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I Want To Publish More Stuff

Really, I want to do more writing. It seems though that every time I bring up a post window in Educer to start pounding away at the keyboard, I justify myself away from the post because it’s (a) not long enough, (b) doesn’t fit the normal subject matter, or (c) just doesn’t come out the way I want it to.

In order to get around that, I hope, I’m starting to establish more places for material to be published. I can get my quick thought, RT, slow chat, whatever done on Twitter. As of today, I can hopefully get the quick thought, but a little longer than 140 done at A Little Longer. I’m soon to setup a Tumblr blog that I can use to share media and other random bits. And I already have a Posterous site setup that I love to use when capturing pictures on my phone as kind of a mobile flow thing.

The end goal with all of this is to establish some kind of place for all of this published content to flow through. My own personal aggregator of sorts. The thought right now is that I can take what I learned from building My Status Cloud over the summer and apply it to a real time river of me at some central location.

Could all be very interesting. We’ll see.

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By jeremy – January 3, 2010

The (De) Construction Of Twitter

$new_standard = strtolower("Twitter");

In the last couple of weeks, both Wordpress and Tumblr have announced support for the Twitter API.

The immediate benefits are that any forward thinking Twitter client can now also be a Wordpress or Tumblr client as well. Tweetie, one of the most popular iPhone clients, has had support for this for a while and immediately became the tool of choice for testing the new features out. Choices for users expand.

So, with that development aside, where next? I see three things.

1) Wordpress should publish an official plugin for Wordpress.org that enables the Twitter API for any blog. This act alone could create millions of possible twitter servers.

2) Wordpress/Tumblr should make a big deal about how their new changes are also already tied in with real time protocols RSSCloud and pubsubhubbub. This helps make the new twitter servers real time.

3) Everybody outside of Twitter should huddle for a brief second and add some new syntax to the existing twitter api that allows for a piece of metadata to be attached (urls to start), call it optional, and implement.

Or, in short– Now that you’ve shown how easy it is to implement Twitter’s API, rip it out of their hands, build a new community, and then market the hell out of it.

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By jeremy – December 22, 2009

Google’s DNS

Google launched a public DNS option today as part of their “effort to make the web faster”. It comes complete with a concise write up and extremely easy to remember IPs (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

I’ve switched my connection from OpenDNS to Google for now. While all of the benchmarks that I’ve done on my end show that Google is slower than a few alternatives, I have a feeling it will get faster over time. Give them a few days to adapt to the new traffic.

If you’re looking for benchmark possibilities, I tried both namebench, which was pretty cool, and DNS Benchmark, which I like a lot.

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By Jeremy Felt – December 3, 2009

My First Stab At A Trending Topics App – Toppics

The other night I pushed out Toppics, my first little app that plays with Twitter’s Trending Topics.

At the moment it grabs the current trending topics from Twitter every several minutes while searching every few minutes for new tweets that mention twitpic.com as well as the topic. Toppics, get it. :)

Version 0.0 is very basic, but very fun. For example, I know when a football game starts because all of a sudden two team names pop up and I have jersey pictures from both sides. I’ve been able to determine that tweeps really like the Christmas tree at the Four Seasons by watching that category for the last day.

The display is only within the last 24 hours, and that does two things. One – it keeps the pictures relevant. One “Monday Night” trending topic is different from another. Two – it can keep picture counts low. I’m learning quickly that some trends just don’t generate pictures. I hope to add some more features in as well soon, possibly refrain from creating a topic page until it has content to display.

The next goal is to add content. It’d be nice to grab visuals from other sources than Twitpic, especially for the topics that don’t generate a lot of traffic. And, while visuals are great, if I can add some context with text, that would be ideal.

All in all, it’s another playground. Feel free to play.

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By jeremy – November 30, 2009

Twitter Is Still Hard – Thoughts On Cross Application Usability

A lot of work is still involved with using Twitter.

Example.

I was just reading a story on the Ft. Hood shootings in the CNN application on my iPod and saw a line in the middle of the story that said “Twitter list: Keep up with who we’re following“. Now, this is a strike against the CNN app, as the text didn’t link to anything. But even if it had, what would it link to? More than likely the @cnnbrk/fort-hood Twitter list, which was created specifically to follow that story.

How would I use this?

If it were linked in the story, it would bring up a Safari window showing the list on Twitter.com.

Safari isn’t my default Twitter reader on the iPod though, Tweetie is.

This isn’t iPod specific either, this is web application specific. If I were looking at the CNN story in Chrome or Firefox, there is currently no way for me to tell the browser that clicking on a Twitter.com link should bring me to Brizzly to read it.

It would be very cool if there was a way for users to specify this type of cross-connection between apps.

I’m betting this is something that could be solved relatively easy in the PC browser world through extensions, but at this point can’t see it even be approached in the strict Apple app development world. At some point, we will realize the need to start treating web applications more like desktop applications in that users will want to leave one to visit another at times as part of their natural application flow.

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By jeremy – November 6, 2009

Journaling And Such

A quick thought that’s slightly longer than 140 characters and refuses to be tweeted.

It used to be that I would often purchase empty journals, mostly Moleskine, to record different moments in time. Now I’m realizing that my brain has started defaulting to “ooh, I should register a domain and setup a quick site for that.”

And somewhat further, I’m actually in progress of transferring the contents of a Moleskine to a website. Hmm. It’s amazing how everything progresses and yet somehow remains a circle.

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By jeremy – October 10, 2009

On pubsubhubbub (Part 2) – Get with it, PuSH, you’re supposed to be realtime.

Or at least that’s what I thought you were supposed to be. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I am seeing is the groundwork for a real time network– link rel=”hub” has been added to every Blogger feed and every FeedBurner feed, no? What I am not seeing are the real time feed updates coming from that network.

I setup My Status Cloud as both RSS Cloud and PuSH enabled. But when I post a new Tweet or cloud message, I can only rely consistently on Dave Winer’s RSS Cloud hub to pass my update information on. The “official” pubsubhubbub server is hit and miss. Whether it’s rate limiting or being lazy, in my little decentralized 140 character network, not every status update is pushed to me immediately by PuSH. Some are grouped together after two updates have been sent. That’s not real time.

I’ve subscribed to many feeds that are PuSH enabled through My Status Cloud. Or at least the FeedBurner feed published indicates that they are. When do I get the updates? Often a large amount of time after they are published. Whenever I’ve gotten a notification from an RSS Cloud server, it is usually within seconds, sometimes up to a minute.

You. Are. Random. That’s the perception I have. There are so many feeds that I’m passed PuSH notifications throughout the day for – with old content and no new content. Fat pings, useful? Yes. More fat pings than necessary? Not so much.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t taken the time to read through the complete documentation to see if I can figure out how the server end of things is supposed to work behind the scenes. When I decide to build a server, I will. Maybe I’m missing an explanation for the sporadic-ness that is coming out of there, but it really should be resolved. If we’re going to be real time, let’s be it already.

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By jeremy – September 29, 2009

On RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub (Part 1) – Publishers Have Some Work To Do

The web is live.

Yes, seriously, it is there there already.

I built a public aggregator that supports RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. Dave Winer has a public aggregator that supports RSS Cloud. Lazyfeed has an aggregator that supports RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. Google Reader has started to adopt PubSubHubbub. Many more are on the way, if not already here. A few more light switches to flip and all of a sudden you are playing catch up.

Who’s you? Let’s try who isn’t first.

CNN has it. Their news wire feed has been RSS Cloud enabled almost since the moment that Dave Winer announced support for RSS Cloud in Wordpress.

Om has it. Another that has been RSS Cloud enabled since the beginning.

Techcrunch has it two ways – RSS Cloud through the main feed and pubsubhubbub through the FeedBurner feed.

Gizmodo supports pubsubhubub through FeedBurner. GDGT supports pubsubhubbub through their native feed.

Who doesn’t?

Engadget has nothing enabled. They’re now the last source of gadget information. NY Times – nothing, LA Times – nothing, AP – nothing, Washington Post – nothing, MSNBC – nothing, Fox News – pretends to, Reuters – pretends to. More detail on the “pretends to” later, anybody else I’m forgetting?

So what do you do as a publisher?

You Read and then implement.

If I can ship an RSS Cloud aggregator in a little over a week from scratch, and add support for pubsubhubbub in a night, all while working a full time job during the day that has nothing to do with either…. you can afford to spend some time figuring out the best way for you to publish content using real time tech.

Which one is better? I don’t make those decisions. Which one should you implement? Whichever one you ship first. Just do it already and get on board.

What shouldn’t you do as a publisher?

I’m not usually one to say this, but don’t put all your faith in Google. Not yet at least. Just because you’re site uses FeedBurner and FeedBurner has decided they support pubsubhubbub, doesn’t mean that your content is actually being pushed in real time. More than likely you’re setup to ping FeedBurner separately. Feedburner then decides when to poll you before turning around and notifying the hub that the content is updated.

Instead, take control of your publishing process. Your web folks should be able to make the basic notifications required for both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub to work. And this should something that is done separate from the FeedBurner process. Don’t count on them to ping on their time. Ping when you publish.

The web is live, RSS and Atom are alive, and content is flowing in real time. I’m harnessing it, and you will be soon. If you are a publisher, you do not want to miss this boat.

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By jeremy – September 29, 2009

My Status Cloud – Now Supporting RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub

The third post written is the first post published. How does that work?

Anyhow.

Number One.

As of last night, My Status Cloud has support for both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub.

Now, while everyone decides which protocol to use, we can just use them. Ship both first, then decide. I like that answer the best.

Actually, they both have benefits and can probably coexist. More notes on what I think will follow. I’ve been closely watching the notifications roll in and I do have some observations to share. Even more so than you will see in the next couple posts.

Number Two.

I stated the other night how I felt about the work I’ve been doing. Pretty proud actually. I don’t normally get that way, but it’s cool. :) In fact, how many aggregators do you know support both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub? LazyFeed and…. Just saying.

What this really means is that I’ve been head down coding most nights without paying attention much to the usability of the site. I like having something to play with before I decide how to use it. I also avoided any kind of closed alpha/beta time because I think watching the progress can be fun for people. So, usability changes are on the way. Little helpers and hints to make things easy to use will be added.

If you’re using it, let me know. This really is your chance to have a feed reader that has the features you want. We’ll build them. And more feature posts will be coming soon explaining exactly why it is you should be using My Status Cloud.

:)

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By jeremy – September 29, 2009

My Status Cloud – Feelin’ Pretty(er) Every Day

Don’t worry, if Chicago isn’t already in your head, then the title won’t make sense. Just smile and nod. But. Also. If you thought we were good looking before, check us out now. :)

I’ve been meaning to do some layout work on My Status Cloud, and finally sat down to get around to it. Some things just needed to be cleaned up a bit before I went back to adding features. If all works as intended, more things should look alike and there should be a better overall flow. Here’s a preview if you haven’t already left to try it out:

My Status Cloud - Layout Changes

Pretty-ness done, back to code.

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By jeremy – September 22, 2009