technology

Now that I’m fully recovered from Chirp and have had the chance to relax a bit, it’s time to start talking about what’s most important now that Chirp is over:

What the hell are annotations for?

If you weren’t at Chirp (or you were there but weren’t paying attention), the Twitter Annotations API will let you attach arbitrary metadata to tweets. So just as Twitter clients can attach GPS coordinates to tweets, so too will you be able to attach moods, who you were with, or funny pictures of cats to your tweets.

One of the primary messages we heard at Chirp was that Twitter is hard to use. For those of us who know and love Twitter, and use it every day, hearing that from Twitter execs came as a bit of a shock. For us, Twitter’s a snap. But our skepticism was quickly replaced by a sense of surprise when @ev, Twitter’s CEO, put up a video of a Stanford grad (yes, that Stanford) trying for five minutes to get Twitter on her phone and failing.

Last night, I posted a data set about which Twitter clients were the most popular on Day 1 of Chirp. Since then, I’ve gotten a few requests for data about which Twitter clients are popular here at Chirp normalized to users instead of to tweets.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Here are two new data sets: one with clients counted by users, and a refresh of clients counted by tweets collected about 5 minutes after the first.

The daytime part of #chirp was a lot of fun, but the overnight hackathon is another thing altogether. Not only do we get to play with newly-released APIs — user streams, I’m looking at you — but we also get introductions to some pretty bad-ass new libraries like the @ Anywhere JavaScript API from the developers who wrote them.

Oh. And then there’s the rate limit bump to 20,000 requests per hour. That’s kinda neat too.

As a quick first project for the evening, I decided to follow up on a suggestion from @_stritti_ to do some quick analysis on which Twitter clients were popular at the daytime part of the conference.

The first morning of Chirp has been very interesting. After a nice mimosa to open up the morning, moderator John Betalle ( @johnbetalle ) got us off to a nice start and the very distinguished speakers started taking the stage.

The opening remarks by Biz Stone ( @biz ) teased us with promises of talk about upcoming changes to Twitter’s API and Twitter’s revenue model. We haven’t heard a lot about the revenue model yet — I expect that will come as we discuss the ad platform later today with Ev Williams and Dick Costello at 3:30 and 3:45 — but Ryan Sarver delivered with some huge announcements about the Twitter API. But Biz is a Twitter cofounder, so he’s been there since the beginning, and my favorite parts of his talk were about Twitter’s history. For example, it turns out that the first big “Twitter is actually important” experience the founders had came at SXSW in 2007 when a whole meet-and-greet spontaneously changed venues when someone tweeted they were going from one bar to another. And, as he said, he knew Twitter had made it big when they had to postpone some planned maintenance because Iranian protesters said their lives would be in danger if their communication channel of choice went down during some upcoming protests. (He also just slipped in that the original Twitter prototype was written in two weeks. Damn.)

I’ll be at Chirp, the official Twitter conference, on April 14-15. Anyone going and want to meet up for a frosty beverage? Or anyone not going who has questions they’d like me to ask the Twitter team? Leave a comment here, or drop me a line at @sigpwned! And I’ll be tweeting the whole time, so for live updates during the conference, follow me at @sigpwned, too.

Regardless, though, be sure to follow @twitter and @chirp at least for the week. There are sure to be some interesting announcements coming down the pipe.

Expect to see new stories here during the conference, and I’ll be sure to post a recap as soon as I get back, so subscribe to my RSS feed or check back for a wrap-up and postmortem.

In another post, I claimed that software can’t be written with no bugs at all. Well, it turns out that’s not quite true. What I should have said is that writing bug-free software is not possible within the constraints of most software businesses or open-source projects.

But that just doesn’t have the same pizazz, does it?

The trouble is that software businesses exist to make money, and open source projects exist to give developers interesting things to do and exposure. (Naturally, there are some exceptions in both camps, but if you imagine that’s always true, you won’t be too far off.) And if these are the goals you’re chasing — customers and money, or interesting problems and exposure — you don’t end up with perfect software. You go broke or get bored before you get there.

There’s been a lot of hubbub claiming “Flash is dead!” in various conjugations because (1) Steve Jobs says so (and he’s never wrong), and (2) HTML5 is going to replace it. (Overnight, ostensibly.)

Now, we all know how much fun it is to declare things dead before they’re dead, but surely they’re not talking about Adobe Flash, right? Not the Flash that has been the go-to technology for complex animation, video, and games on the web since it was introduced in 1996. Not the Flash with gigs of impossible-to-replace user-generated content scattered across the Internet. Not the Flash that powers your favorite games, and your favorite animations, and your favorite webapps. Not the Flash used to build all that neat, goofy stuff we all love so much. Not the Flash that runs 30%-40% of the websites on the Net, including the websites of some of the world’s most influential organizations. Not the Flash being used to make some of the most important animation on TV right now. Not that Flash. They must be talking about some other Flash. Right? I mean, come on, let’s not be ridiculous.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Google (yes, that Google) is getting into the ISP business. Surprised? Well, that makes tons of us. At face value, this seems like an odd choice for a search company. Serving up the intarwebs isn’t obviously related to Google’s mission to index the whole world. But when you read about Google’s plan to build the next generation of webapps, its decision to enter the ISP arena is a no-brainer. Google needs a faster network to build what it wants to build, but it’s tired of waiting for the telecom industry to provide it, so Google’s going to roll out the network itself. (Honestly, if you want anything done…)

Anyway, the official name of the program is Big Gig, and you can read all about it on its official site. The high points are that Big Gig is going to roll out faster broadband to cities in America, but only a few, so the competition to draw Google’s attention is fierce. And the competition should be fierce. Google’s not just rolling out faster internet. Google’s rolling out gigabit internet. Let me say that one more time, just in case you weren’t paying attention: Google is rolling out Gigabit internet. That’s probably about 100-200 times faster than whatever connection you used to download this article.

Now are you listening?

When it first came out, I believed (like most people) that Twitter was a flash in the pan, and nothing but one more way for the Me Generation to get another attention fix. After listening to the WCG social media team in the InnovateTexas offices using and talking about it for a few months, though, I got curious and finally created an account.

Now that I’ve been using Twitter for a couple weeks, I’m going on the record: I was wrong.