serious business

One of my goals for SIGPWNED has always been that it would be a place where I could share not only my ideas and my writing, but also my work. And so today I announce a new section of my site, the Projects section, as well as my first open source project ever: Jsonification.

The projects page will be where I keep a laundry list of all of my most current projects and where they stand at the moment. Right now, I’ve got WhatsTwending there, as well as the new project I’m announcing in this post.

Jsonification has its own project page, so I’ll let you head over there to read all about it. I’ll just mention the high points here, as paraphrased from the project page:

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.

One fateful friday in January 2009, @micah sent out a tweet that still echoes weekly in the twittersphere:

I am starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday, suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her. Today is @fancyjeffrey & @w1redone.

What began as a simple idea is now a full-blown weekly phenomenon on Twitter. #FF may have started small, but nowadays there are so many #FF updates rolling through your followers’ streams that it’s easy to get lost in the mix. If you stick to these six rules, though, your #FF updates will start to get the attention they deserve.

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.

After an application and review process, I’ve been selected as a new writer for theappleblog.com. I should be posting my first official post in the next couple of weeks. I’ll be sure to post a link to the story here, or even resyndicate it if I can.

And I guess I’m now officially a professional blogger. Fancy.

Of course, now that I’ve made it big, I have to start thinking about my image. Beginning next week, I’m doubling the subscription fees for sigpwned.com from Free to Free. So enjoy this last week of Free posts, because starting April 12 you’ll have to start paying nothing to get your SIGPWNED fix.

Sorry. That’s just the way us professionals roll. You understand.