There is a strong and growing demand for communities within distributed networks. They help new-comers immediately realize the value of these enigmatic services like Twitter. Verticals foster a conversation for eavesdropping or participation. What is striking is how much of the conversation flows around the few at the top. Below is a chart of the 225 most active participants discussing stocks and finance on Twitter. The orange bars represent the number of times a user was included in a tweet (an @reply in Twitter parlance). The green bars represent how many times the same user included an @reply to another ...
Headlines about "college students" and "twenty somethings" finding early success no longer impress me. Not only has the Internet made age irrelevant, but it has debased experience as a key indicator of success. The Internet has exponentially increased the opportunities available for those whom are agile and fast enough to react to the ever broadening scope of opportunity. That said, why don't we expect that most people who change the world to be young, uncommitted, and industrial? After all, that is an apt description of most hungry and frugal 20 year old college students I know. ...
Editorial note: I'm at RTP Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend is a serial weekend-long codefest designed to design, birth, and launch a company in little less than two coffee-filled days. Watch the live-stream here. Lot's of smart, ambitious people here. Developing...
You don't have to talk on Twitter to get value from the service. You don't even have you "get it." You can just listen.
Summize can be used to search Twitter real-time. This is compelling for two reasons:
You can search for updates to ongoing sporting events, breaking news, public opinions, etc...
You can subscribe to a feed of search results
Real-time search of what people are saying is interesting on it's own merit. Try it the next time Tiger is playing at the US Open to see what I mean.
Understanding the value of point number two isn't so easy, so let me illustrate.
One ...
Interest in the major TV networks' distribution site, hulu, has picked up here in the US: Be sure to check into hulu if you've not yet been. Though it will never rival YouTube in reach, it will have some great content that may interest you.
Tech startup Joost was supposed to revolutionize the way we consumed video. I realized today it's been months since I had last heard a mention of the effort. No one is talking about them anymore: The market is saying YouTube has given it more than enough to digest for the moment: No disruption here please, thank you. Ahead of it's time?
I've been working on a Java framework to develop Twitter services recently and have found the API and Twitter's reliability to be a real problem.
The strict API limitation of 70 requests per hour (~ 1 API request per minute) is highly restrictive. Especially when you are placed in Twitter-jail for exceeding the limit in a given hour. Forget about making API calls while Twhil is open. That's the quickest way to bring development to a halt.
That's frustrating.
What's surprising is the large number of errors I'm receiving from Twitter on simple requests.
Over the last 7 hours and 30 ...
I realized while adding my Amazon.com library to FriendFeed that I should share the mash-up I made to display the books on the right side. Even if you don't care about the technologies -- Wordpress, syndication, and mash-ups -- you should at least read on to learn how the Internet is plugable. The only advertising on this site is the Dead Trees feed on the right; this is a list of the book titles I have recently read and liked enough to pass along. I link them as an affiliate of Amazon.com. Amazon.com won't give me a ...
Fred Wilson said it first but you can learn more from Twitter than CNN and MSNBC. Without a TV, it's become how I participate in the news around me.
Search for anything important that's happening right now (current time). You'll get a conversation of the many rather than a presentation from a few.
My right now is the democratic PA primary:
Search: pa
Search: obama
Search: clinton
Most people mislabel Twitter as a microblogging service. If that's what they really think, they are missing the point.
Twitter's about chat. It's about lowering the threshold into participating on the web to 160 characters. ...
So that's an April Fool's joke but it should. Just look at the Popular FriendFeeders:
Yeah. Tech heavy bloggers. Not quite mainstream.
Interesting to see if this personal aggregation thing gets squashed by a more complete UI (Facebook) or crosses the chasm to the mainstream.