Tag Archives: twitter

But, why did you unfollow me?

February 5th, 2013

Please do not be alarmed if you’ve noticed that I have unfollowed you on the Twitter. It isn’t because I do not like you. It is, again, because I’m refactoring the way that I handle Lists on Twitter.

The unfortunate consequence of this most recent refactoring, though, is that if you have a private account I may no longer be able to follow you on Twitter. Twitter does not currently allow me to add your account to a list if we don’t follow each other.

Update: Why am I refactoring? This is why.

Single User Utility In a Social System »

December 28th, 2012

Don’t get knocked off your feet by the sheer strength of my agreement with Fred Wilson on Single User Utility In a Social System:

One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have (should have?) single person utility. But I strongly believe they should.

In short; single user utility is the fact that an application or service can be valuable to a single user with or without the social components like the network, sharing, etc.

Delicious is a good example of this, as Wilson describes, but there are many others. Path, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, the now discontinued Nilai, and many more have their own single user utility.

Bad examples? Google+, Instagram. Both of these would be fairly meaningless without the social components.

Social components should multiply the value of a service not be the only value of a service.

The advantages and disadvantages of feature roll outs

December 19th, 2012

If you’re a member of a fairly popular web service you’re probably becoming more and more familiar with feature roll outs.

A feature roll out is when a new feature is added to a service for a certain number of users at a time and, after some duration of time, every user on that service ends up with the new feature. This process could take hours, days, weeks.

There are a lot of reasons a company may need or want to do a feature roll out. There are also reasons a company may want to avoid doing them. Lets first look at why a company may need to roll a feature out.

Some features on these large-scale platforms are incredibly taxing on the technology infrastructure of a service. Say, for instance, that YouTube released a feature that allowed its users to re-encode all of their videos into a higher quality than they previously allowed. YouTube has billions of minutes of video. If every one of their users were allowed to do this all at once they’d bring YouTube’s infrastructure (world-class though it may be) to its knees.

Twitter’s recent roll out of a feature that allows its members to download all of their tweets in an archive is another example. While certainly not as intense as video encoding, gathering up tens-of-thousands of tweets and creating a neat and tidy archive of them does take some horsepower. They’ve decided to roll this feature out.

Another, slightly more technical, reason that a company may need to roll out a feature over time would be that they split their traffic onto many different web nodes. Or, actual web servers or clusters of servers. Each of those web nodes being updated at exactly the same time would bring the service down for a short period of time. High-capacity, “always up”, networks like Twitter can not afford to have downtime across all nodes at once. So they may roll out a feature so that their service remains up and running and they only have to pull down one node at a time, moving the traffic that would normally go to those nodes to other nodes temporarily, to update it with the new feature.

But why would a company want to roll out a new feature even if they didn’t need to? There are many advantages and I think one of the best ones that is often overlooked is hype. Remember when Instagram rolled out web profiles? It took the better part of a week for everyone to get their web profiles.

If you don’t see your profile yet, be assured that you’ll see it in the next few days. We’re rolling out profiles to everyone on Instagram over the course of this week.

A week. Even with 100,000,000 users a week in internet-speak is just about one year and three months. But with a certain number of users getting their web profiles each and every day they got an amazing amount of word-of-mouth for free. “Yay! I got my web profile!!” followed by a link on Twitter from a huge percentage of users. If for no other reason then to have Instagram on everyone’s mind for an entire week it was worth rolling this feature out over time rather than giving it out relatively immediately to everyone.

Another advantage worth noting is that by rolling out a feature the company is able to monitor the progress, effectiveness, and use of the feature and has more of a chance to correct things as the feature rolls out. If a feature has a direct impact on the stability or cost of running the service then rolling it out over time gives you a better idea of how well the feature is doing at attacking that goal. If a feature is brand-new and the company wants to see if users will A) use it and B) figure out how to use it correctly – by rolling it out you can get some sense as to how users interact with the feature. This is very advantageous.

Why would a company want to avoid feature roll outs? Announcing features that users do not have yet is always risky business. It is almost never a good idea. Some of the risk falls on user awareness. If a user learns about a feature and gets excited to use it and can not use it for a week they’re likely to forget about it a week later. You’re also likely to create higher expectations for a feature than you’re able to deliver on. I’m sure the Instagram users that got their web profile a week after they were announced had a slightly less excited response at getting them than the ones that did in the first day or two.

Feature roll outs are sometimes a necessity, sometimes a tool, and sometimes a bad idea. Choose carefully.

Any other advantages or disadvantages? Chime in on Hacker News.

The web we lost »

December 14th, 2012

Anil Dash waxes poetic about the web of turn of the century before Facebook and Twitter. But then talks about what is happening now:

But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means, akin to the years we spent as everyone moved off of AOL a decade ago, teaching them that there was so much more to the experience of the Internet than what they know.

Facebook is definitely the modern-day America Online. Twitter the modern-day SMS. But our blogs are still here. And Google does a decent job of indexing them. And maybe, just maybe we’ll see a resurgence of people “getting onto the web” as opposed to “getting on Facebook”. But the only way that will happen is if these tools of yesterday get as much attention and focus as the social web. And I think I see that coming.

 

Why Twitter introduced photo filters »

December 11th, 2012

Matthew Panzarino:

As photos and other media become a bigger part of Twitter’s strategy in the future, it can’t have this kind of thing completely at the mercy of a service owned by a competitor.

Instagram’s being able to simply yank Twitter’s ability to embed images inline on their site and apps is far too much control for Twitter to be comfortable with. Makes sense to me. And, as Marco said, I hope it is this reason and not to try to hurt Instagram. Because that wouldn’t work.

App.net’s new API feature: Stream Marker »

November 14th, 2012

App.net has a new API feature called Stream Marker. Dalton Caldwell:

Multiple times a day, I switch between my laptop and my phone. It’s frustrating that I have to ask myself “have I seen this post?” as I scroll through My Stream. Today we’re adding support for Stream Markers to the API. This will allows clients to sync where you are in your stream, global, and even in individual threads between clients.

This is fantastic. Tweetbot for iPhone, iPad, and Mac have used either Tweet Marker (now called Watermark) or iCloud to do something very similar in syncing where you’ve left off in a stream between apps/devices. This is something that has never been built into Twitter’s API even though it seems like a no-brainer.

Great update to what is quickly becoming a far better API than Twitter’s.

Why Tent.io seems more promising than App.net »

October 17th, 2012

Bruno Grande at App Storm:

“In essence, instead of one entity having control over a medium like Twitter, a standard is made, allowing any person or company to implement the medium, which remains interoperable.”

Today at Viddler HQ, around the new handmade, reclaimed pine Viddler table, the lot of us were discussing App.net, Tent.io, Twitter and the state of social networking. It really is an interesting time.

Today I said, if Tent.io existed in 2003 I wonder if Twitter would exist in its current form. In reality, micro-blogging is coming back around to be little more than blogging with a few added social features. Tent.io standardizes this “protocol” like SMTP and POP did for email.

For an excellent and thorough discussion of this look no further than John Siracusa’s Hypercritical Episode 88. You might consider Huffduffing it like I did.

I’m not going to bet for or against App.net winning or losing against something like Tent.io. I actually happen to like App.net quite a bit. And, App.net could easily implement the standard. I’m also not betting for or against Tent.io. But something will come along to disrupt the control that Twitter and Facebook have over the social graph.

Exciting.

Twitter favorites, now less valuable »

October 4th, 2012

Me, in July 2009:

So that is why I use Twitter’s favorite feature to help me save links for reading later.

For at least four years I’ve been subscribed to the RSS feed for my favorites on Twitter. That RSS feed is now gone. One of the features I found  most valuable on Twitter is now gone and I can not complain, send feedback, beg, nothing. It is simply gone.

This is painful. App.net and Tent.is are looking more and more viable. At least with them I’d be a paying customer and I could write in to complain.

Paul Haddad on Twitter’s limitations »

October 3rd, 2012

Paul Haddad about the new user token limit for third-party clients on Twitter:

“For iOS, there’s no danger of hitting that anytime soon,” he said “For Mac, it’s really hard to tell. It’s definitely a lower limit, but then there’s going to be fewer users as well. We’ve never really been keeping track of user tokens before this, so we know how many we had as part of the beta test, but we don’t know how many of those are going to buy the app, and we don’t know how many new users are going to buy the app. We’re a bit concerned but there’s not really much we can do about it at this point.”

Essentially, no matter how awesome Tweetbot for Mac is and no matter how many people love it even more than they like the official Twitter applications Tapbots has a ceiling on how successful Tweetbot for Mac can be because Twitter has changed their policies.

With Netbot’s debut I’m betting that Tapbots is hedging their bets. They are keeping a foot in the Twitter door (because surely they can bank at least a half-million dollars in revenue at the very least with Tweetbot for Mac) while simultaneously keeping their options and focus open to other services to support.

My island on this ocean

October 1st, 2012

Me, over four years ago:

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

What a difference four years can make! Pownce, Ma.gnolia, Cork’d, TUG.n, all gone. Flickr rarely gets my attention. Twitter is still here but is changing policies more often than I change my shirt. Viddler, I’m very proud to say, is stronger than ever but is certainly a much different service than it was then.

The Internet is like the open ocean and what we publish seems to be on a life raft simply going along for the ride. Yet our personal websites seem to be like small islands in this ocean. Sure, their beaches may change from time-to-time but the island remains – like a beacon to all travelers that we’re still here – somewhere to always come back to as these rafts take on water and eventually sink into the deep.

This environment forces me to rethink, yet again, how and where I publish on the web. This internal debate seems to be one that keeps coming up, over and over, year after year, as the ocean of the Internet ebbs and flows.

Should I simply post everything that I publish directly to this site and nowhere else? Do I cross post things to this site and also onto other services? Do I simply link back to this site from those services? Do I syndicate to those services with their own accounts (like I do now on Twitter and Facebook for this site)? Do I post some content here and some content elsewhere?

Believe it or not, and you may think I’m crazy, but these questions plague me all of the time. I constantly struggle with this. And I never seem to muster the conviction to make a hard choice and so I’ve got content everywhere; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the brand-new App.net, Flickr, a little on Google+, and so on.

Why does it take conviction to limit myself to only posting on this site? Because there is a pull and a need to share this content with as many people as possible. With nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter, a few hundred on Instagram, friends and family on Flickr, etc. it is hard to limit the exposure of this content. I want people to see what I’m publishing. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. This site, as it stands, only has a relatively small audience. Some of my posts get views in the single digits, others, in the hundreds of thousands. So I can never really be sure how many people are paying attention. That is why it takes conviction. I have to be OK with the fact that maybe, just maybe, no one will notice. And maybe, just maybe, no one will care.

I think I’ve gotten to that point. Even as I write this I’m coming around to the idea that I don’t really need anyone to read this post. And if they do read it I’d much rather them read it here than on Facebook or Google+. Whether or not I choose to publish here on my site or elsewhere doesn’t really matter at all to anyone but me. And I want to publish to my site. So I should publish in a way that makes me happy, right?

There is an upside to making this a hard, line-in-the-sand choice. If anything I post is shared around the web it will point back to my website. My island. Some have built up enormous followings on Twitter and Instagram. What happens when they go away or change? I’d much rather people remember me for my website than for my Instagram stream.

So what does this mean? Well, I’ve thought about it. And I’m still going to tweet. Though probably far less. Twenty-five thousand plus tweets so far and counting. My entire family and most of my close friends are on Twitter. And, using Twitter Lists, I’m able to get a lot of value from this service. Far more than any other. However, I’m done with Facebook, Google+, Flickr, ADN and Instagram (even though I love Instagram). Everything that I publish is going to be on this site. Follow, don’t follow, it is up to you.

 

Do you deal with this struggle? I’d love to read about how you’re dealing with it on Hacker News.

 

Some have asked if they’ll be able to stay subscribed to this site via Twitter and Facebook. Yes, you will. As long as their policies allow for it. And also RSS if you’re a nerd like me.

How to tear down the walls of your echo chamber

August 22nd, 2012

Everyone has an echo chamber that they’ve unwittingly built up around them. Your interests, friends, environment, and location are all factors in determining what your experiences are, what you know, and what you don’t know. It can be limiting.

How can you tell if you’re in an echo chamber? Ask yourself; Is your experience and knowledge more diverse than it was five years ago? Do you know everything there is to know about a single topic such as Apple or Anime? Do you listen to podcasts, read the blogs of, and follow the tweets of the same few guys? Do you see the same headline (or worse, sponsor) more than four times a day? You get the point. You’ve built up a few walls around yourself and things are beginning to echo a bit.

Shake things up. Tear down the walls. Here’s how:

Travel. Don’t go on vacation and just visit the touristy areas. Sit, eat, chat, and work with the people of the area you travel to. Learn what it is that makes business, marketing, and sales thrive there. Come back with ways you can improve how you do business. (Visit the touristy areas too, though, and Instagram the crap out of them.)

Go to conferences and meet ups. No doubt you’ll hear new perspectives from the presenters but also be sure to intentionally speak to people who don’t do exactly what you do. Ask them questions about how they do business, what lessons they’ve learned, what skills they have, and what their favorite hobbies are.

Work next to someone different. Have you had the same job for more than a few years? That’s great. You should consider yourself fortunate. But you have to mix it up and you don’t have to quit to do it. Work at a coworking space or a cafe a few times a week. Sit next to someone different. Feel their energy when they’re getting stuff done. Teach them how you do things. Bring the lessons you learn from them back into your company. Everyone will benefit.

Periodically delete your RSS subscriptions. Or, perhaps, you use Twitter Lists now instead. Whatever the case, once-and-awhile go through and delete the sites that deliver news and opinion pieces. If you read someone’s opinion long enough their opinions begin to form your own. Break out of that habit. Read the counter arguments. Or ditch them altogether.

Take a break from what you already know and follow something brand-new. Do you know everything about the new iPhone being released next month? Do you have an App.net account? (So do I.) This is OK. It is good to know what’s new. But don’t forget to learn from the past or from something new. Something way out of your “wheelhouse”. What about following something super local but important like the growth of your community, the efforts to build new parks in your town, celebrate the centennial anniversary of a nearby bakery, or help a friend build a new business that you know nothing about? Take a break. Follow something new.

Watch 90% less television. That’s it.

Get offline at least one night a week. The Internet is awesome. But it will be awesome tomorrow, too. Get offline one night a week (meaning, from 5pm until you go to sleep don’t touch the Internet in anyway on computer, phone, TV, nothing) and do something you need to get done. Grocery shop, clean your house, repair something, play a board game with a friend, go to a museum, walk around your town and speak with your neighbors, plant a garden, cook a new recipe (twice). Remember; seeing something on-screen is much different than feeling it with your hands, smelling it, or tasting it. Get out there.

Our echo chambers won’t kill us. But they certainly limit our own perspective. And, in reality, our experiences are what make us different, valuable to a company, and fun to be around. Tear down the walls of your own echo chamber and see what else is out there.

Have more to add? Consider chiming in on Hacker News.

How I use lists on Twitter

August 16th, 2012

The way I use lists on Twitter is pretty straight forward. I hand-curate about a dozen lists into categories of things I’m interested in. Over the years I’ve seen people complain that they don’t want to do the heavy-lifting of managing these Lists. But I’ve found that lists is a feature that has kept Twitter valuable to me.

I think it is interesting that I’m seeing more and more people come around to the idea of using lists to retain value as Twitter grows, albeit slowly.

It used to be that following every Twitter account that you’d like to keep up-to-date with was enough. For the first few years it was manageable to keep up with. But that quickly changed as Twitter exploded and the amount of content and correspondence on Twitter increased. I’m assuming this was one of the main reasons Twitter created and has maintained the lists feature. Today, Twitter is used as a RSS replacement, a way to keep up with companies, software updates, photo sharing, location sharing, news alerts, weather alerts, celebrities, friends, family, and even used to communicate in place of SMS and e-mail in some cases.

If you want to get value out of this huge content river on Twitter you need to divide that river into smaller streams just to keep it manageable. Until Twitter comes up with a better way, at least.

Alex King just recently started to create a few lists. Here is how he chooses what accounts he follows:

My “following” list on Twitter is made up primarily of people who I know in real life (who aren’t too verbose on Twitter), with a few choice “entertainment” gems. I like it this way, it keeps the noise to a level where I can generally keep up with folks I care about.

I’m a little more strict than Alex. I only add Twitter accounts to my Following list of people I know and interact with on a daily basis and, in most cases, are geographically near to me (the main exception being family spread out all over). It is how I get the most value out of Twitter. When I check Twitter I would like to see what is most important to me and that, as with most anyone, is family and friends.

Everything else that falls out of those rules ends up in a list. And I’m pretty strict about what goes into my lists too. However, I am more willing to throw an account into a list and check lists periodically than I am to ever follow an account directly.

So, what lists do I have? Believe it or not, I’m still trying to come up with the right mix. I’m always switching up lists, their names, purpose, what accounts go into which list, etc. In fact, I’ve done it enough that the Twitter API won’t allow me to add accounts to or delete  one of my lists so I have a duplicate, empty list that just sits there. I’m pushing the system to its limits apparently.

I’ve come up with a few lists that have stood the test of time. About 4 of them. But I have 8 or 9 other lists that still haven’t settled. I have some obvious ones for news and software updates but I also have some not-so-obvious ones for interesting accounts I come across. I had written out some of my lists and their descriptions in a draft of this post – but I’ve removed them because I believe everyone’s way of categorizing things is different. It is probably why Twitter hasn’t provided you with any default lists.

There is a list that I’ve recently created that I’d like to tell you about: Scratch. Scratch is a list that I am now using to throw just about everything I come across into. Especially in the real word. See a Twitter account of a restaurant? Add it to Scratch on the go. See a Twitter account that seems funny but you don’t have time to read them all now? Add it to Scratch. Then, when you get time… go through and prune the list. Putting the accounts that you ended up liking into their proper lists or following them. The others, like restaurants that you didn’t like, delete. I’ve found it useful, you may too.

I suppose my favorite part about using lists is that I can check Twitter whenever I want without the feeling that I’ll be overwhelmed and distracted by tweets. I can choose when I want to be distracted. When I want to sit down and catch up on Twitter I can go through a few of my lists depending on my mood. Like the contrast between picking up the newspaper or starting to watch TV and flipping the channels. If I want to check up on world affairs I can do so without seeing Stephen Fry’s photo of a baby otter. Isn’t he cute?

This is how I use Twitter’s List feature. I recommend more people taking the time to do the same.

 

Side note: Many Twitter clients, including Twitter’s own clients on iPad and iPhone, do a terrible job implementing the Lists feature. The best client to use on iPhone, iPad, and Mac has been Tweetbot. I recommend it highly.

 

We met on the Internet »

July 19th, 2012

Andre Torrez waxes on about how he’s slowly coming to the realization that we all need to back away a bit from the streams of the web:

I’ve been posting about this a bit, but I think my time off pushed me even further along to where I was going. I won’t say “off Twitter”, but I feel like focusing more on things around the edges of Twitter.

And maybe I am just looking for examples—seeing patterns where there are none—but a few things have appeared that makes me feel like other people are feeling the same way.

I’m with Andre. I’m starting to see a pattern among some of us that have been doing this for nearly 20 years now. The web is speeding up and I keep feeling like I want to put the brakes on. Yet another calling for The Slow Web to really filter the web for us.

Something I want to be clear about though, this isn’t a bunch of old guys yelling “get off my lawn” or yelling that the Internet is too fast and we can’t keep up with it. I want the brakes to be on me not the web. The realtime nature of today’s web is an incredibly good and valuable advancement and I hope it continues. The quicker information spreads around the globe the smaller this world becomes. And that’s an excellent thing. But as an individual I feel a natural inclination to slow down and connect more with the world around me than to be beholden to a torrential river of information that the web provides. I want digests. Rounded out ideas. Permanent thoughts and things. Less is more!

I think we can have our cake and eat it too. We just need to learn how to step onto the shore and only dive into the river when we’re ready to get wet.

/via Mike Monteiro on the Twitter.

Twitter needs to state their objective in much clearer terms »

July 10th, 2012

Jason Kottke, today:

 It’s funny that so many of the things that make Twitter compelling weren’t actually invented by Twitter but by the users and developers.

It is true. Linking, @replies, #hashtags, photo sharing, location sharing, and much much more all came from the community and the developers that built cool tools ontop of Twitter. Not from Twitter themselves. Twitter simply supported and fostered the growth of these features.

Michael Sippey of Twitter, a few weeks ago:

These efforts highlight the increasing importance of us providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools. Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today. Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

The Developer Rules of the Road do not seem all that ominous but the tech press is certainly painting a picture of doom and gloom for developers. And, the developers that have read these rules, no doubt, stand back and wonder what exactly Twitter is getting at. I think Twitter needs to state their objective in much clearer terms.

Legalese is not my strong-suit but reading through Twitter’s Developer Rules of the Road document I came away with the following opinion. Twitter does not want developers to simply recreate Twitter.com, Twitter for iOS, Twitter for Android, Twitter for Windows Phone, etc. If someone is going to create a Twitter client, it should be markedly different than the way that Twitter’s own official apps work. For instance, someone could build a client that shows the main Twitter timeline, Lists, and trending topics in a whole new way (like Tweetbot, for example) but it should be easy to see that it isn’t the official Twitter client (which it is easy to see that) and it should exclusively use the Twitter API for these features (I don’t know enough about Tweetbot to know), and – in the near future – it may be asked or even forced to show Twitter Ads.

I could be way off. If I am, it may be even more apparent that Twitter needs to state their objective in clearer terms.