Posts Tagged: twitter

Web — View Comments
31
Oct 09

Twitter Introduces Lists; I Introduce a "Game Industry" List

You’ve probably heard by now, Twitter is launching a Lists feature. The beta has been rolling out to users (randomly, it seems) for a few weeks now, but Twitter has finally gone ahead and made it accessible to just about everyone now. Basically, it lets users setup groups of users that they can share with friends, and those friends can follow all the users in that group with a single click. I think the Twitter team sees it as their first step towards the grouping mechanism users have been begging for these last few years, and it’s a solid first step at that.

There’s a lot of interesting uses for this Lists system. You could setup your list of favorite tweeters, or build a list of all the employees in your company who are tweeting. There’s a lot of neat ways clients could implement this feature going forward too, and Twitter is opening up an API specifically so they can.

In any event, check it out, and if you’re into game design or the video game industry at large, check out my @game-industry list. It’s got 200 (and growing) Twitter users from the game industry, and pop me a @reply if you’d like to be added or know someone who should be.

P.S. If you’re looking for a way to easily browse some of the Lists being built on Twitter, check out Listorious.

Web — View Comments
3
Aug 09

Aardvark is Aawesome

Have you seen those obnoxious commercials for KGB? That directory assistance/knowledge market company that I suspect spent oodles of cash securing their domain name? The concept is interesting: text a question, get an answer researched by a real person. Well, if the question is too difficult for their keyword search system, anyway. Neat idea though, right up until you get to the $0.99 price tag and realize you’d be better off Googling the answer for all the good it would do you.

Today I came across a web service called Aardvark, which one might define as a user-generated KGB; that is, it’s a community of users connected via web browsers, cell phones and instant messengers that define their own areas of expertise, and are automatically sent questions from other users that target those criteria. For example, earlier today I asked “What is a good, lightweight and free (open source preferred) FTP client for Windows?” and received 2 answers within a few minutes; one user recommended Mozilla FTP, and the other FileZilla. When the answers came in, I was notified via Google Talk on my Blackberry and PCs. Alternatively, I could have received notifications via SMS and email. Twitter notifications from the @vark account would be a nice touch, too.

The service is brilliant, and I really hope it gains popularity. The only real problem right now is the limited number of users participating (think Twitter back when it was “twttr”). On the other hand, as my buddy Tom pointed out, one has to wonder how scalable the platform behind it all is, and whether they’ll be able to meet the demand as the community grows. I wish them the best of luck with it.

If you’d like to try Aardvark, you can sign up using my referral link or from their site.

Gaming / Industry — View Comments
1
Jun 09

E3: Telltale Breathes New Life Into Monkey Island

The most exciting news to come out of the E3 hype bubble so far? Telltale tweeted just minutes ago that they’ll be bringing the classic adventure game Monkey Island back in episodic format, much like they’ve done with Sam & MAX recently.

GROG! GROG! GROG!

GROG! GROG! GROG!

Monkey Island sort of embodies a lot of my childhood. It was the first game that made me ask, “how do you make stuff like this?” It was the first game that inspired me to get into game development, so to say I’m excited over this news would be an huge understatement. Of course, given the feedback I’ve been seeing on Twitter and across the web, I’m not at all alone in this.

Ron Gilbert, one of the great minds behind the original Monkey Island (and my digital Lord and savior), blogged about the news as well.

You can already preorder the first episode of the first season, and there’s a lot of awesome bonus perks if you do. I’ll take 3, please!

Thoughts — View Comments
26
Oct 08

Twitter a Hotbed for Hackers, Socialists and Atheists; Oh My!

Caught a tweet by Ethan Marcotte this afternoon pointing to a rather fascinating article over on Yahoo! News. Apparently the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion released a report on the evolution of web communities and social technology these last few years, and how terrorists might apply these advances to some nefarious means. The usual suspects are listed – online games, mobile devices, what have you – with the exception of one particular chapter entitled, “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter.” That’s right, the social messaging service we’ve all come to love (or hate) with that cute little blue bird and morbidly obese whale is appearently a potential hotbed of terrorist activity. Lordy, lordy! A messaging service with virtually no realistic privacy control is a perfect platform for passing top secret sleeper cell orders. Not just that, but …

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said.

Are you kidding me? My first question would be why the military bunches up vegetarians, human rights groups and religious communities along with communists, anarchists and terrorist cells. I’m an atheist, a border-line vegetarian and if you want to apply labels a hacker… am I a one man tweeting sleeper cell? Fuck this noise. This country is in dire need of a CTO. Someone in touch with technology and capable of explaining why reports like this are complete and utter, fear-mongering bullshit.

Check out Yahoo!’s write up here, the Wired article Yahoo! picked up on (very interesting read) and the report itself over at the Federation of American Scientists website (warning: pdf file).

Projects — View Comments
19
Jun 08

TwitterBash launches

Today marks the launch of TwitterBash, a concept conceived and designed by my good friend Judson Collier. Judson hired me on to work on the project about a month and a half ago, and I think we’re both quite pleased with how it turned out.

TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which allows folks to post snippets and quote conversations from IRC, and applies it to Twitter. Just sign up for an account, then head to the submit page. Pop in the permalink for a tweet you want to quote and you’re done. Tweets can be voted up or down by users, and we base our popularity index off that score (which we call karma.) You can even embed quoted tweets into your own pages using a number of methods.

I think Judson came up with a great concept here. It’s simple, it’s fun, and people will hopefully have a great time using it.

For those curious about the tech behind it (that was my department, after all), TwitterBash runs atop PHP5 and the wonderful CodeIgniter framework. Thanks to CI, I was able to rapidly pump out a prototype in a matter of days for Judson and I to begin playing with.

Give it a look, bash your favorites and have a good time!

Thoughts / Web — View Comments
1
Jun 08

FriendFeed is not an alternative to Twitter. Get over it.

This week all I seem to be hearing is people wanting to describe FriendFeed as some sort of reasonable alternative to Twitter. It isn’t. I love FriendFeed to death, perhaps even moreso than I do Twitter these days, but it wasn’t designed to be a messaging system or to compete with Twitter; it was designed to be precisely what it is: a lifestream aggregator with social elements. And it does it amazingly well.

I think people enjoy FriendFeed so much for what it is, they want to pretend it’s suitable to fulfill this gaping void Twitter’s constant issues has created. But FriendFeed isn’t suitable for this kind of stuff. It lacks the IM, the SMS, the email and, frankly, the structure of the site doesn’t lend itself to conversations terribly well. It’s great for commenting or brief discussions, but if you try to follow a thread of replies to something Scoble says, it’s truly difficult.

Could FriendFeed be a Twitter competitor? Sure. Everyone could be if they put the time and money into retrofitting the system to do it. But I don’t think that’s honestly what FriendFeed wants to be. I know it isn’t what I want them to be.

Web 2.0 is all about doing one thing and doing it right; FriendFeed is already there as a product (with the exception that it needs a much broader range of service support, like profilactic does.) Twitter needs a lot of work, but in the mean time there’s sites like Jaiku, Pownce and a new one I’ve been playing with today called Plurk. They all do a much better job of microblogging because that’s what they were designed from the ground up to do.

I understand the sentiment, everyone, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree wanting FriendFeed to be something it isn’t.

Thoughts / Web — View Comments
30
May 08

Twitter: when all else fails, blame your users.

You’ve probably seen it all over your feed reader today; blogs screaming “Twitter just called Scoble out!”, or “Twitter is punishing their most popular users!”, and frankly they’re right. Alex probably thought he was doing the right thing and taking a proactive approach by explaining things in his blog post yesterday, but he made some poor choices that Twitter is going to have to face this weekend- namely, stating that a factor of the huge downtime issues Twitter has been having is users like Scoble who have tens of thousands of followers are causing database calls in the system to pile up.

As Scoble so eloquently put it in a Seesmic video response to the blog post today, bullshit.

Now, to be clear; Alex didn’t call Scoble out explicitly. It was inferred by the fact that, well, Scoble is pretty much king of Twitter in terms of followers. It was him and a handful of other users (who, it should be pointed out, would also qualify as these evil-doers to the system) made Twitter by singing it’s praises.

More to the point, the blog post is bullshit because it doesn’t explain why Twitter has been having constant issues since day one, long before Scoble and others amassed their base of thousands of followers. Even more so, it doesn’t explain how Twitter is going to fix these issues. So the database is backing up… how are you going to resolve this? Throw more servers at it? Get rid of your ridiculous XMPP-based message backend? Rewrite the site in a language that is actually scalable? For a post entitled questions and answers, there were far too few answers and way too much finger pointing. Let’s be clear what Twitter is: it’s a shit ton of text flying around, and a bunch of databases to store it in. This isn’t that complicated.

Alex isn’t a bad guy, or an idiot. I don’t think his intention was to make it seem as though Twitter is calling these people out. However, Alex isn’t a PR guy. He’s a developer. And, speaking from my own perspective as a developer, we shouldn’t be put in charge of trying to explain things to customers, users or the press. We aren’t good at sugar coating things, or explaining problems to users in a way that makes it consumable. We’re quick to blame the users because, well frankly, it’s usually user error that’s the problem. But users don’t want to hear that- they just want to know when it’ll be fixed.

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Tips — View Comments
1
Aug 07

Web APIs by Example, Part I: Twitter

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are essentially standardized methods for applications to talk to one another and share information. In desktop applications, the operating system provides a full range of APIs in order for your programs to run and interact with it (in Windows an app might register itself as an option for when you right click an icon; or on a Mac an app will hide itself from the dock.) On the web, APIs are usually provided as a means of importing data to other services, or using third party clients to push information to your account.

Since Twitter is all the rage these days, I thought it would be a great starting point to introduce you to the world of web APIs and how simple they really are to work with. Twitter, like most presencing services, has a very limited range of API calls because, well, it’s a very simple service. The documentation for Twitter’s API can be found hrere. The Twitter API, all be it simple, has allowed great applications like Twitterific and Twittervision to be created.

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