MicroContent Musings

Mac Twitter Clients

Today a new Twitter client arrived on the Mac: Tweetie. So time to check out the state of Twitter clients.

Since a long time I am a user of Twitterific. It is a simple client that seemed a nice fit to Twitter. You get a small icon in the menu bar, which changes colour once a new tweet arrives. Clicking on that icon unhides a special window, with a sequential list of the latest tweets. Each tweet shows an icon, the name of the author and the tweet itself. Authors and url’s have a different colour and link to the Twitter-site. Each tweet can be acted upon, such as a reply tweet, etc. Twitterific also interacts with Growl, so that each new tweet is presented on the screen for a short time.

Twitterific is really a downsized MicroContent Client. The new Twitter clients however show that a real full-sized client for Twitter has its rightful place on the Mac.

The first Client is Tweetie. The first thing that stands out is the sidebar with four options. With this the user can select his timeline, reply, direct messages and search. Very nice if you want to zoom in. I think I will like the search option. C licking on a tag will create a new tab with a corresponding search. Thus the tabs will show your history. The same happens if you click on a @username. This client also supports multiple Twitter accounts. It is also very easy to post images.

And then there is Nambu, which brings Twitter in the real MicroContent Client age. This Client has a real sidebar (list view pane) with categories (Twitter, Links, Nambu, Search). The Links category shows all tweets with url’s that I have recieved and sent. The Nambu category seems to be related to a Nambu url shortener and picture uploader.

The search category has a standard list with the most used words in tweets (current/today/this week). I do not know how long ‘current’ is. But Susan Boyle is on top in all three trend periods. The most important category is naturally the Twitter category with standard subcategories: home, mentions, direct, sent, favorites, people and groups.

Tweets are shown in standard inverse time order with the user icon, twittername/full name, tweet time and the tweet itself. One can easily reply, retweet or private tweet. (and can I recognize other Nambu user tweets?). Nambu indicates which tweets are unread. As all tweets seemed too be stored locally, it is possible to delete all tweets, read tweets, set all as read, etc. It also easy to follow/unfollow. Very nice is the possibility to translate tweets easily. It did work well for japanes and korean tweets.

A tweet is parsed such that hashtags, links and users are found. Clicking on a hashtag creates a search list for that hashtag (sweet). Clicking on a username opens a new window with the tweets for that user. It is then easy to follow or block that user. Interestingly shortened urls are expanded, so that you can see where they point to.

The people category can show information of your social network (followers and following) on an image grid. Hovering over an icon shows the information on that person. Groups allows you to define a group of people from the ones you are following, so that you are no longer overwhelmed. This again shows feed. (I guess people should be moved to a separate category).

Nambu is a very interesting Twitter client. I will continue using it.

Nambu should work on its menu bar. That is now totally beyond logic. There is also a secondary tool bar. This tool bar is different for each list. I get however the impression that it could be part of the main toolbar.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • field • tag • type • blog
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NetNewsWire Drops Microformats Support

NetNewsWire drops support for microformat. I am afraid that is a right decision. NJobody seems to use microformats within feeds/blog posts. So deleting this code will speed up NNW, which is of greater importance.

[Inspiration Chris Casciano]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • format • hformat • type • blog , netnewswire
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Times application

The Times application is new way to read and aggregate RSS-feeds. It allows the user to create a newspaper-like experience for reading feeds. The main window of the application shows the RSS-feeds as newspaper page. Multiple RSS-feeds are divided over three panes. The content of a feed is presented as a set of headline, a few sentences and if available an image, depending on the pane it is in. Clicking on an Item shows the entire Item in a new pane.

The user can create multiple ‘newspaper pages’, add feeds and assign a feed to a pane. The location of the panes and the format for each pane is set and can not be changed.

At this stage of the application I have mixed feelings. I appreciate the possibility to see multiple headline in one glance, so I can quickly scan news. Depending on how interesting a feed is I can increase of decrease the amount I see. So it should be much quicker scanning and reading. If there is something interesting I can drag it to a shelf for later reading.

I however miss some control. How can I see whether I read an article or not? Why can I not edit my RSS-URLS? My RSS-feed did not show anything, I was not able to figure out what went wrong. The import feeds from NetNewsWire is nice, but with hundreds of feeds imported shows that tthe current feed management solution is not the right one.

However the application shows an interesting new visual apporach to MicroContent. And one that I do not yet have fully my head around.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • application • type • blog
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Quotably can be interesting

Quotably creates threads from Twitter-posts. The idea is that by detecting and displaying the relation between tweets, one can follow conversations. And this is a very good idea as that is not yet possible at the moment.

This idea of uncovering threads has also been tried with blog-posts. With breaking comment-systems another solutions are required. One solution could be that instead of putting a comment in the comments part of a blog, one puts the comments in one’s own blog with a reference to the blog-item one comments to. So just add the link. There was a party that did this (don’t remember who). Problem is that there should be an unambiguous way to encode these referral permalinks.

Quotable tries to do something similar. There solution is a bit more easier, as they only have to worry about Twitter. I am not sure how one create good threads. By adding ‘@username’ one refers to another Twitter-user, which is a good begin. However it seems that one can not refer to a specific post of that user. It seems that one can only refer to the latest post. When I add the tinyURL of the post, it does not help.

So for the moment Quotably is a limited solution.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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A look at Pownce

Thanks to some other services, I happened upon Pownce again. I already signed up, but I never had a deeper look at it.

At first it just looks like another micro-blog. The structure of an Item consist of just one field: the title. And I use Pownce in this way, as I post to 4 micro-blog services simultaneously. An Item (called a note) has a corresponding permalink, where one can also see the comment thread.

However Pownce is not limited to a micro-blog structure, it is possible to add more fields to a pst/item. The ‘link’ structure adds a field for a URL.

The ‘file’ structure allows you to add any file. If I add an image it will be shown in the note. A file can only be posted to friends.

And finally one can create an event. This structure consists of a title, a place, date/time and a real note. There is a corresponding ics-file for easy importing. Interestingly you can reply to such a post to indicate you will attend.

I get the impression that I can not edit a note. I already needed that feature a few times. I am also annoyed that I can not edit the recipients. I already made several errors due to that. I miss a RSS-feed, at least I do not see it.

Pownce is a bit more a communication service, as one can send a note to just a single friend, all friends or the public. I like the approach of Pownce to struture.: if you want more, just add a field. It is much more like wild MicroContent.

I do not think that I will use Pownce though. I only view MicroContent through feeds in NetNewsWire. Although I will continue publishing to Pownce. My usage will depend on the feeds and integration with my desktop;

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • blog • bookmark ,
pownce

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My microblogging flow

I have been playing with Applescript in order to tie together various applications and services: write once and publish everywhere. This is geared to my Mac environment, but might offer some ideas for other environments as well.

I use Quicksilver to create my microblog item, my tweet. Launching this app by clicking opens a window, by pressing '.', I can create my tweet, then press to go to the command part. Now I type either N, 'T' or O and in order to start the publishing process. All in all this is very quickly.

Whether I press N, T or O depends on what I have been doing. T is for a context-less tweet. N will add the URL of the RSS-item I am reading in NetNewsWire and O does the same for my browser OmniWeb. These are context-rich tweets and allows me to create intertwingled micro-threads. So this process will get my tweet, get an URL, get the music I listening to from iTunes and my current location from Plazes.

Then this information is uploaded to Twitter, Jaiku and my own microBlog. And I can add more publishing locations if I want.

Categories/tags: type • blog
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Microblogging flow

I am still thinking about my MicroBlog-flow. I got a few steps further.

What I want to say in my microblog is something like "I am thinking (or doing) X in response to Y while hearing Z and being at L". In this sentence X is the classic tweet in Twitter or Jaiku. The Y is to express a thread of communication. In Twitter this can be another Twitter user and is encoded in a tweet as '@username'. In Twitter this can also be an URI, usually encoded as tinyURL. This URI might point to another tweet, a wev-page, a blog-item, etc. Z is a piece of music and can be the artist plus track name. This can be taken from a local audio application or a service such as Last.fm. And finally L is a location and can be a place-name plus country name. This can be taken from a service such as Plazes.

I think the above combines what we see appearing in various services. We need an extremely easy way to publish this MicroContent. It must be as easy as click-click, write and publish. The write-part in here is the classic tweet (X) and the other parts must be automatically extracted from other applications and services of the user is using.

The publication part is another matter as not all services support all four MicroContent fields. In principle it is possible to encode the four fields into a single tweet. We see this happen within Twitter. A service like Plazes only supports location and tweet. And Jaiku supports location and tweets. And within Skype one can use the tweet as mood text and also for MSN Messenger.

The publication of threading information is another matter. If one published to a specific service, one should follow the threading rules of that service. So in Twitter one should use the implicit threading. In Jaiku one should use the explicit threading of the service.

And in addition to the publishing of this MicroBlog information one could specific features of a service, such as the icons of Jaiku or publishing to specific channels or user accounts.

So not only blogging has gotten complex, microblogging is becoming complex as well. For me this implies that I should take control back by publishing this microblog content integrally in an environment that I can fully manage.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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Microblogging environment

Now that I am connected to both the Twitter and the Jaiku service, I have to re-assess my usage of the tools. My main usage of these services is through the clients Twitterific and Juhu. And there starts the first problem: I just want one client. And I already have a blogging client, MarsEdit, so why add another one? And I do not want to get locked into either one.

The other aspect is the viewing of microblog items. I use Twitterific and Juhu to view the posts of myself and of my friends. I also subscribe to the RSS-feeds. In principle the RSS-feed viewer is sufficient. However from time to time I like to have a viewer, which updates itself very often. I like the Twitterific viewer here. However Twitter is not able to aggregate, whereas Jaiku has this possibility.

And then I want to look at the MicroContent itself. The structure of the MicroContent is a little bit different between the services. Both support 140 character field. Jaiku has a commenting system in place, whereas in Twitter one has to put a '@username' in the text field. Twitter can create a reply page from these encodings. Jaiku also supports the location of the user. This location is also encoded within the Jaiku RSS-feed. Integration with Plazes would be nice here.

The other interesting feature is that Jaiku can aggregate other feeds and produce a single microblog feed. I still have to play with this and see whether I like it. One can for instance show what one is currently playing within Last.fm. And with this we get into the field of status messages. Many instant messaging service support the showing of status messages. Usually the user has to type these or they can be autogenerated. I do this for instance with Skype, but MSN also supports this. And then there are statuses such as offline, available, online, etc. In Jaiku one can see one's availability on the phone. Not sure how these statuses can be generalised. But one can envisage a whole infrastructure around micro events in ones life.

An finally what is missing is the archive function. What happens when one wants to change providers? Do we really want to archive the micro events? The only solutions seems to be to do the micro blogging yourself or save the rss-feeds.

Anyway I will experiment a little in setting up my own micro blogging environment and try to follow the DataLibre idea of write once, publish everywhere.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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Twitter as backchannel

During the MicroLearning 2007 conference we have been playing with Twitter as back-channel. The idea of a back-channel is that the participants can comment on the presenters, thus exchange comments and start a discussion among themselves in that channel.

In order to this a separate user (micro2007) was created in Twitter to represent the conference. Participants and others can follow that channel to get official messages from the conference. Subsequently these followers were added as friends of micro2007. By following this friends channel one can thus read what people say about the conference and presentations. The backchannel was projected on the wall in the hall with TwitterCamp.

This worked great for coordination and you saw people moving towards the conference, waking up and getting ready for the presentations. These friends should limit themselves a bit to only conference relevant tweets in order to prevent TwitSpam. And that worked reasonably well. We did remove a fried that was not present at the conference as his tweets were not conference relevant. It was seen as trolling. And as this was a international conference there was a problem with twittering in multiple languages. One should use a single language.

For many participants Twitter was new, however there was a good participation, i.e. people signed up. The actual backchannel communication did really occur and relevant discussion was created. Really interesting to see. It is however unclear how many people lurked in this backchannel. A drawback is that this use of Twitter might be heavy for the Twitter friends of the participants, they get to see a lot more traffic.

So in principle it worked. There was not much trouble with the time lags that Twitter introduced. Much easier to get people using it than IRC. Unfortunately Twitter was down the next day, when they were doing updates in the US night.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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Twitter comments

Martin Lindner has some nice comment about his experiences with Twitter. He talks about it as a real second life. I am not sure what that should be, I need some more experience with it. It is indeed a new 'writing yourself into existence', but we already did that with blogs. It seems indeed to be some deepening, but what? Also the question of privacy is interesting. Are we now letting go of more privacy? Are we opening now more of our First Life? Also the observation that Twitter is not communication, but something 'literate'. And something where the archive is not(?) important. Unfortunately I can not comment on the SMS integration. I hardly use a mobile. Should I create multiple twitter-feeds, i.e. categorising my tweets? Friends, microcontent, etc? Different browsers for differnent personae???

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • blog , twitter
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Twitter - persistent presence?

George Siemens talks about Twitter as persistent presence indicator. And that is indeed what people seem to use it for. But for that purpose it is a lousy service. And what should be persistent presence?

My being online? - to indicate my being online is already done by several IM-services and Skype;
My current location? - This is very well done by the Plazes service for me;
My current meetings - that is doen by an online calendar service;
My current actions - look in my public calendar as well;
My attentiont - I used attention recorder for a while, but that records only my web-usage. I did use a local app to record anything, but that was not published

And you can subscribe to my pipes feed to see everything combined. So what does Twitter offer as an extra on my presence, not very much.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • blog , twitter
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Twitter is a communications router

I get the impression that Twitter is not so much the blogging itself, but the combination of communications. From a MicroContent point of view the Twitter format is just a naked blog format. It is something that I already have on one of my blogs, but only use for a very specific purpose.

What makes Twitter interesting is that one can post either through the web, a separate client, an IM client or an SMS message. And one can subscribe through various means as well. In itself not very interesting and already supported by various mobile service providers.

So why the hype? Maybe because the service can also aggregate multiple feeds? Or?

Anyway other blogging hosters might now add SMS and IM interfaces as well.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • client • service • type • blog
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Twitter usage

I am still playing with Twitter and still figuring out what to do with it. And I am not the only one (see Bryan). I still have a lot of questions and certainly there are a lot of possibilities. So I just start with a personal perspective. First of all I have to decide on the audience. Is Twitter for the world? for my friends? or just for myself. Or should I combine these audiences? Or create separate Twitter feeds. That is all to much in one go, so I just start with a feed for myself. And what should I post in Twitter? It should be different from my blogs, it should be different from my del.icio.us feed, so what is left? I could post the actions that I do or have done, but I am not sure that is interesting. For that I use already my blog diairy and I do not really need more details. Or I could post the places I am, but that seems a lot of detail as well. So I am left with miscellaneous thoughts that I have. Thoughts for which I do not have to work upon and create a blog entry. So I will experiment with that for a while. I still am looking for feeds by 'friends' that are worthwhile to follow. I look to see who uses this as a publishing/story medium.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general • type • blog
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Twitter

I started playing with Twitter. Twitter is very similar to a blog, only the Items are very small. And it is very easy to update. Items can be gathered either on a web-page or in a RSS-feed. And there are also Clients that allow to post new Twitter Items, such as Twitterific. It is also possible to add a List of recent Twitter Items to your web-page as a widget. It all reminds me of the way Dave Winer is using his blog. One of the questions is whether Twitter Items are MicroContent. A Twitter Item consist of an author, a piece of text (description, title? what is the max length?), a post-date, a permalink and the posting source (for instance 'from web', 'from txt', 'from twitterrific'). One can delete a Twitter Item and assign an Item as a personal favorite. Twitter Items can be mashed, for instance by combining the Items for multiple authors. And thanks to their API there might come others ways of using Twitter. The last thing that remains is the question why one should use this. It looks interesting and could be used to register your attention, or your location. It is much faster than blogging and much simpler. I'll use it for a while and see whether it will stay.

[Inspiration Loic LeMeur]

Categories/tags: MicroContent • general • type • blog
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Yahoo! Pipes

One of the main events last week in the MicroContent world was the introduction by Yahoo! of Yahoo! Pipes. It surely is not a service for the fainthearted, it is really a geek service. But interesting nevertheless. It is bit hard to get to know the service.

Yahoo! Pipes works only with a single MicroContent Type: blog Items. The service allows the to mix and match these MicroContent Item by using the information in the structure of the Items. And this probably can become pretty complex. And the output of the service is always an RSS feed (or the corresponding web-page).

I started with a simple pipe: the aggregation of my three MicroContent feeds. You can find the corresponding RSS-feed here. While creating this piper I found several errors with my existing RSS 2.0 feeds. Th errors have been repaired now, although there remain problems with certain characters. Yahoo! Pipes only uses and republishes the description fields of Items. It turned out that I did not used those in my feed. What I did now was to put the first 200 characters of the content field in the description field. I have no idea what the correct way to go is. It seems that the description field only contains a summary. I also am unclear between the dc:date and pubDate fields, which I used for sorting the feed.

This is really a very simple pipe, it will get more interesting once the results of a yahoo query are used as input for fetching Items. It will be much more dynamic. I like this pipe, which uses the NYTimes as input to search Flickr. Also the pipe that searches for apartments near parks is interesting. These pipes show that Yahoo Pipes is not really limited to the blogs, but can do interesting things with locations, images and classifieds as well. It is just getting the right feeds and making the right queries.

You can browse the most popular pipes yourself if you want to have an impression of what is possible.