Tag Archives: twitter

rss

Identi.ca Reply Sniffer

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It looks like a few of us are starting to play with Identi.ca. It’s just like Twitter, but without the community and without any real tools to support it 🙂

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to track @replies. I’ve put together a quick Yahoo pipe that will catch at least some of your replies. This is highly experimental (pre-alpha stage maybe). Welcome to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe.

I’ll try to make some improvements to it over the next couple of days, but in the meantime, feel free to leave me suggestions in the comments on this post.

Usage:

  1. Go to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe
  2. Enter your username and click “run pipe”
  3. Grab the RSS feed output

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

General, legion of tech

Gary Vaynerchuk at Legion of Talk

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Tonight is the first in what will hopefully be a series of guest speakers for Legion of Talk, a Legion of Tech. event. Gary V. is in town for his book tour at Powells, and we were lucky enough to snag him to talk to us about how he has used social media to grow his family wine business.

Here are my raw notes from the event:

Gary would like to meet every human on earth, and it looks like we’re bringing him about 150 people closer to his goal at this event.

He comes from a traditional retail background in the family wine business. His original passion was selling baseball cards, but when he realized that people collect wine, and he could bring those passions together.

He went from running the company to walking away and spending 18 hours a day working with the online wine community, but he loves it. If you aren’t loving what you do right now, you need to embrace your DNA figure out what you want and do it now. Figure out what you want to accomplish and work backwards from the goal. Right now we are in a gold rush – the early adopters will get the gold. By sitting and talking about what he knew, he’s been really successful with his book deal, speaking engagements, consulting and more. If you really do what you love, you can work the ridiculous hours it takes to win. 99.9% of people out there don’t know what Twitter is. It isn’t over. It’s just getting started. Email is over (especially with the younger crowds), but social media is really just starting.

You need to be patient. He loves his community, and he answers a thousand emails a day. It isn’t scalable, but he loves the community more that he loves himself. When people ask a question that he doesn’t know, he researches it and finds the answer. He really likes people and what he does. Giving back is in his DNA.

Go to the niche of what you love, and really narrow it down. Get specific. Put out awesome content, but the show isn’t important. Content is king, but marketing is the queen and the queen runs the household. After you publish the content, It’s all about building the community and spending as much time as you need. If you love it, you’ll be doing this anyway. Become part of the conversation for what you love, and then really attack it. This works for your brand (as a person) or your corporate products. Be good to the consumer and build businesses by word of mouth. Word of mouth is out of control right now with existing social media tools. The conversation will happen, nothing is hidden, and you have to completely embracing it. Bring your dark secrets out on your terms before someone else does.

The long tail is way longer than we know. Twitter, Facebook, Pounce, and other social products will continue to grow, and everything is at our fingertips. There are so many cool and interesting things that people are doing with technology that you can embrace if you are passionate enough about it. Make it about you. Gary talks about wine, and the NY Jets, and WWF, and … You need to look for excuses about how you can, not how you can’t.

The platforms now are basically free. It isn’t about the platform, and don’t chase other business models. If you do something really good and unique, people will watch it. You have to be authentic and real to build your personal brand. It all comes down to how good you are. It’s all about the advertising and monetizing around your passion. Advertisers are moving into it slowly, but they are moving into it. It is about the patience. Tier 1 advertisers have to die and the tier 2 advertisers are going to move into this area and be successful. You have to hustle to make the money. Look at Google ads to see who is already purchasing advertising on your keywords. Talk to people about advertising.

Don’t look at where the money is; look at where your passions are. Doing something because there is a lot of money in it won’t be authentic. He missed the whole blogging thing because he doesn’t like to write. He saw Lazy Sunday, and knew he had to do this video show.

People are people. It’s about the people and having a clear message that is authentic and not over-polished. He wants people to be real, authentic rats. Don’t worry about whether it is new media, old media, whatever.

Force the world to come to you.

The most important question is “how can I help”. The reason he is here at Legion of Talk because Raven worked with him to donate wine to iPhoneDevCamp. You get a lot back when you give to people. Give 80% to every relationship & that 20% that you get back will be so delicious that you won’t need anything else. You have to give back to your community.

He pumped out 200 shows before he started getting much interest. Stop consuming content and start producing. He doesn’t have time for reading or TV. He’s popular because he puts out.

A side note / insight from Gary: Naked women on the internet is good business 🙂

Want to see other cool people talking to the tech community here in Portland? If you know of any other big names in the tech community coming into town for other events, Let us know, and we’ll try to schedule them into a Legion of Talk event.

twitter

Plurk: Twitter Replacement or Not?

I’ve spent a little time today playing with Plurk.  If you want to check it out, this link has an invite code for Plurk.

A few observations

  • The verb and emoticon drop-downs provide the potential for some interesting targeted search features, but I don’t think these actually exist yet.
  • This morning, the RSS feeds were mangled, but by the time I got around to writing this post they’ve been fixed, so they seem to be on top of the bugs & able to respond to issues fairly quickly.
  • The timeline view puts quite a bit on a page, but I’m not sure how well it would scale to 100, 1000, or more friends.
  • It would be nice if you didn’t have to mouse over every update to see the entire text.
  • You can leave comments on Plurks, but you have to click on the update to see the comments.
  • The Karma aspect is fascinating, but it is only calculated once a day. You get Karma by you and your friends activity on the site. The algorithm remains a mystery, which along with the one calculation per day helps prevent gaming, since it is much more difficult to see which activities are worth the most points.

While Plurk is interesting, I suspect that it is doomed to failure unless it finds a way to integrate with other services, like Twitter and Facebook.  I’ve enjoyed playing with it, but all of my friends are on Twitter, and ultimately your friend network is what matters. For this single reason, I don’t really see Plurk as a Twitter replacement.

barcampportland

Don't Miss BarCampPortland May 2, 3, & 4

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you might not know that we are holding our second annual BarCampPortland this weekend. Here are a few things you should know:

Logistics

Friday, May 2: 6PM-10PM
Saturday, May 3: 9AM-11PM
Sunday, May 4: 9AM-2PM

Location:
CubeSpace
622 SE Grand Ave
Portland, Oregon

The event is completely free, but it would be great if you could RSVP on Upcoming

What is BarCampPortland, and Why Should I Attend?

I think that I did a reasonably good job of explaining this in a Silicon Florist blog post last week: BarCampPortland: Five reasons to attend

But I’m not technical enough to attend …

Bulls**t! All you need to attend BarCampPortland is a passion for technology in some form: as a user of technologies, as a Twitter addict, as a blogger, as a programmer, as a food geek, as a sys admin, as a …

Last year, we had hardcore programming discussions along with conversations about online communities, science fiction, Lost TV show conspiracies, knitting, and so much more. I don’t want people to self-select out of BarCampPortland because they aren’t programmers. I haven’t written code in years, and I’ve been to a bunch of BarCamps (in Portland and elsewhere), and I always feel welcome. BarCamps use the “law of two feet”; if you get to a session and decide that it isn’t useful for you (too technical / not technical enough), you can just get up to walk out and join another discussion.

Twitter

Portland has a huge Twitter community, and we will be using Twitter for updates during the event. Please follow BarCampPortland on Twitter to get real-time updates during the event. We will also have a space on your badge for your twitter name, so if you haven’t yet joined Twitter, now would be a great time!

WordCamp

Are you a WordPress user? If so, you will want to attend the mini-WordCamp running along with BarCampPortland on Sunday. We will also have plenty of other sessions on Sunday, too if WordPress isn’t your thing.

Bubble Tea and Bacon

Let’s just say that I’ve heard rumors about Bubble Tea and Bacon (separately, because together would be yucky). Nothing confirmed and no promises. I’m just sayin’ that I’ve heard some rumors.

Volunteers

We are still looking for volunteers, so if you would like to volunteer, you should contact Raven Zachary.

Just shut up and go already

I had a blast at the event last year, and I expect this year to be even better! Attending BarCampPortland is highly encouraged (and not just because I’m organizing it!) 🙂

blogging

WordPress: Host it Yourself or Host on WordPress.com

I sent someone some advice on WordPress hosting and made the mistake of posting about it on Twitter, which resulted in a couple of requests to blog about it.

I started this blog as the Open Source Culture blog (later renamed the Open Culture blog) on Blogspot.com. Last April, I rebranded the blog as Fast Wonder and moved it to WordPress.com. After a few months, I grew increasingly frustrated with the limitations of WordPress.com, and I moved it to my own hosting provider. Based on this experience, I tend to recommend that most (but not all) people host their own WordPress installations, instead of using WordPress.com.

There are a number of benefits of hosting WordPress on your own domain.

  • You can use a custom feed and have it auto-discovered (I highly recommend the free FeedBurner service). The benefit of a custom feed is that you can move your blog around, rename it, etc. and keep the same FeedBurner feed forever to avoid losing subscribers.
  • You can have a custom favicon on your own host, but on WordPress.com, you are stuck with the WordPress favicon.
  • You can get better analytics (Google analytics are also free) if you host it yourself.
  • You have more control over the theme, since you can hack on the templates files, while you are more limited to just css changes on WordPress.com
  • It also seems like some countries may be blocking all of WordPress.com, so if you do business globally in certain countries this may or may not be important depending on how you use your blog. Thanks to Aaron Hockley for reminding me of this issue.

For people already on WordPress.com, it is pretty easy to migrate to your own host without losing comments, posts, etc. with the WordPress export / import.

There are some potential disadvantages to hosting your own WordPress installation:

  • Hosting it yourself requires a fair amount of technical knowledge to install.
  • You have to keep up with installing the WordPress security updates, which can be a lot more work to maintain.

Yes, I am a big fan of hosting my own WordPress installs; however it really isn’t for everyone. If you aren’t at least roughly familiar with databases and installing PHP applications, I wouldn’t try it yourself. Also, if you have a very small blog and really don’t want to do much customization or spend much time on it, then I would go with WordPress.com and not host it yourself.

There are probably some other advantages and disadvantages, so drop them in the comments if I missed anything.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

rss

FriendFeed Stats and Analysis

Internet Duct Tape recently posted an interesting analysis of a bunch of different FriendFeed stats broken down into 5 trends. I won’t cover them all here, but there were a few points that I found particularly interesting.

Twitter accounts for almost half of all items on FriendFeed, and 90% of the items come from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this trend within my own feeds. In fact, the Twitter traffic was so overwhelming that I decided to filter it out entirely with a FriendFeed Minus Twitter pipe.

I was also surprised and sad to see that Ma.gnolia was in the bottom 1% of services used. I like it so much more than del.icio.us, and it seems to also get a lot of usage from my friends. We must be atypical when compared to the broader group.

It also looks like FriendFeed is addressing some of the comment issues, starting with the ability to send an @ response directly to Twitter when someone comments on a Twitter item in FriendFeed. Now, if they would only find a way to do it with other services, like blogs. It would be great if a comment on a blog post in FriendFeed would also find its way back as a comment on the blog post. Ideally, I would love to see FriendFeed find better ways of dealing with comments so that I don’t need to use the FriendFeed Comment Finder pipe that I created to make it easier to find comments in FriendFeed.

While I think that FriendFeed is cool, I find that I have a hard time using it. So much of the information is duplicated for me. I already have feeds of people’s blogs, Ma.gnolia links, etc. I do find interesting things that I have missed in my regular feeds, but I haven’t quite decided if it is worth the time invested.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

rss

Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer: More Improvements

The switch last week from TerraMinds (the service appears to be dead) to TweetScan for the Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer had a couple of unintended side effects. For people with twitter account names that are also common words, the new sniffer delivered way too many false positives. I realized that TweetScan completely ignored the “@” sign, which I didn’t think was a big deal at the time. With a Twitter account like @geekygirldawn, I didn’t notice any issues; however @verso noticed. I was also having a hard time pulling the date out of the TweetScan RSS feed last week for some reason. It was obvious today, which means that they added the date to their feed, or I completely missed it last week when I was tweaking the pipe. Either are good possibilities, since I made the tweaks to the pipe in about 5 minutes while talking to a couple of Legion of Tech board members and waiting for the board meeting to start.

This new and improved Twitter Reply Sniffer explicitly includes only references to your twitter account name that are preceded by the “@” sign. For any of you who liked seeing every reference to your twitter account name, you can easily clone the pipe and remove the filter for @accountname.

I’ve also added a time stamp to the end of every title so that you can easily see exactly when each person replied. If you don’t like the time stamp, you can also clone the pipe and remove the loop right before the pipe output module.

Thanks to Ms. Fishbones for suggesting the improvements and for pointing out the typo in my blog post about the new version of the reply sniffer from last week!

I also wanted to thank Justin Kistner at Metafluence for creating the first rev of this pipe. He came up with the idea to do this and found the services that made it possible. I cloned his original version and have been making minor tweaks along the way that seem to have taken on a life of their own as things like this frequently do.

Here is the new version of the Twitter Reply Sniffer. I think that your rss reader should automagically pick up the changes if you were already using the old Twitter Reply Sniffer.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

    search

    FriendFeed Becomes Useful by Adding Search

    I really wanted FriendFeed to be useful for me; however, I was having a hard time really finding much use for it … until they added a search feature. Until now, I found that my FriendFeed content was completely useless due to being overwhelmed by Twitter, which has orders of magnitude more traffic than any other service. I tried tracking my friends using RSS, but almost everything was Twitter, and since I follow most of them on Twitter already, almost all of the content was duplicated.

    With the addition of search, I can see myself using it to quickly find friends who have expertise or who are at least talking about a topic. For example, a quick search on “OAuth” tells me that Chris Messina and David Recordon are talking about it the most (big surprise), and a search for “startupalooza” shows me some interesting bookmarks and discussions about the upcoming event. This is a great way to quickly find friends with knowledge about a topic along with their bookmarks, Twitter thoughts, and blog posts. Very cool addition to the service IMHO.

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

    twitter

    Yahoo Pipes: Track Twitter Replies with RSS Part Deux

    A while back, I modified Justin’s Twitter Reply Sniffer to add a little more functionality. The reply sniffer is really useful to help find Twitter @ replies directed toward you from everyone (whether you follow them or not). This is incredibly helpful for me in a couple of ways. First, it finds replies that I missed from people I follow. Second, I just can’t keep up with the noise if I follow everyone who follows me; however, I think that the conversations are one of the most important aspects of Twitter, and the reply sniffer helps me participate in those conversations.

    My issue with the original reply sniffer is that it was based on TerraMinds.com, which was down all day yesterday, so I decided to modify it to use a similar service, TweetScan. Here is the link to the new and improved Twitter Reply Sniffer pipe.

    Related Fast Wonder Blog posts: