Twitter Updates Profile Sidebar

Twitter is going through a round of small updates today. One of the most noticeable differences revolves around the sidebar located on the right hand side of the site when your browsing a users profile. The sidebar now looks like this:

Twitter has taken this oppurtunity to provide users an easily accessible link which allows users to configure their phone or IM client to work with Twitter. The update comes as a surprise to many as the official Twitter blog doesn’t mention any updates that were in store for the Twitter site. I noticed that the ARCHIVE section of my Twitter profile has been inaccessible for about 40 minutes. It makes me wonder if they are changing some things around with that area of the site as well.

Web 2.0 Convergence

Valeria Maltoni posted an email she received from Greg Verdino which contained a paragraph that struck a chord with me.

One biggish issue that nobody is really talking about is that anyone who starts using more than one of these services (or multiple social networks, sharing sites, etc) finds herself with multiple circles of friends, constantly updating various profiles/status posts, etc – there isn’t any way for a user to bring all of their stuff/friendships/updates together in a single interface — which can be a real pain if you’re in MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube and del.icio.us. YIKES!”

Wow, this guy hit the nail on the head! Bill Gates always seems to talk about convergence with technology but I feel that because of the amount of Web 2.0 sites/services, social networks that have sprung up across the web, now would be a good time for a business venture to figure out, Web 2.0 convergence. Right now, users could probably get away with using RSS feeds on different sites in order to converge their online presence. Let me give you an example.

I use Twitter and Jaiku, two micro blogging platforms. Twitter being the main service that I use to post updates and links to my blog. I take my Twitter RSS feed and post it into Jaiku so that my Twitter updates can be viewed on Jaiku. I also take my Twitter feed and place it into my Tumblr account so that Twitter updates are displayed on my Tumblelog. Facebook has a Twitter application which takes care of my Twitter updates showing up on my Facebook account.

The downside to using this method is that, most of these sites do not check RSS feeds in real-time. At the very least, the feeds are checked once per half hour, meaning that what you post on twitter now, wouldn’t appear on any other site that is displaying your Twitter RSS feed for at least 30 minutes. Sure it’s not real time, but it works.

What I am trying to accomplish, is to join these other social networks and then join the communities inside of those networks that correspond to the content on my blog. I’m trying to build power profiles on these specific sites which will provide updates to my friends attached to those profiles, hopefully via Twitter.

Sorry for going on a tangent here but reading that paragraph up above sparked this response! Just thought I would share what I am trying to do in order to converge all of this stuff so I am not doing what is described above, being apart of 50 different networks, spending all of my time providing separate updates to those sites. What a nightmare that would be.

Feed Your Blog To Twits

If you are familiar with Jaiku, Twitters competing micro blogging service, then you’ll know that you can add content into your Jaiku account from RSS feeds across the web. For now, you can’t accomplish this with Twitter but Twitterfeed at least allows you to feed your blog and other RSS feeds to Twitter.

Twitterfeeds site design leaves a lot to be desired, but the concept behind the service is clear. Before you begin using Twitterfeed, make sure you have a registered Twitter account. This Twitter account, or one of your choosing, will be the one that posts your feed entries onto Twitter. Once you create your account, make sure you click on the CREATE NEW TWITTER FEED link. One of the cool things about Twitterfeed is that it has support for OpenID logins. There are too many sites and services on the net that require users to create a username and password. We need more of these sites to support OpenID so that we can use one unified login for multiple sites.

Type in your Twitter username and password, your blogs RSS feed, choose your update frequency which is usually 30 minutes, maximum amount of updates to post each time and if you desire you can type in a description which will be attached as the prefix to each Twitter post. If this option is disabled, only the posts title and link will be posted. The last option you have available to use is whether or not the feed is active.

Once configured, Twitterfeed will check your feeds based on the update frequency you choose during the setup process. If Twitterfeed detects new content, it will automatically post the new content to Twitter via your account.

This service is fairly straightforward to use but I have to question it’s meaningfulness. For instance, if you maintain a blog and you publish a piece of content, you can immediately come up with your own prefix with the associated post link and post it to Twitter and it will show up instantly as compared to waiting 30 minutes from the time it was published. The manual method described above actually offers more flexibility but it is also a little more time consuming. Twitterfeed does allow you to have more than one feed attached to an account, so if you don’t want to be bothered with creating Tweets featuring your new content, then this service should do the trick.

Jaiku Launches Channels Feature

As reported by Mashable Jaiku has finally added the ability for users to create their own channels. Users are limited to creating only three channels, with each channel being publicly viewable upon creation.

Channel administrators will be able to give their channel a unique avatar, short description, add feeds to the channel, and will also be able to slightly change the presentation of the channel. In the future, Jaiku users will be able to create private channels, allowing you to communicate with only those people you have invited into your group.

I’m still bummed out by the fact that Jaiku has failed to fix the problem of too many users being displayed on the right hand sidebar when your inside a channel. For instance, try going into the Twit channel and making a quick post, it becomes anything but quick. The sidebar should be handles in a way so that only a maximum of 20-30 people are displayed at one time with the option of seeing more friends. Hopefully this will be in Jaiku’s next update.

At any rate, I have created a channel on Jaiku called Jeffro2pt0 which will be the focus of discussions related to anything dealing with Web 2.0 If you are a Jaiku user and are interested in Web2.0 please be sure to stop by and join the channel http://jaiku.com/channel/Jeffro2pt0

Crank Up The TweetVolume

I recently discovered this site by accident and although it’s use is fairly simple, it gives the user a chance to look deep inside in the Twitterverse.

TweetVolume is a service which uses a combination of Twitter and Google to visually show how many times a word or phrase has been used on the Twitter Network. Although the Twitter userbase makes up a small portion of the Internet, it is quite entertaining to figure out what the GENERAL interests are within the Twitter community.

For instance, Coffee appears over 15,000 times while Tea appears only 5,010 times and Water only appears 3,920 times. Therefor, it is safe to assume that the majority of Twitter users are coffee drinkers. It’s also interesting to note that the word Lunch appears over 17,000 times which is the highest amount when compared with other times of the day. So now we know what workers are really doing on their lunch breaks.

If I had one suggestion, it would be to somehow someway include the actual Twitter message or messages that included the searched term. This set of results could also be complimented by the username who created the message and then the username could link to their Twitter page. Think of these as Twitter Referral links which would show the actual post that the word was used in. I think that would be pretty cool.

I’ve already spent an hour dabbling with the service and I’m sure I will probably waste even more time trying to figure out what the buzz is all about within the Twitterverse. Give it a shot and report back with your findings!

Thoughts and Insanity From Jeff

The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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