twitter

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.

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.

The tweetmeme API is pretty neat: given a long link, it will tell you how many times that link has been tweeted. And it even works, which is nice.

Well, it works most of the time.

On my recent post on the origin of perfect software, I looked over at my custom Tweetmeme badge and saw that this story which had just been published had 42147 tweets. Now, my work is good, but it’s not that good.

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.

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.