Library clips

I have an issue where I noticed two Tweets in my Twitter account that weren’t made by me, here they are:

http://twitter.com/johnt/statuses/24515341
“Phillip Pearlman, Sam Zell, Valleywag, and me /A VC/ - Phillip Pearlman is a hedge fund manager, stock … http://tinyurl.com/2a985z”

http://twitter.com/johnt/statuses/25236971
“Fluorescent Adolescent /A VC/ - Here’s a great track from the new Arctic Monkeys record. It’s called … http://tinyurl.com/22jt4s”

Now how did someone slip into my stream?

Auto replies

While I’m on the topic of Twitter I thought I’d mention the auto-reply feature I just noticed.

If I want to Tweet to someone in particular, but still display it in the public stream, the norm is to use the “@” symbol. When you do this, the “@” symbol is recognised by Twitter and your post (Tweet) will auto-display a reply link.

eg. I made this Tweet about my identity issue with Twitter, then I made another Tweet, then Elsua used the “@” symbol, intending to reply to my first Tweet (I can tell he is replying to my first Tweet from the content in his Tweet).
Now if you look at his Tweet, it auto-displays a reply link “in reply to johnt”…but this links to my second Tweet, not my first Tweet.

Here is his Tweet:
“elsua @johnt: Are you serious with that claim? Are you saying that you Twitter account has been hacked! Wooohooo! I didn’t expect it’d be so soon! about 1 hour ago from web in reply to johnt”

So this auto-reply displayed link isn’t that effective as it is links by default to the last Tweet of the user you are replying to even though you may really be replying to their 8th last Tweet.

Even worse, what if you are doing a shout-out to a friend, that is you are not replying, but initiating a Tweet using the “@” symbol. Your Tweet will auto list a link to the last Tweet of the person you are Tweeting to. That person’s last Tweet will 99% be totally unrelated to your Tweet…imagine their last Tweet was to someone else using the “@” symbol, this would get confusing.

Groups

Wouldn’t it be great if Twitter had groups, that is, instead of following a person eg. twitter/johnt, you could follow a group eg. twitter/groupA. All a group would do is re-publish all the user Tweets into the group Twitter as well. So if you belonged to 5 groups, your Tweets would show up in 7 places (5 groups, your user space, and the public space).

This would make it more managable to follow groups of people by SMS or IM, eg. leave groupA eg. follow groupB, etc…

Or perhaps a multi-authored account like MACWORLD.

Check out 30 boxes for their group hack…make a view by adding people, see here. If this had a feed I could make lots of these and subscribe to different groups of people by RSS, and then I could also get this on IM or SMS or email via Rasasa, ZapTXT, or Blastfeed…or even email via Emailtwitter.com…also see Anothr for IM.

Twitterment is another Twitter search service, but this one also has comparisons and stats.
The homepage has 2 tag clouds “buzzy terms” and fading terms”.

Here is a search for beer:
- search results display Tweets containing the term beer (it doesn’t have a list for who mentions “beer” the most)
- % of tweets graphed by the hour unit (for 24 hours)
- % of tweets graphed by the day unit (for 7 days)
- map of where the tweets are concentrated
- tag cloud with terms that mostly coincide with the term beer (this gives an analysis of context)…at the moment the term “drinking” appears with the term “beer” more than any other word.

You can also compare terms eg. sleep vs. office
- shows both graphs with 2 different coloured lines representing each term.

There are direct links to search, compare and stats (numder of Tweets per hour and per day)

It even does author search eg. author:johnt, check out my weekly graph, I didn’t Twitter at all on Saturday, and the hourly graph proves I don’t Twitter in my sleep

Also see a Twitter tool roundup from Quick Online Tips.

Qnext - file sharing, similar to Tubes and many others, this one has music streaming, file and photo sharing, video and audio conferencing, IM, tagboard…also see Quickeo, izimi, and dekoh.

Postful - send an email to Postful and they will print it and send it in the real mail, now that’s getting lazy. At work, outgoing mail is stamped and sent for me, but I print out the physical paper and whack it in an envelope and write the address. Maybe postful could really take off in the enterprise, they could be your outsourced mail room…oops, privacy factor. [via mashable]

Gigya and Wildfire - widgets in emails, they are also offering Wildfire which offers people a widget of your content to embed in their various web2.0 sites, and get this you don’t cut ‘n paste the code, you just fill in your details and it will appear at your site.

Ideawicket - a social network for ideas, also see Acorn, TagFacts, and Bank of Ideas.

me.com - build a social network community, also see Haystack Networking, similar places are group topic pages like Zimbio, GROU.PS, Fanpop, Webjam or Complore for research. Other DIY social networks are Ning, ElggSpaces, KickApps, PeopleAggregator, KrawlerX (P2P social network), and Vox.

We all love that we can create topic clips blogs right from our Google Reader, a simple and effortless clip stream with it’s own feed and public page…my gripe is that you can’t clip outside stuff or annotate, see Top 10 Sources for a great example (this is not an RSS Reader).

Clustering is a feature missing from Google Reader, you will find it at MyFeedz, WizAg, Feeds 2.0, FeedEye, and Feedable.
Another term would be memetracking within your RSS Reader, all this means is that similar stories are clustered together (including showing inlinks for each), and it may provide bonus stories from outside your RSS Reader (ie. related stories to a cluster, from feeds you are not subscribed to).

Even if Google Reader did introduce clustering, would I be able to clip a clustered meme to my clip streams. At the moment you can share single links in a public clips or link stream, well what about a clips meme stream, this means instead of clipping links one at a time, you get to clip a cluster of links as one entry.

What about a widget for any clustered story, this would be a great feature for megite or Techmeme.

Feedable now has clip or linkblogs, so my question is what about memeblogs, to repeat myself, where instead of each entry being a link, each entry is a cluster or bunch of links, basically meme clipping.

A meme cluster as a unit or permalink obviously begs to be able to do more than pointing to the permalink (as we do in Techmeme), we want to embed a widget of a meme in our blog posts, why point to a Techmeme URL, when you can have the excerpt of the content within your post (and I don’t mean an image).

Once Google Reader does clustering, I’d love to be able to grab a cluster of links around a meme as a widget and put it in a blog post.
When you are writing a blog post you often have to go to the trouble to list lots of links about a current topic or meme, and sometimes you even may include a quote for each link, eg. Emily’s post on her Twitterverse blog about all the blogs that have mentioned the new release of her Twitterverse product.
Now imagine if she could search the term “twitterverse” in megite (coming soon), and the results are displayed in that visual memetracker layout that we love (rather than unappealing linear search results). She could then grab that meme as a widget and put it in her blog post, instead of manually doing it all herself.

OK, at the moment those blog posts she’s included in her post will know they are being talked about if they follow their ego feeds, but will they know each time they have been embedded as a megite widget, will the links of all the posts in the meme widget be tracked by search engines, so you can know someone is talking about you.

I suppose another thing is that Emily compiled the posts she chose to talk about, nothing beats personal choice, whereas a meme widget will have a bunch of generated clustered posts (and may exclude some good stuff, compared to scouring the net yourself). She also chose to quote an excerpt from each, maybe posts in a meme can expand for summaries.
Anyway in this case maybe doing it manually is better, but for other situations when you want to say, check out who’s talking about the latest product, all you would have to do is effortlessly search megite or perhaps your own RSS Reader, and grab the meme as a widget and embed it in your blog post.

Another thought…

Over time a new meme could connect to older meme’s, that is, a re-surface of a conversation that was had in the past. Would the old meme grow to include the new meme or would they be separate as they happened at different time chunks, therefore are different conversations, even though they are about the same thing.
I guess they could link to each other eg. also see….

If you went back to look at an old meme and it has lots more links compared to when you last looked at it, would the widget version of that meme in your blog post grow as well…I don’t think so, I believe meme’s are time sensitive. But it would be great for the meme widget in my blog post to suddenly have a link saying also see this new related meme.

How this could work is that if all the links in a meme were wrapped up in an OPML URL.

Imagine for each meme in megite you could grab an OPML Grazr widget, and the outline in this Grazr widget mimicked the layout of the meme in megite.
You could put this OPML Grazr meme in a blog post and because it is based on OPML, any new links added to the megite meme, would reflect in the Grazr meme in your blog post…

OPML makes everyone happy