A way to make Twitter better
I *almost* love Twitter. I use it sporadically to either fill a bit of time or to buoy a moment of low brain activity. It has never taken a consistent place in my day. I just figured out why.
The Problem
Twitter is great for following colleagues and professionals who use it to disseminate interesting articles, resources, facts, etc... It is also great for keeping up with some details of friends lives. It can be frustrating, however, when you log in and find dozens of posts about the personal side of your professional contacts. It gums up the works and causes interesting tweets to drop well below the fold (or several ajax folds).
A Solution
Add a personal / professional switch for each tweet. This tweet is personal... this one is professional. On the reader's side, we have the simple ability to filter our stream. "I just want to see the professional tweets." *Click*
The draw of Twitter is simplicity, so I'm trying to add as little extra complication as I can imagine. Some people may never use it and many will probably chronically mis-tag their tweets, another good hearted tech eccentricity to quip about in podcasts and on blogs.
Taking this a step farther. Twitter could completely voluntarily add the ability to tag tweets with any sort of boolean, or even category-type tags. I know this breaks their wall of 'everything in the tweet' and that the # tag is their gift to the universe for this sort of thing. These solutions, however, would allow those tweeters who want to use it to create more in-depth semantics in their tweets, which would allow those readers who want to sift through the noise the ability to do so.
[Update: Twitter is moving in this direction with Annotations:http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_twitter_annotations_mean.php -http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Annotations-Overview. The only question is how these will be integrated into the popular UIs to drive behavior. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.]
Relaxing with some fonts
Hey everyone. I'm on vacation in FL, it's night time, I sat down for some aimless websurfing / massaging the rough edges of some of my projects. After getting a couple of timely things done, I followed the path of least resistance and found myself surfing for typesets and fonts. I like to think of myself as an all around web guy who is strongly skewed toward the tech angle, but my little experience in design has lead to me a tremendous respect and fascination with those who can pull off what is impossible for me with seeming ease and grace. Fonts and typesets are dead center on this. I have a special love for exploring the vast landscapes of typesets and reading what font bloggers have to say about them because they are a tool I don't know how to use. Their examples are like walking into a woodshop and watching the carpenter use a dove-tail guide for the first time. Here are a bunch of fonts that look nice but kind of similar. Apply this one the the heading in this size, this one to the body text at this opacity and BAM. Emminently readable and beautiful prose.
I found the most interesting personality here: http://jasonsantamaria.com/
He works part time for typekit (http://typekit.com/), which seems to be a great typesetting product. One line of code on your pages allows you to use a dashboard to control your fonts. The actual fonts themselves are stored on Typekit's servers, for which they guarantee 100% uptime.
Ethics and action in an open community
The community of open software and design is an amazing thing. I am frequently awed by it. It makes my way of life possible. I find a beauty in engaging it and a special kind of joy in giving back to it.
The thing that's striking me at the moment is that it is an example of an economic system that works. It is a model where everyone involved can get more than they can give. No, this doesn't violate the precepts of thermodynamics. This is a case where the product created by one person or group can be distributed to thousands or millions with no fee for mutual benefit. (There is an economic thesis here, but that is for another day.)
At face value, it looks like the community is 99% pirates and trolls and 1% geniuses. Actually, the ratio is even more extreme, when you do the math of software uploads, updates, etc... vs downloads. I, personally, have downloaded far more then I've ever given back. This is not for lack of trying, however. I've been active in forums, tried briefly at participating in developer communities and even tried to launch my own open source project.
Sometimes I feel like a draw on the system. Then I come across another resource that shows how the entire model only exists because of people like myself. Today, that site was this:
http://www.mac-developer-network.com/category/columns/artoftheproduct/
Lua Basics
I was asked by a colleague to research the Lua programming language. We are creating interactive television apps and will be using it if/when we develop for Verizon Fios.
Lua is a meta language. It does little but call apps and code from other languages. It is extremely small, fast and extensible, allowing developers a lot of flexibility in creating precise structures to model concepts.
It's only reason for existing is to allow developers to work within systems such as cable boxes, games, other apps. For example, Verizon's Widgets are 'written in Lua'. In actuality, none of the actual functionality in the set top boxes is in Lua (looks like it is EBIF). Lua is used as a layer to access the EBIF functions, routines, etc... So what you get is a Lua toolkit that allows verizon to expose any functionality they want developers to have while not allowing any access to lower level box functions. Since Lua is open source, this also boils down to Verizon allowing developers to work on their ebif platform (which, as we know is closed and hard to get in to) using a widely available and open scripting language.
Going Open Source 2 – “Will work for greater vision”
This post is going to be like the movie The Usual Suspects. I'm going to show you the end then let those of you who are interested start from the beginning and take the long way back:
... so after dipping the strip into a bunch of sites, here are the ones that turned a favorable color:
The Micropreneur Academy and
47Hats - The MicroISV Digest
Subsequent posts in this series will focus on my journeys in these realms.
Do-do-de-loop x5 (the moving back in time noise with fingery hand waving)
In the first article in this series, I talked about my strategy of taking a code base that had been developed through a number of client projects and 'going open source' with it. There were two goals that I was trying to achieve with the work I outlined back then:
- to have a stripped down tabula rasa code base to build up from, and
- to come up with a detailed, itemized, prioritizable list of steps to build the first package release.
I now have a fairly realistic idea of the time commitment needed to have a coherent engine together. I have also designed a 'first module', if you will. In classic programmer fashion it is a module that will aid people in building other modules... 
So, yes, I do think I'm on track for the next step:
A step back
During this process, I realized a fundamental aspect of my approach to this project concerning what I call my point of action. As usual, I've been working from intuition, which leads to familiar patterns.
I've spent quite a lot of time with the code and the ideas and strategies to release it both to the open source community and as a basis for an ISV. I have a solid plan, mostly still in my head, to the steps I will have to take in order to achieve open source as well as perceive a need that this could fulfill on a subscription basis. These thought processes span a half dozen disciplines (marketing, accounting, support, etc..), all of which have to be implemented to support the greater idea.
It was not a surprise to me that I fell into the familiar pattern of diving into the code with the focus to take the code all the way to open source before putting substantial work into the other facets of a project / business that are necessary to support it.
If I go straight forward, I will have a sourceforge bill sitting on my monthly credit card accounts that leads to a spartan project page with a sad, lonely release with perhaps a dozen downloads and maybe one or two inactive contributors.
Tapping some experience
I've come across a lot of entrepreneurs that work to help entrepreneurs. There's a lot of genuine folks out there selling access to valuable experience and community, but there's also a lot of charlatanism. I have done a large amount of researched based on the free trials, posts and media out there.
My litmus tests for entrepreneur coaches:
- Have they done this themselves?
- If no, then close the browser tab
- If yes, then, did they get it right the first time?
- If they struck it the first time, close the tab but keep an eye on their blog/product. These folks are awesome inspiration but I've found that style and inuition doesn't come through in a practical manner.
- If they have tales from the trenches, more mistakes learned from than brilliant magical success and an authoritative tone of voice that's the result of excitement and energy tempered long by the pressures of experience then I keep them on the list.
- Do they have an active community surrounding their work?
- Better be yes, because I want to be able to say, "I've been working at this damn phase for months and not one person has come to my site!" then for them to say "Try x." and for me to spend one hour outside of my preprogramed approach comfort zone and smack myself on the forehead for all the 'learning experience' 'character building' hours behind me.
- Do they have good hair in their headshot? Absolutely essential. I mean they can't take themselves too seriously. If I wanted to staple myself to a rigorous routine I would go work in the financial district.
The following are the blogs / communities that I have decided to participate in to develop the greater vision
Great Google SEO Ranking Analysis
Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin posted a tremendous article on Google's Algorithms digging into the way in which a ton of different factors influence that all important search ranking. This is a must read for anyone interested in the fine art of Google subservience that is modern SEO and webmastering.
Topics:
- Are Links Well Correlated with Rankings?
- Can Any Single Metric Predict the Rankings?
- How Do "On-Page" Factors Correlate with Rankings?
- Can We Build a Ranking Model that Gives more Actionable Takeaways?
- Conclusions & Take-Aways
seomoz.org is really tearing it up over there content wise. I like their tools as well but am a bit put off by the obscene amount of 'pro only' disabled features they stuff into their 'free' offerings. See their rankings page for another view of the smiling waving kings and queens on the web popularity parade float.
As usually, share and enjoy.
Going Open Source 1: Coding Style
This is the first article in 'So you want to go Open Source', a journal of my process as I work toward releasing a company project that has been in development for a very long time as open source. This article covers my first passes through the code base.
I have already taken my most advanced implementation of the code base, set it up in a shiny new dev area and stripped all traces of the former project. I'm left with a fully functional engine with no polish that basically purrs great but does very little - isn't attached to any gears, drive trains or tires... etc. My temptation is to start implementing the meta-code that will give the project shape, but that would be getting ahead of myself.
Before shaping the logic and design of the app, I ought to do a full audit of every line of code. In my fist pass through the code, I am focusing on two things:
- Cleaning up, stylizing and commenting the code and
- Creating an itemized list of all elements of the project that will have to be dynamicized and genericized
Style, style, style...
My approach to style focuses on clarity and accessibility with a bit of dry sarcastic wit. I will be using php documentor so I'll largely taking my inspiration from their style guide. I also recommend reading the pear guides, and articles and guides for other open source projects just to round out the ideas.
Framework?
I'm basing my software on a simplified MVC, so won't have to package any other framework or incorporate bridge notes on how issues may arrise.
Comments!
I'm finding that the process of commenting is the most helpful aspect of this exercise. By forcing myself to explain each segment of code, I am rigorously exposing potential inefficiencies, insecurities and even some contextual errors. I am also developing my master ToDo list concurrently as a place to organize the tasks. I recommend Basecamp for ToDoing.
This process will take me a while, as I have to fit it in amongst other responsibilities. Stay tuned for part 2.
Eric Schmidt and Ken Auletta
I generally don't post things that are old, but here's a great conversation between the New Yorker's Ken Auletta and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Eric touches on just about every aspect of the company, speaking candidly in his measured sort of way about everything from individual products to overarching corporate axioms.
Great things to learn about search this (or any) week
Here's a great collection of seo (mostly Google Search) tips, tricks, insights and analysis from Michael Martinez, posted on the self proclaimed best seo blog. The post is definitely worth a read through if these topics peak your interest:
- Google says “Links Are Only 1%”
- Want immediate consumer trust? Buy search display ads
- Half of all SEMs want to pay higher advertising costs – WTF?
- Google Web updates blog indexing faster than Blogsearch
- Bounce rate should not affect your (Google) rankings
- Yahoo! dropped the “keywords” meta tag
- Google wants to crawl your AJAX
Michael has some great analysis that suggest how the personalities behind the search giants (Sergey Brinn, I'm vaguely referring in your general direction) have a hand in what's weighed how. As always, Mike doesn't give any passes to the wacky apparent inconsistencies of the ever changing search engine optimization landscape. It's like there are people who's job it is to constantly shake up the algorithms making full time seo guys as manic and confused as these guys.
Multitouch
Multitouch is one of the most exciting technologies on the cusp of breaking into the main stream. It seems that every major hardware company has serious R&D going and every software platform manufacturer is scrambling to pull the elements into their languages and apis. Here are a few interesting videos and articles that give a good flavor of things to come.
Virtual autopsy via multitouch
Adobe's initiative via the almighty TED
A good rundown of issues and initiative from 10/GUI
A demo of MTJ4, a Java Based Multitouch API
... and Tom Cruise, our favorite Scientologist, from Minority Report
Share and enjoy!