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September 26, 2007

Roundup : Snitter, Jott update, Yap, Blabto, iratemyday

Filed under: tools, roundup

Snitter - yet another Twitter desktop app, similar to Tweetr [via m]

Jott - I posted on Jott in March, since then there has been an update.
Current features are phone call (speech to text) blog posting, link an audio byte in your blog post, reminders, voice to text a friend and group (friends receive the converted text Jott by email or SMS, they can also choose to hear the voice link or ring to hear)…and now they have added presence blogs like Twitter and Jaiku, simply call up and talk a tweet, and it will convert to text and post to Twitter.
Also to-do list Jotts (these are deposited into your Jotts folders), similar to Gubb. [via RWW]

Yap - soon to be released, be able to talk to your phone and have it translate it into a text message…good way to be able to responsibly text while driving a car. It’s not gonna stop there, how about posting to your Facebook friends or Twitter, search and lots more.[via W]

Blabto - another Twitter clone, see other presence blogging from Podobo, Jaiku, Hictu, Yappd, Yodio, Utterz

iratemyday - as you would imagine a specific status/presence blogging app, also see moodmill, emotionr .

BONUS LINK:
Hictu presence blogging with video integration now has tags for posts, just like Podobo and Jaiku.

Twitter channel hack for real

Filed under: blogs, conversation, mobile

[UPDATE: Yikes, see comment on this post, the problem with this Twitter channel hack is that I may be creating a feedback loop.

Tweets showing up in search results are automatically being tweeted again as the search result feed is being re-syndicated into a Twitter account using Twitterfeed…this is the intention…but now the same tweets will turn up again and again…oops!!

So maybe we have to be happy with my former post which was re-syndicating the search feed into a blog like SuprGlu, and get notifications by using an RSS to email, IM, SMS service.]

I’ve posted twice on Twitter channel hacks, here’s my 3rd attempt which is really the icing on the cake from my 2nd attempt.

Pick a topic eg. electronica

Create a new Twitter user called “electronica”

Use RSS2Twitter or Twitterfeed to re-syndicate the contents of an RSS feed as automatic tweets.

This user called “electronica” will have an owner, but the owner will not tweet in this account or follow any users, instead the tweets are automatically populating from a search results feed.

The Terraminds search engine searches the latest Twitter updates

- do a search for the term “electronica” (as this is our topic)

- whenever a user on Twitter uses this word in a tweet it will appear in this search result, therefore it will appear as a tweet in the stream of the Twitter user “electronica”.

To be notified whenever a new tweet appears in the user “electronica” just follow that user.

Now Twitter will let you know when the user “electronica” has a new tweet (behind the scenes this user is not tweeting at all, the tweets are coming from random users on Twitter who have used the word “electronica” in their tweets).

Just say you are notified of a cool tweet that you have seen in the Twitter account “electronica”, and you want to reply to the user who made that tweet (you will find the users name as a prefix to the tweet)

Just simply send a @reply tweet, it will appear in that users private reply stream…you don’t have to follow each other to be able to use the reply feature.

But what if you want this reply to also appear in the Twitter account “electronica” for sakes of a conversation thread…just make sure both words are in the tweet:

eg. electronica @mikes I agree boards of canada get better and better with each new release

This tweet will appear in the Twitter account “electronica”, and it will also appear in the private reply stream of the user “mikes”
- if the user “mikes” follows you, it will also appear in his “With Others” stream.

This will let you send and receive tweets on a topic, and all will be archived at a Twitter user space.

Only issue is that someone has to create the topic account, therefore they are the owner, and can decide to kill the account…but at least you have the Terraminds feed to start again.

Experiment

Darn it…there is already a user called “electronica”

I suppose it doesn’t matter what my topic user is called…

Here is the user “3lectr0n1ca“, if your tweet contains the term “electronica”, it will appear on this users page…follow that user for updates.

It works, the first tweet has been made by me as the user 3lectr0n1ca…this is an intro tweet, these tweets from the user page are just for announcements.

The second tweet is the latest tweet on the Terraminds search results for “electronica”, Twitterfeed has picked this up and tweeted it at the 3lectr0n1ca user page…yippee it works!

Not sure if Terraminds is still indexing, as I have made 2 tweets in the last day with the term “electronica” and they are not showing up…anyone know of any Twitter search engines with RSS output.

Check out a search for “electronica” on Twitter search engines:
- Terraminds
- Twitterment
- Twitterverse (or here)
- Twittersearch doesn’t have unique links
- Twitterzone was not available

It seems Webware has hacks using Twitterfeed and a new Twitter user you can follow, the Facebook hack is a treat.

September 25, 2007

Megite : bookmark memetracker

Filed under: newsmaster, search, attention

Megite discover which I posted back in May, has added a bookmarking feature.

Megite’s main service is the memetracker, this works on it’s own to bring you the hottest stuff of the day, you can even enter your OPML so it’s the hottest stuff according to your feed set (it also throws in some recommended posts).

They also have a discover engine as a way to find the hottest posts by entering a topic query, or enter a URL and get related links and also topics for that URL.

It has now expanded into bookmarking, when you play with megite discover you can choose to save a link right there within your megite user space. You can also use a bookmarklet to bookmark links you find outside of megite…what we have is a memetracker and discovery engine allowing users to now bookmark links it finds in the engine and outside of the engine.

Hmmm, what about being able to bookmark stuff you find on the main megite memetracker site.

If you find a handy bookmark on the web will you bookmark it in megite or del.icio.us?

If you find a handy bookmark in megite discover will you bookmark it within megite discover or del.icio.us?

Related:
megite : Memetracker for a single blog

Terraminds Twitter search channel hack

Filed under: blogs, conversation, mobile

Terraminds searches Twitter people or updates, also get an RSS feed.

What I like about this is that you can search for replies like @johnt, then subscribe to this RSS in your RSS Reader…the native Twitter reply feed is authenticated so this is an alternative for some RSS Readers.

You could hack a channel chat, based on hash tags I mentioned in my Twitter channels post

Just say I want to tag my tweet as “electronica”, I could have a tweet like this
eg. pulseprogramming is sweet #electronica

Actually the hash symbol is being ignored by Terraminds, so maybe you could use @electronica instead

Problem is there could already be a user called Twitter/electronica, and we wouldn’t want this user getting @electronica posts that we are tweeting, so we need another symbol to denote channels/tags, but Terraminds seems to be ignoring symbols, so perhaps a number will have to be used.
eg. 1electronica Qua’s old stuff is more guitar oriented
eg. Perth has an underground 1electronica scene

You and a bunch of users could search query 1electronica and grab the RSS feed.

Then convert this feed into email so you can follow it on your phone email.

In action

So you and some users have subscribed to a Terraminds Twitter search feed for “1electronica” and then converted it to email. Every time a tweet has the term “1electronica” you will receive a mobile email on the go.

Whenever you have the term “1electronica” in one of your tweets, users who subscribe to this search feed will be notified.

NOTE: I just searched for 1electronica and got no results, therefore no feed…so you have to at least have one post in order to establish a feed.

Now you and your friends can have conversations around the channel/tag “1electronica”, all without following someone, all people are doing is subscribing to a search feed.

If you want to see an archive of the conversation, do the search query at Terraminds, and you should see your search results as a chat hack.

Better still re-syndicate the feed to SuprGlu so the discussion has a place to live.
People wouldn’t even need to know Terraminds exists, they could follow your SuprGlu feed instead of the Terraminds feed, and you could use the sidebar to list regular posters to the channel, although this may be a bad idea as it’s not member based, anyone can post to this channel.

So with the power of search feeds we can have a conversation on the go and see the conversation archive in a search result or re-syndicated to a blog.

Conversation example

johnt: 1electronica when is the next issue of 1st past the post coming out

Since shaym subscribes to the search feed for “1electronica” he is notified of this post

shaym: 1electronica not sure but it sure beats any other magazine for the local scene

Since johnt subscribes to the search feed for “1electronica” he is notified of this post

johnt: 1electronica does anyone have back issues of 1st past the post

…and so on

Now the difficult thing is that what if you want to direct your conversation to one person but still appear in the channel, you could just use the @ symbol in your tweets as well…but this means you will sometimes see tweets twice, one in your search feed and one in your reply stream.

Why a channel name?

The reason we are using “1electronica” instead of “electronica” is that we don’t want noise in our search results.

eg. “1cars” would be a tweet channel about cars

a tweet like:
eg. I drove my car to the shop

….would not appear in the channel as we only want tweets that are intentionally about cars

OK, so maybe my example of “1electronica” was not a good example as the term “electronica” is pretty unique and always mostly used in the one context…it’s not very ambiguous or common.

But maybe you don’t want to see every tweet that has the term “electronica”, and only want to see tweets from people in the know of the term “1electronica”.
If you want a kind of closed group approach, just tell a bunch of friends about your unique term, you can tweet amongst yourselves…more like a conversation.
Sure, people that follow you will wonder why you always have the number 1 infront of a regular word in your tweets, and if they start doing it, their tweets will show up in the channel as well…it’s very open to spam and people contributing on the fly.

When you think of it, this is the same as an adhoc group based around a del.icio.us tag. People that want a type of closed group approach just choose a unique tag to share their links in.
If you collect links about electronic music you could tag it “electronica” for the good of the folksonomy, but also tag it “electronica1″.
All bookmarks in the “1electronica” tag are populated by people in the know, people who find out about this tag could start tagging this way (kind of like joining the group).

Anyway, for now I’m not creating a unique word as the term “electronica” is unique enough, and for this purpose I don’t care for a secret group.

So I’m gonna follow the Terraminds search results electronica, here’s the RSS feed.

This way I’ll know about any tweet with the term “electronica”, others who follow this search feed could ping back tweets like a conversation. Well they will be contributing anyway as long as they use the word “electronica”, but if some of their tweets are about “electronica” but they haven’t used the word “electronica” in their tweet then it won’t show up.

Again that’s why it’s important to choose a keyword as a channel name….I love it, following a adhoc topic instead of a user.

Following search feeds is a good way to find friends!

[ADDED: In the end, I could be the only one following the search feed “electronica”, if I see some cool tweets I can @reply to another user…even though we may not follow each other, they will still see my @reply tweet in their reply stream.]

Related:
Twitterment : search and trends for Twitter
Twitter word bursts: Twitterverse, Twitterzone, TwitterSearch, ZoomCloud

September 24, 2007

Roundup : Intuuch, xobni, DocStoc, Utters, Treedolist

Filed under: tools, roundup

Intuuch - yet another lifestream service, how many of these can we handle…anyway it has a nice and clear interface, very twitter like. Add Intuuch friends and view a friendstream…also has an easy widget, and facebook app.
On each user space there are links to all the users profiles, unfortunately you can’t limit the stream to one of these services or a selection. Just to compare, other lifestream services have private messages, and even internal note blogging features. [via Lifestream blog]

xobni - an Outlook email plugin with a sidebar info box for each email. I’ll just let Frank Gruber explain it:

“It displays a heat map of email activity for each particular sender. It offers a popularity rank by inbound and outbound emails to a specific contact, pulls the phone number from the body and displays related contacts. Rather than having to search for attachments from a contact buried somewhere in your Inbox, Xobni includes them all in your right rail. Xobni’s email metrics expose your emailing habits. Xobni’s powerful search makes finding items a lot easier. Xobni also pulls in your Outlook to do lists and calendar entries. It even reminds you of contacts you have lost touch with.”

A quick list of features from their website:
- search
- threaded conversation
- email analytics
- social analysis inbox
- easy attachment extraction
- easy phone extraction

DocStoc - like Scribd and ThinkFree Docs, there is a new social document host in the game. [via rev2]

Utters - another presence micro-blog network in the realm of what we will one day see with Twitter. SMS updates from your phone, SMS or email photo’s or video from your phone, or call a number and leave an audio byte, others can rate and leave comments…even listen and respond to Utterz using your phone.
An added feature is to be able to post to your blog or social network, even by voice.

It mentions in the FAQ that you can send a txt, audio, image in any order and it will mash them up into a clip, sounds a little like Yodio.
I see a channels section, which may mean you can send your utter to a channel as well as it appearing on your profile, and a tag cloud which may mean you can tag your utters.

I really like the look and feel of Utters, and the great features: channels, tags, comments, photo’s, video, audio, email….come on Twitter. [via m]

Treedolist - lastest to-do task manager, also check out Stowe Boyd’s post on similar tools like Todoist and Huddle.

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