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.

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.

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.

To the Unemployed – - A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again.

For at least a thousand years, people have been able to receive news through some kind of bulletin or newspaper format. In a printed format.

RSS is a web feed format used by publishers on the internet to make their material available to others somewhat like the print on paper. In an electronic format.

Twitter is a web application that allows users to publish material in a proprietary format using the service as a delivery method.

Google Reader is a web application that delivers material that has been published in the RSS format to users. It uses it’s own delivery method in which it checks with the publisher every so often to see if new content is available.

Now I will switch from definitions to analogies, because analogies help me understand things.

If I visit RSS formatted feeds manually using my browser as the delivery method– I go on a walk through town whenever I have time,  and visit all of the newspaper press buildings to see new content has been printed since I was last there. This takes a while because I need to travel to New York for the Times, DC for the Post, Chicago for the Tribune, etc…

If I use Google Reader (or another aggregator) as the delivery method for my RSS formatted news– I go on a walk every once and a while to my favorite news stand to see if they have any changes in content available from the newspapers I like.

If I use Twitter as the delivery method and format for my news– I go on a walk to the building in San Francisco which Twitter uses to publish content as it happens. This is great because it’s available as soon as somebody submits it. Every once and a while, I even choose a building in another city to look at content delivered by Twitter. These buildings have agreements to be notified of any news coming out of Twitter headquarters as soon as it happens. There are some other buildings that don’t have agreements, but they still check with Twitter headquarters every once and a while, and I can check new material from them when I go to the newspaper stand.

If I’m using rssCloud as the delivery method for my news that is in the RSS format– I stop going for walks. Instead, I have finally decided to sign up for delivery with all of the newspapers that I love to read. I am only required to open my door and read what’s sitting on my porch. I even have access to content that comes from Twitter, because one of the newspapers that I love to read has an agreement to be told of any news from the Twitter system.

Both delivery and format have been around for a while, nobody’s going anywhere. Thanks, Barney Flaherty.

First, the look and feel has changed quite a bit. I always do funny things with colors and rounded corners when I first start, but then get sick of them and go back to shades of grey very quickly – so there you go. Easier to read.

Next, which is more like 4 in 1, you have configurable options!

• User Settings: You are now able to change or remove your email address and manage your OAuth connection to Twitter through preferences.
• Ping Settings: If you’ve started to develop your own rss Cloud server and want to try a different client, these settings can be changed to work with your server. Only http-post is supported at the moment, but I’ll be working on a SOAP and XML-RPC version soon.
• Subscription Settings: Another option for those who have started to implement their own rss Cloud server. These settings allow you to play with the actual cloud element in your My Status Cloud RSS feed. Also with this- only http-post is supported for the time being.
• Publishing Settings: This is the best part, I think, brought on by what I was thinking in last friday’s post… You can now enter FTP settings to publish your My Status Cloud RSS feed to your own server. If an FTP server exists, the application will attempt to upload your feed (username.xml) to the server specified.

Ponder those changes for a second if you didn’t grab it the first time and I’ll add all the previous pieces together for the overview.

The overview…

1. You can cross post updates into the rssCloud and/or Twitter at the same time.
2. Links can be attached as metadata to the update so you can use ALL 140 characters.
3. These updates, Twitter or not, are saved into an rssCloud compatible feed.
4. An rssCloud server, rpc.rsscloud.org, is notified every time you update either the cloud or Twitter.
5. The My Status Cloud client/aggregator shows you the updates immediately after being notified by the server that it has been updated.
6. You can publish (or backup) your feed anywhere via FTP.
7. You can start to manage your feed through an rssCloud server other than rpc.rsscloud.org.

There you have it. Try away and report away if you see anything unexpected.

Sitting in my chair watching myself type status updates to myself along with Dave’s automatic lifeliner feed that does a wonderful job of showing different state names and times go by is great and all, but playing with some real content would also be nice.

So. As of now, anybody can signup for an account at mystatuscloud.com and start using the concepts of the rssCloud in tandem with Twitter. Or without Twitter, that’s always an option too.

Yes, yes, this is too early. And it’s probably buggy. But you can still give it a go if you want. I’ll try to sum up what it does in a few blurbs.

1. It is a basic authentication Twitter client. You can Tweet and push to the rssCloud at the same time.
2. It is an rssCloud client. You can push to the rssCloud without Tweeting.
3. An xml feed is generated on your first update.
4. A cloud server (rpc.rsscloud.org) is notified of every update.
5. A 24 hour subscription is maintained with that cloud server.
6. Every user is automatically subscribed to every user. This is temporary, but should be fun to watch the flow.

That should get you by for now. If not, sign up anyway and play around. Then, checkout the material at rssCloud.org and my personal Week 1 status report to get caught up on what this is all about.

Beyond fixing bugs that should be fixed when found, these updates are coming within the next few days:

• OAuth. Then you may feel comfortable using your main Twitter account.
• Aggregation Code. It will work by streaming or refreshing, but streaming is on the fritz a bit.
• Subscription maintenance.

I got a late start, but it looks like Week 2 is still shaping up to be a productive one.

The concept has literally been rebooted, not rewritten.

It is, however, the first week for me. Even after I read the several pages he posted about the rssCloud effort back in July, I never had time to play with it until now. It has been a quick, painless, and relatively simple experience ever since.

Heck, it’s built on good tech, it should be.

The first step was to practice. I setup a basic server that I wanted to have notified when things were updated, then a basic client to subscribe to Dave’s cloud server. After running into firewall troubles, something else clarified in 2001, I realized that Amazon’s AWS was in order and setup my first real Linux instance over there. Another easy process, sweet!

Next, I setup a little Twitter client that posts to Twitter through the REST API, then backs the tweet up to an RSS feed on my server and notifies the cloud that it has been changed. The cloud in turn notifies me back, and then the main page at mystatuscloud.com is updated with the feed.

Seriously, good tech = fun stuff.

Then on Wednesday, the Google Reader team announced a new Send To feature that allows you to share items to other services via notification URL. As an extra option, they provide a spot for your own URL with parameters for url, title, source, and short-url. It didn’t take much to turn that into a service that tweeted the shared item to Twitter, saved a copy on the server, updated the RSS feed and notified, notified, etc.

Also, if you combine the ability to share notes via the same service with the script that Dave Winer wrote to push all your Twitter contacts into an OPML file, Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client – already. The only side note is that Reader does not yet pass a title for notes, so the tweets show up mostly blank. According to @googlereader, they’ll be fixing that shortly.

Finally, tonight I implemented the cloud element into this blog’s RSS feed and setup another script to ping Dave’s rsscloud server when it’s updated.

So, now that I’m running out of my own stuff to add cloud elements too, I’m going to start working on the next phase. Some kind of multi-user thing is probably in order. We’ll see… on to week 2.

New User Signup: Anybody can now sign up for their own TopTwit Top 40 page. All you need to enter is your Twitter username, Trim username, Trim password, and Disqus shortname. I will fully admit that I’ve been coding quick, so I don’t have the checks and balances coded and you can pretty much enter whatever the heck you want for everything and who knows what will happen. But if you enter valid info for the above stuff, you will have access to all the features thus far. You can probably skip the Disqus info if you don’t care about comments. Also note that until I get things dynamic enough, you’ll only have a pretty URL if you tell me in advance that you’re coming. Otherwise you will still work fine, but the URL just won’t be as fun.

Comments Are Enabled: I just added Disqus comments to all the tweets that are captured. You can click on the comment count to go to a page specifically built for the tweet and comment there if you would like. I’m still thinking out smarter ways to go about this, but it looks pretty cool.

Trim, Postly, Bitly All Work: The page is designed around Tr.im because their API has a cool feature to grab the visit count on the last X urls posted, saving a lot of time when refreshing the data every 5 minutes. However, you can still get the view count from post.ly (the Posterous url shortner and bit.ly, so I do. Bugs are always possible of course and I haven’t read into the bitly API enough, but I may need to have you enter a bit.ly api key at some point.

Broken Stuff: Of course there’s broken stuff because I’m the only one using the site and nobody’s complained about the broken stuff yet. Specifically the detection of URLs that you retweet but are from other people – those stats don’t show up the best and I’ll need to get some owner checking going on at some point. Also, reposting old urls does not refresh the age at this point, which would be kind of a nice feature in the future.

What else: That’s it. Please sign up and have some fun. It’s your own little personal Twitter Digg if you hadn’t thought of it that way yet. And if you hadn’t seen it already, this all exists because of Dave Winer and his challenge to have some fun after he made the first top40 app. So thanks to him because it has been fun.

Twitter has long been talked about as a news source. If it ever decides to work as a news source, or if we ever decide to actually use it as one, there will be two parts:

1. The raw news will be complete madness, and everybody will be allowed in.
2. Many somebodies, from many different groups and interests, will harness the madness into usefulness.

This is easier (ha) than it sounds.

Six degrees of separation, or something similar to that, will determine that I as an editor/publisher can choose my trusted raw news sources that cover my area of interest. If I’m looking for local news in my town of 30,000, I only need a handful of trusted sources sending out raw news in order for me to edit/publish an aggregation of news for that locality. A larger city (Chicago) only requires a handful more sources.

For edit/publishing tasks, I will have a way to strip out tweets that are unrelated from that stream and a way to categorize the tweets that are related. Once a category (story) has valuable information from enough sources, it will be published. Once published, it remains alive. I can remove/add information and sources. Everyone can react, republish, comment, or do whatever they would like with that story.

More later I think. I might be working on it.

The original TopTwit has pretty much failed for the time being, but that doesn’t mean the idea is dead. Soon I’ll head back into that code and clean it up (a year later). It does still work if you want to try it out– sign up and build your twit lists and you have a nice page to keep track of your favorites.

On the other side of things, I’ve been having fun playing copycat to the 40 most recent links from @davewiner. You can see my version over at 40 most recent links from @jeremyfelt. I’ve recently added support for bit.ly and post.ly in addition to the default tr.im functions. I have categories built in (using hash tags), but I took them off of the display for now because it seemed like a waste of characters. Not sure what new features will show up here in the near future, but it definitely needs a design overhaul.