbye RSS. Welcome Real-Time Web!

Posted on April 13, 2009 by jessestay

A few weeks back I mentioned here that I was giving myself a whole week without a single check of my Google Reader feeds in order to see how reliant I had become on RSS, and where I could shift my priorities in order to become more productive. It’s a technique I tried last year with Twitter, and I think proves effective with anything you want to gain a new perspective on. I mentioned I was going to report after my hiatus, and I admit I have been slacking, considering it’s now almost a month later. The time has been good on me though, as I’ve been able to learn how to adapt after my hiatus, and have found several things that have worked for me.

What I Learned

Going without RSS was insightful. I learned what was really important to me, what I may be able to do without, and what I would miss without RSS. First of all, the things I learned that were most important:

Blogs I write on – it’s important for me to know what my co-authors were writing so I can stay up to date, as well as promote the content of the blogs I write for.

Family – I follow several of my family members who blog. Knowing what they, and close friends write about is important to me, and saves me the need for the dreaded family newsletter we used to have to pass around.

Guilty Pleasures – okay, perhaps these could go within the “do without” column, but let’s face it – we all have a few blogs we read that are just enjoyable to read. They keep us sane, and give us balance to our days.

Believe it or not, that’s about it. To help explain why, let’s go with what I can do without:

Most tech blogs – lets face it, I can now pull most of my favorite blogs from sites like FriendFeed and Twitter. Better yet, FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter work better for “media snacking” because I can filter results by number of people talking about each topic. I can also hold a conversation with a large group of people on each topic, and help promote the blog I’m reading much more than I can in a Reader. Believe it or not (and I learned this from my friend, Jeremiah Owyang), I can get most major news by just checking FriendFeed or Facebook or Twitter. I have yet to miss anything I regretted losing.

Sharing – Google Reader (my preferred RSS Reader), and most RSS reader tools out there are very outdated in the way they let you share the feeds you read. I would much rather share something on FriendFeed, where I can re-post out to Twitter, post an image with the feed, or encourage much more conversation, real-time, with a very large audience. I can’t do that effectively with Google Reader.

Mundane news – I noticed after my week was over that I was subscribed to a lot of just dumb news that really was unimportant to me. It was cool for that “one special article” the authors would some times write, but I found many of those were also sharing on FriendFeed or Facebook, and I could get my news there instead. In addition, there were many news sources that would just repeat news from other sources, making many of my feeds redundant.

Shares from many of my friends – A lot of the shares I was getting on Google Reader I was also getting on Twitter and FriendFeed, and I was also already subscribed to the blog they were sharing. I hid most of those sharers from view, and instead added them to my “Favorites” filter list on FriendFeed. Now I still get all their shares, and can freely discuss, real-time with them and others rather than fracturing the conversation. If you want to share stuff with me, make sure I see it on FriendFeed.

Of course, there were several things I found I couldn’t ever leave. RSS is not, nor will it ever be completely unnecessary, although I can very easily see myself being proven wrong in the “never” category there as well. I found several things I just missed, and still can’t think of a perfect way to solve. Those include the following:

Blog mentions of my company, name, or brand – the infamous “ego search”, as it’s called, is very important to brands and learning what others are saying about you. It’s how you can get eavesdrop, know where you stand, and perhaps step in where necessary. Notice I said “blog” though. Through FriendFeed, now in the Beta you can set up your own “ego filters” and save them in the right-hand sidebar. Any mention of your name in the comments and posts will appear in your filters. On Twitter, you can always use http://search.twitter.com, or a separate column in TweetDeck or PeopleBrowsr, or as I’m currently doing, set up a custom search in CoTweet for your brand name and track it that way. No RSS needed.

Comment tracking – on any post I do for LouisGray.com, there is no way via Disqus for me to track just the comments from the posts that I wrote. Therefore, I subscribe to each post’s RSS comments that I write, and any new comments come into my feed reader. I do this with many blogs that don’t provide a way other than RSS for me to track all the comments.

Wiki, forum, and other site tracking – one strategy I use to get the latest data is to track the “recent changes” on MediaWiki installs. This is available via RSS, and any change will be sent to your RSS reader. In addition, forums do the same thing. For forums, being replaced more and more by microblogs, it will be interesting to see how necessary this becomes, but it’s necessary for the moment. Now, I’m curious who creates the first real-time Wiki (send your royalties my way).

RSS is not dead. It’s just losing its value. As the web gets more and more real-time, we are less and less having the need to have data pushed to us via RSS – we can go get what we want, when we want it, from any point in time. We can now, through filters and real-time data, retrieve much of the data we want to get, in an environment amongst peers. Google Reader itself is old – it’s slow to adapt, and I just can’t see it keeping up with sites such as FriendFeed, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you want me to read your stuff, I still subscribe to some RSS feeds, but if you want to guarantee I see your stuff, subscribe to me via FriendFeed and get my attention there. Your site, in order to continue in the future will need to be part of the real-time web and those that don’t keep up will be left in the past. You can follow me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/jessestay (check out http://beta.friendfeed.com/jessestay for a true realtime experience!), or on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com. I can’t wait to read your stuff there! You can read all the content I write across all the blogs I write for, real-time, in the custom FriendFeed room I created at http://friendfeed.com/jesse-stay – either subscribe to the room in FriendFeed, or you can add it to your RSS Reader! 😉 Of course, as always, for the old-fashioned out there you can always subscribe to this blog at http://staynalive.local/feed.

Are there any other things you can see a need to use RSS for? What other techniques have you begun using to adapt to the real-time web?

You Don’t Own Your Data on Social Networks

Posted on April 9, 2009 by jessestay

I get asked often by clients, reporters and media folk and others about Facebook’s recent Terms of Service updates, essentially saying they own their users data and have a right to do as they wish with their data. They’ve turned around on that and will be releasing newly revised Terms soon, but at least they’re being honest about it. The thing is, any service on the internet you belong to, which includes Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, even Gmail, and more, owns your data. It’s their right to change their Terms for their users any time they want, and the only choice you’ll have at that point is to leave the service, or continue on, recognizing what you already knew – that what you’ve stored on their service is theirs to own forever. I think people have come to accept that – they just get all up in arms when it’s thrown in their face.

The thing is, as a brand, you can’t afford for this to happen. Owning, and losing rights to your data can make or break your business. People take risks to be able to take shortcuts and survive by joining such services, and frankly, it’s important to still have a presence on these services because people are talking about your brand and you could be missing out on that conversation. But can you really trust your content on such services? What if Twitter, or Google, or FriendFeed were to pull a Facebook and with the drop of a hat own all your previous data. They are within right to do so – you gave them that right when you signed up for their service.

The Social Web Needs More Open Protocols

We were discussing on FriendFeed today how the new FriendFeed beta, with its real-time nature, is a lot like IRC, and enables people to chat, in a completely new way, in real time. The thing is, it’s not at all like IRC. IRC is an open protocol. It’s software businesses can own, modify, and change to their hearts content. They can wrap their brand around it. With IRC a business has the ability to own the community that subsides within the environment they set up, on their own servers.

Not FriendFeed, or even Twitter enable this capability, which is why if they don’t adapt in the future things will change. Facebook is attempting to address this with their Connect product, and that’s a step in the right direction. Facebook also provides quite a bit of their underlying developer platform code, as open source, freely and openly to the community, also a step in the right direction, but they can always do more.

Keep in mind that this is all about owning your own community. Can Guy Kawasaki set his own rules about what is, and isn’t spammy? Can Leo Laporte provide a Geek-friendly environment for his TWIT Army? Can ESPN provide a sports-enthusiast friendly environment for Football fans, and properly advertise and provide things, in their own way, that those fans would appreciate? You can’t do this on any of the networks right now (with the exception of Facebook Connect).

Laconi.ca is headed in the right direction on this. As is Automattic, and SixApart. They all have their own major services, but all of their services enable you to focus on owning your own community. And even if you don’t have enough control, they provide you the source code to give you the control you need, should you need it. This is the future!

Why does this matter to the end-user?

You may think, well, I’m not a business. I’m just a casual user so this doesn’t matter to me. I’m willing to bet if you’re an Athletics fan, or a Boston Red Sox fan, or a 49ers fan, or a Mom, or even a Dad, that you put much more interest in those things than you do the brand name Twitter or FriendFeed or Facebook. Those things are your real life! Now imagine if those brands started to give you a way you could communicate with like-minded individuals, and what if different brands could talk with each other? This is one reason Facebook is going to succeed, and one reason Laconi.ca is going to succeed, because I can chat in the environment I want, and my friends all still get to hear me! As an end user, and especially a brand targeting that end user, that’s powerful!

This is why TodaysMama Connect is seeing great participation in their new Connect community for Moms. Now, with their service, Moms can connect with each other without having to sift through the massive data mine of Twitter. At the same time, TodaysMama gets to own and control the community in a way that works well for Moms and is inviting for them, while maintaining their brand image. You see the same with Leo Laporte’s TWIT army, and I’m already talking to several other major brands that are considering the same.

How do you control your data?

Will the future be full of everyone creating their own communities of “followers”, competing for who visits their site and embraces the community? It’s possible, but that’s far down the road. We need more open standards. The Twitters, the FriendFeeds, and the Facebooks all need to be providing and leading these open standards and serving instead of being data hoards, becoming network Connectors, providing ways to connect multiple smaller networks with each other. They need to be the directories and the places where people can go to find each community. They need to be the search, and the stream of the “brand-owned” data, and providing as many ways as possible for those brands to completely own and customize the experience for their own communities. Their role is the glue of the Open Web.

Let’s truly make these services the IRC of the Social Web. Thank you, Laconi.ca and Automattic, and SixApart for leading the way.

Photo Courtesy Eric Kilby

Twitter, One Year Later and Nothing Has Changed

Posted on April 9, 2009 by jessestay

“Twitter’s all about the real time.” That’s what Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, said in this interview Scoble did with me sitting in the background almost 1 whole year ago. As I sit here, my Twitter is inconsistently providing updates, they have specifically told their users some updates will just be missing over the next little bit, and I’ve been waiting on CoTweet, my preferred client, for hours to provide me new updates. No, I don’t blame CoTweet – after all, my own service, SocialToo has also been suffering from these delays and slowness issues due to some sort of “architectural changes” they are making on the back-end. Twitter’s slow, follower and following numbers are off, apps are hitting rate limits when they shouldn’t normally be, caching issues are everywhere. We’re at Twitter’s mercy, and it’s far from real time!

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Rewind back one year. I recommend watching the above video if you have 15 minutes. I’m hearing the same things today that I heard one year ago in that room, and I’m still just as frustrated as I was an entire year ago. I’ve been strung along and I’m not happy, as a user, and especially as a developer.

A full year ago Twitter was working on their architecture, dealing with scalability issues in times of “massive growth”, and that never, ever stabilized. In fact I think the media has actually kind of gotten used to it – you rarely hear frustrations today like you did back then when nothing has really changed! At this point I’m beginning to think it will never stabilize – I’m scared as both a business owner who writes software on top of the service (I should have heeded my own warning half a year ago), and I’m scared as a user, and someone who has brought hundreds, if not thousands to try out the service that my reputation may be tarnished.

I’m talking with a lot of media entities and reporters about Twitter lately and frankly, I’m not sure what to tell them any more. Do I keep pushing them to try out Twitter? Do I just be brutally honest that this is just what Twitter is and people should just be prepared to get used to it? Or do I tell them it’s not worth leaving Facebook and their existing networks there to pursue? After all, Twitter themselves barely even use their own service. When was the last time you saw them respond to a complaint from someone about Twitter, on Twitter? Does anyone really know where to go on Twitter for Twitter support? Even in the video above I’m referred back to the developer mailing lists, not Twitter – nothing has changed. When at the same time I can always contact @comcastcares, or @scottmonty, or @RichardAtDell and get prime support from some of Twitter’s biggest users.

I’m seeing hundreds, if not thousands of people begin to game the system of Twitter. People are using services all around Twitter, and I’ll admit some are even using mine, to gain massive followings, empty followings, just to accrue followers with no relationship underneath that number. I’m beginning to feel that most of my followers are just dry numbers because of that – Twitter is seriously losing its value for me as a user.

Evan and Biz, it’s been a year already – I’m your biggest fan. Because of that I’m also your biggest critic, and I’d really like to see some improvement! At what point can we expect to see brighter skies and greener pastures on Twitter, or will it continue to be “we wish we could give you a time frame, but it could be months down the road” like you said a whole year ago? Just be frank with us – be honest. Let us know what to expect. Communicate to both your users and your developers in a way we can all enter this knowing what we’re going to get, because frankly I have no idea what to expect from the service any more.

Maybe it’s about time Twitter starts looking to sell. There are many businesses quite large enough to handle the problems Twitter is experiencing right now, and even prepare for 2 years down the road. There are businesses that have experienced this growth and know how to get it in order quick. Something’s not right at Twitter – it hasn’t been right for over a year now, and maybe it’s time to fix it.

Forgive my venting – as a developer I’m frustrated and I needed to get this out. In the meantime I’m going to go write some more code. While Twitter’s down you can find me on FriendFeed where it’s nice and green and pretty, oh, and real time!

TodaysMama Launches a Laconi.ca Instance That Works

Posted on March 28, 2009 by jessestay

As long-time readers of my blog know, I am a very strong proponent of self-hosted, branded micro-blogging communities. Imagine, for instance, if ESPN were to create a Twitter-like site, just for sports enthusiasts (call me!). People are known for talking their minds on Twitter, but when someone mentions what they ate for lunch, they go nuts! How about a Subway-branded micro-blogging community for food-lovers? Another example I have used is a community, solely for Moms to communicate and share with other Moms. That’s why I was excited when Rachael Herrscher, CEO of TodaysMama, sat down with me looking for new ways to build community around their brand. What we came up with is something I’ll admit blew me away when I saw the final version. Yesterday they launched the live version of it, TodaysMama Connect for the world to see.

TodaysMama Connect – What it Is

TodaysMama Connect, put quite simply, is “Twitter, for Moms” (as I call it). They’ve taken a simple open source Microblogging platform, Laconi.ca, and have made it beautiful, something your Mom could use. The site has simple microblogging functionality, enabling users to post, in short burst, what they’re doing at the moment or what they’re thinking, while at the same time communicate with each other via @replies or direct message functionality.

In addition, the site uses a feature of Laconi.ca, groups, to allow groups of people, such as what we’re seeing through the #GNO (Girls Night Out – takes place every Tuesday night) “group” on Twitter, to truly communicate as a group without disrupting the flow of the site. In fact, the very large #GNO movement which makes Twitter trending terms every Tuesday has also created a group on TodaysMama Connect, and the group is continuing what they started over on Twitter, in the more Mom-focused environment. When users send !groupname and their message, the message goes out to only those who have joined the group on TodaysMama Connect. There are already hundreds of groups to join, top groups including “Toddler”, and “Office”, and “Potty”.

The site integrates fully with Twitter, so you can use Twitter directly from the site itself, importing your current Twitter stream into TodaysMama Connect, and also sending your updates from TodaysMama Connect out to Twitter. In addition, as a Laconi.ca instance supporting the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) standard, the site works fully with clients such as Twhirl, which support Laconi.ca and OMB. I even got it to work on my iPhone with the LaTwit app (using http://todaysmama.com/connect/api as the API URL). You can get it to work in Twhirl using username@todaysmama.com/connect as your username.

Even if you’re not a techy and prefer a nice, plain, web interface, the UI is comfortable enough any Mom would enjoy using. The site supports normal login/registration, or if you have an OpenID you can login/register via that means as well. Registration was extremely easy. There is lots of help documentation, and if you get stuck, you can always pose your question, and @todaysmamastaff is listening (as is the CEO, @todaysmama).

The Power of Micro-Branded Communities

I’ve said this time and time again, and I’ll keep saying it. The only way Twitter will survive is if they open up by allowing other communities to communicate and build “Twitter” in their own environments. This is “Forums 2.0”, and Twitter just so happens to have the largest master Forum site on the internet right now. That won’t last forever if they keep their closed environment.

Businesses want their customers interacting in their own brand environments. Many have strict rules, requiring they host the content and do it under their own umbrella. Twitter can’t do that right now, and will never fully do that if they don’t open up.

At the same time, Twitter is a mess of mixed niches, all on the same platform. It’s very difficult as a brand to pinpoint users devoted and interested in a single type of product. It’s difficult to identify demographics. What TodaysMama is doing is enabling brands to now have a specific demographic of people they can target and share information with. Rachael Herrscher, the CEO, even shared an example of a local Zoo being able to share local deals to the Moms in the area. Businesses want this – and this is the perfect social environment to do it in. They now have the power to interact with one of the most powerful demographics on the internet – Moms.

The Future of Microblogging

This is only the start. What Laconi.ca and OMB allow users to do is connect with people, across platforms, in ways they weren’t able to do before. For instance, if someone were to create an OMB-compatible site for Dads, now my wife would be able to follow me as I interact with other Dads on the Dad-related site, and she would never have to leave TodaysMama Connect.

Evan Prodromau, the author and maintainer of Laconi.ca is offering services to help large brands set up and maintain these instances. From my conversations with Rachael, he was there the entire way to help with the technicalities of the TodaysMama Connect set up. Businesses like this type of professional service and guarantee. Large Brands will embrace this.

I know of several other large brands also interested in such a set up, and many don’t even know this is possible yet. Dave Winer is also looking to push this concept, as is Steve Gillmor and others. Twitter is a powerful force, but it has a long way to go before it can embrace every niche out there. I really don’t think people are as devoted to the “Twitter” brand as we think they are. They are devoted to “NASCAR”, and they are devoted to “ESPN”, just as they are to being a Mom, or being a Dad, and the products and services surrounding those. Twitter has led the way, but it’s time to break out of the mold.

If you’re a Mom, have a Mom, or are married to a Mom, I highly suggest you try out TodaysMama Connect. We are already seeing the site take off and I’m amazed by the many conversations I’m already seeing there. I think for the first time I may actually get to see my Mom, or my wife, truly microblogging and interacting with others via such a service. I only wish I could hear them from Twitter now. That won’t happen until Twitter opens up.

You can sign up for TodaysMama Connect at http://todaysmama.com/connect.