David Chan’s Blog

I was digging through my iPhone notes and found this quote that I had scribbled in there in May 2008:

“Weak bonds give you novelty”

Andrew McAfee said this at an Oracle/BEA conference I attended in Chicago.  Strong bonds are people who you have a deep connection with and are usually like-minded and have similar experiences.  People you don’t have have a close link with - weak bonds - are likely to provide new perspectives, opinions, and ideas.

I think that Twitter allows us to discover and build weak bonds extremely well, better than other social networking tools.

One of the things I love doing on my iPhone is to capture and share candid moments in my life.  And there’s probably no better way to broadcast novel messages than with Twitter.

There are a lot of ways of getting pictures on Twitter with the iPhone, and I’ll list several here.  Each of the methods I’ve tried have their pros and cons, and I’m uploading via 3G, and not wifi.

1. Twitterific

The first method is via the app Twitterific (free ad-supported version, downloaded from app store).  To attach an image onto a tweet, simply press the “camera” icon, and you will have the option of taking a picture.  The image upload doesn’t take too long (around 15-20 seconds).  Here’s a screenshot of the image quality:

To date, all of my images uploaded this way have been rotated sideways.  The image quality is average but still very decent.

2. Twittelator

Twittelator is another iPhone app found in the App Store.  Like Twitterific, it is free, but does not have any ads.  The camera icon makes a familiar return in the create tweet screen in Twittelator, and pressing on it will give you the option of selecting a picture to upload or taking a new picture.  The image upload time was very fast.  Here’s a screenshot of an uploaded image:

Here, the image has been cropped, and that some of it has been cut off.  This image size isn’t acceptable for me as it’s hard to tell which parts will be cropped when you’re taking and uploading a picture in the wild.

3. Email picture to TwitPic

The third method doesn’t require an app - just a setting on TwitPic.  Goto the TwitPic website and login with your Twitter credentials and you should see some new options in the top navigation.  Enter the settings screen and you will get to see your private email address for uploading images to TwitPic.  I’m going to assume everyone knows how to email photos from the iPhone, and there doesn’t need to be text in the body to upload your photo.  The subject line of the email becomes your tweet, and your post will appear in Twitter anywhere between 1-5 minutes.  Uploading an image with this method on 3G takes quite a while (30 seconds to 1 minute), and you’ll probably want to refrain from doing anything which might stop the uploading.  Here’s a screenshot of the uploaded image:

The long upload time is offset by the great image quality and (relatively) high resolution of the picture.

For the most part, Twitterific has the best balance between upload time and image quality.  The rotated picture is definitely a setback, but I’m sure Iconfactory will look into that issue.  Emailing to TwitPic directly is probably the best way to go if you want quality, and currently that is my method of choice for uploading images to Twitter.

Update: July 27

I’ve recently started using Posterous as an alternative to emailing to TwitPic directly.  Posterous is basically a blog you update via email, and any media attached to the email message gets embedded into your post.  Although Posterous is a standalone (micro) blogging platform, it does integrate with Twitter, and any posts you create in Posterous gets tweeted.  I’ll spare you any of the signup details (as it’s actually quick and quite painless), and go right into the image quality.

Mousing over the file will give the above tool tip, letting users know that they can view the full size of that image.  Of course, the “full size” is the shrunken down version of the original, done automatically by the iPhone Mail.app, but it’s still nice to be able to get an even larger image.  Image upload time was decent, from around 25-35 seconds on 3G.  As a bonus, Posterous sends you an email when the upload is complete, letting you know if the upload was successful.  Great feature for Roger’s quirky 3G network (though some people might find confirmation emails annoying).

I was a loyal fan of uploading images directly to TwitPic, but as it stands, Posterous is slightly faster and offers a few nicer features, and leaves me wondering if there’s a need to use Twitter clients to send pictures at all.

Original post (June 24, 2008):

A quick search for myself reveals that I’ve been taken off the Google index (do a quick search for “david chan blog”), and I might know why.  My guess would be that my Twitter Friend’s links appeared to be “spam” to Google’s crawlers.  I’ve heard of people being penalized for link spamming, though that was not my intention at all.

My Twitter blog digest posts will be disabled until further investigation.

Update (July 7, 2008):

After investigating and confirming that I’ve been black-listed by Google, I have sent off a notice of reconsideration.  Will update again when reply comes.  Stay tuned - it’s going to take several weeks.

Update 2 (evening July 7, 2008):

Within about 12 hours of my Google index reconsideration submission, it appears I have regained my old positions for some search terms. I’ll need to do more checking to make sure that all my old posts have been indexed.

If anyone else runs into this problem, I would be more than happy to guide them through the reconsideration process.

It just occured to me that Twitter’s emo whale likes self-inflicted pain.

Recently there has been lot of whispering on my Twitter friend’s timeline as to who’s on, or will be joining Plurk.  I took a quick look at it and my initial impressions were underwhelming, but I decided to make an account anyways.

The first thing in any new social network would be to find friends from other social networks.

I used the find friends from Twitter feature, and it gave me a list of Plurk users to add, which was great - until I realized it doesn’t send them a friend request. Now I was stuck as a fan of my Twitter friends, and to add them as friends on Plurk, I had to manually go to each person’s page and click the “Add as friend” button.  Not exactly what I had in mind when I initiated the import functionality.

As a developer, I’m always looking to see if something has an API.  Plurk doesn’t have one yet, but that doesn’t stop others from making their own versions.  I particularly like this one from YungSang.  Mashables say that an official API is coming.  I’ll be looking at that as soon as it comes!

What Plurk does offer in comparison to Twitter is a more social experience.  The whole Karma system and the numerous rewards found throughout the system work great to attract users and build adoption.  However, it feels a bit gimicky to encourage usage with rewards.  Time will tell if this is a good idea, when the novelty of the Karma rewards system runs out.

Plurk looks great, but it’s not enough to attract me to use it over Twitter.  Other Twitter folk express similar first impressions.  Lets see if my mind changes in the future.

I started using Twitter Tools a few weeks ago to aggregate my tweets in a daily blog post.  Last weekend, I had an idea where I could also aggregate tweets in my friends timeline.  I thought that it would be cool to show the links that my friends are sharing with the Twitterverse.

I started with Twitter Tools as a base, and after reading and understanding the code, it was relatively straightforward to add a seperate call to the friends timeline.  Once I had the desired tweets, scraping, storing and posting the ones containing links were easy and routine.

Now that it’s all said and done, I’m enjoying sharing novel links from Twitter on my blog.  However, the daily digest posts are now very lengthy due to the amount of links my Twitter friends post.  It’s kind of good and bad at the same time.

Does anyone have any suggestions for the “Links” section of the Twitter digest?  How to make it more relevant or compact, or perhaps display it in a different way?

Twitter Tools by Alex King [alexking.org]

While leaving Chicago from the BEA Participate conference last Thursday, I got an idea to aggregate tweets into a Basecamp message.

During the cab ride, @danmartell mentioned that there’s value in having a section during our team meetings for reviewing relevant links.  Our team uses Twitter quite often, and it made sense to send links via replies to our company Twitter account, and then we can review all the tweets during the meeting and pick out the links.  And that’s how I decided that it’d be a lot easier to get replies each week using the since option:

eg: http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.xml?since=Tue%2C+27+Mar+2007+22%3A55%3A48+GMT

Take any replies there which have a link in the tweet, and then wrap up the tweets in XML to send to Basecamp.

Pretty straight forward, and I got it working with PHP in about an hour.  The hardest part was actually formatting the request XML for the Basecamp message.

Since I wanted one link tweet per line, I needed to insert a linebreak in the XML.  Being new to PHP, I wasn’t sure if it was “\n” or “\r\n”.  In the end, I found the PHP_EOL variable, which I was able to append to the end of each line.

If anyone wants the code I can publish it, it’s really a hackjob more than anything.

You’ve probably read something on the web which has shocked you, made you angry, and down-right pissed you off. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet, or even an instant message, you couldn’t help but to feel strongly about what was being said.

It’s a good thing.

I find that a lot of people don’t like to express their opinions for the the fear of being judged or inciting conflict. No one likes to be judged, and no one likes conflict (okay, that last one isn’t totally true), but not being firm and opinionated means you’re being wishy-washy. And besides, people with opinions are much more interesting than the me-too’s.

You can’t make everyone happy, so just say what you want. Put the expression back into self-expression. Otherwise, why are we all on this “social web” anyways?

Twitter is a phenomenon. People are always finding new ways to use it and it becomes more and more addictive as you follow new people. But why is following people fun? This isn’t a MySpace “I have more friends than you” kind of deal. Following someone on Twitter means that you are listening to what that person has to say. Scoble summarized this very well in his “The secret to Twitter” post.

But what really makes Twitter great is the ability to have conversations between any number of people. Using @<username> you can send a reply to someone’s tweet. Replies to your tweets will show up automatically in your timeline. However, by default, Twitter is set to only show replies from people you follow. This doesn’t really follow the listening model, but luckily, you can listen to anyone reply to your tweets by changing a simple setting:

From the Home screen, click Settings, click on Notices, click on the @ Replies dropdown and choose “all @ replies”, and click Save.

Now you’re listening.