I’ve written a new plugin for wordpress entitled “AHP Tags to Hashtags” for use with WordPress and WordPress MU. The plugin can be found for now at pastebin here, I will update when it’s been added to the official wordpress plugin repository.

The plugin appends the tags for each post to the post title in the RSS feed. For example, for a post titled “Awesome post” which is tagged with “Amazing, Awesome, Super awesome”, the RSS feed will show the post titles as “Awesome post #Amazing #Awesome #Superawesome”. Note that spaces in a tag are removed, and hash symbols (#) are prepended to each.

This plugin is useful primarily to bloggers who pipe their posts into Twitter. The post tags become Twitter hashtags. Since post tags and twitter hashtags are both a form of metadata, it is natural to simply and automatically reuse the one for the other.

Consider a blog post on the Iran election. Normally youd tag the post Iran and then when you tweet it, youd have to manually insert the twitter hashtag #iranelection. Now, you can simply tag the post iranelection (no # symbol) and it will automatically be hashtagged. Combined with a service like Twitterfeed, this plugin can greatly automate the process of piping relevant posts into the twitterverse.

Note that the plugin makes no attempt to check that the total length of the post title, including hashtags, falls within the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter.

At present the plugin has no options. The feature roadmap includes the following:
- add title character length checking
- toggle using tags or categories for conversion to hashtags
- let user decide whether to remove spaces in tags, or convert to underlines or other character

this is a pretty simple plugin so other feature requests are appreciated.

UPDATE: version 2.0 of the plugin is at pastebin here. This version no longer appends all tags, but only those already beginning with #. This way the blogger can selectively choose which tags they want converted into hashtags.

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Tags to Hashtags

Facebook is now in a relationship with Friendfeed. It's complicated.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers.

Still very much a breaking news story but I am sure the Techcrunch folks will update with more info as they get it.

The obvious motivation here is to pound on Twitter’s “statusphere” market share. The big drawback of FF until now was that it was just a “better Twitter” – but without Twitter, 90% of the purpose of using Friendfeed was essentially rendered moot (as was the case with the DDOS attack over the weekend). But by folding in FF’s feedslurping uber-twitter capability, Facebook can create a one-stop shop, making all facebook users who are also on twitter stay within facebook for their twittering, which of course keeps them in control of the ad viewing. A souped-up Friendfeed application for Facebook seems likely; or even more likely, a new default Facebook tab (“Feeds” ?). This is technology that the Facebook people are going to want to put front and center.

The adoption of FF-ish features like commenting on everything and “Likes” are also unique to the FB/FF ecosystem and these should be integrated. Even google got into the “Likes” act so I think Twitter is going to have to respond to this by introducing that feature at least (which would incidentally be useful in meta-twitter metrics of who to follow and whatnot). I also don’t see how Twitter can resist the inevitable “groups” feature to compete with Friendfeed’s Rooms. I actually use Rooms to power virtual groups on Twitter like @otakusphere.

Twitter has serious catch-up to do, feature-wise, but until now they haven’t felt any real competitive pressure because no one else had the numbers to threaten them. With Facebook’s takeover of Friendfeed, however, the game has just changed dramatically.

UPDATE: It’s confirmed: Facebook and Friendfeed are now in a relationship. It’s complicated.

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true blue: facebook friends friendfeed, whales on twitter

Ashton Kutcher has done it – he has amassed one million followers. He’s using this publicity to donate mosquito nets to African children, but that’s just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Use your imagination.. what could he do, with his combination of celebrity and follower clout?

- he could raise money for a politician or cause
- he could single handedly launch a new brand or artist
- he can function as a one-man Digg or Slashdot effect

but more importantly, he can actually influence the public sphere. Consider that twitter users are the elite, early adopters and opinion makers. Ashton Kuther can now promote ideas to this elite. He’s a nexus of potential memes.

This is a landmark day. We don’t know how yet, but we will.

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One Million Strong for @aplusk

This is the Final Tweet to End All Tweets.

Twitter is Over. This is Twitter’s End. There are No More Tweets.

(inspired by the eoti)

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The End of Twitter: You can stop tweeting now

The Politico interviewed former chief of staff for President Bush (43), Andy Card, and he mentioned this surprising tidbit:

The nation has been so focused on the 44th president that we’ve nearly forgotten about the 43rd. What exactly has George W. Bush been up to since he left office on January 20? Is he just lounging around or has he been keeping busy?

Who better to ask than Andrew Card, a Bush confidante who served as W.’s chief of staff from 2001 to 2006. We caught up with Card at the National Press Club Thursday after a panel discussion sponsored by Politico and Georgetown University.

Card says that Bush has plenty on his plate and may even — gasp! — delve into the tech-savvy world of Twitter and Facebook.

watch the video yourself:

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George W. Bush coming soon to Twitter and Facebook?

One of my mantras is to rely on others to filter my data in the social web, because the key to improving your signal to noise ratio is not to try and filter the noise, but actually to reduce your signal. That’s a lot harder than it sounds to do. But it’s made a lot easier by genuinely smart filterers like Dave Winer’s NewsJunk, which was an invaluable tool during the election season. Winer basically culled the best and most interesting news stories (by hand) and fed them to a dedicated RSS feed, which then fed into twitter. As a result I often briefed myself on the day’s politics by first checking @newsjunkies rather than wading into my mess of feeds on Google Reader cold. This is why i am genuinely sad to see that Winer is considering pulling the plug on NewsJunk now that the election has ended.

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whither NewsJunk?

Twitter: over one billion tweets served. Actually, it’s probably more than that, since the count is from GigaTweet, an external service and not an official count. If we do the math, that comes out to:

140 chars per tweet x 1 byte per char x 10^9 tweets = 140 billion bytes = 130.4 GB worth of data

The 1 billion tweet mark took Twitter just over two years to achieve. Even assuming exponential growth, it’s hard to see Twitter’s raw tweet storage needs exceeding a terabyte ($109 and falling) in the next five years.

Of course, raw storage alone isn’t the whole story, since unlike the gigabytes of data on our home computers, the data on Twitter needs to be actively accessed and queried from the databases, which is a non-trivial task (as any regular user of Twitter over the past year can attest to). This is probably why Twitter has been enforcing a limit of 3200 tweets on users’ archives. The overhead on maintaining the archives beyond that is probably a threat to Twitter’s ability to maintain uptime and service reliability. The limit seems reasonable, since only the heaviest users will have reached that limit by now – I’ve been on twitter longer than most of the A-listers, and I tweet every blog entry I make from 5-6 different blogs, but I’m still only around 1200 tweets. Also, with far fewer followers (several hundred instead of thousands), I have only a handful of @replies compared to the firehose that folks like Darren (@problogger) or Scoble (@Scobleizer) see on their real-time clients. As a result, Twitter is more akin to an email/private messaging system for users like myself, rather than a real-time chatroom for the big users.

Still, even a casual Twitter user should be at least partially alarmed at the thought that their entire Twitter history is subject to arbitrary limits and no real guarantee of backup. As usual, it’s up to us to protect our own data, especially data in a walled garden (albeit one with handy RSS and API gates). Good user practices are the same whether we are using an online service or word processing at home, after all.

Here are just a few ways in which you can backup your tweets. I am sure there are more, so if you have any ideas I’ve not listed here, please share in comments!

Tweetake.com – This service lets you enter your username and download a CSV-format file of your followers, favorites, friends, and tweets. Unfortunately, @replies are not available for backup. It doesn’t save direct messages, either, but if you configure your twitter account to send you notification emails of direct messages, you can t least archive those separately. The CSV format is useful for archiving but not very user-friendly, though you could in principle import the data again into some other form.

Alex King’s Twitter Tools – this is a wordpress plugin that lets you manage your twitter account directly from your WordPress blog. The plugin lets you blog each tweet and/or tweet each blog post, and you can also generate a daily tweet digest as a blog post if you choose (and assign it to an arbitrary category). There’s no way to archive replies, DMs, or follower relationships.

Twitter itself supports RSS feeds, so you could slurp your own feed of replies and tweets using a feedreader and periodically back those up or even write them to disk. Also, users of third-party services like Socialthing, Friendfeed, or Ping.fm also have an alternate interface to Twitter that could potentially be used for backup. However, none of these provide comprehensive tweet archives either, only real-time mirroring.

Finally, Dave Winer has proposed a service/API that twitter clients can use to backup the RSS feed of a twitter account, but this is more of a technical solution of interest to twitter developers rather than end users.

UPDATE: Johann Burkard has written a great little tool in Java called (appropriately) TwitterBackup. It is a very simple piece of freeware that simply downloads all your tweets to a XML-format file saved locally. You specify a filename as you desire, and the tool is smart enough that if you give it the name of a file that already exists, it will only download newer tweets and append them to it rather than do a full download again. This incremental backup of tweets is ideal behavior – the only thing that this tool doesn’t do is preserve your follower/following relationships.

To be honest, none of these solutions are perfect, though Tweetake and Twitter Backup come closest. What would the ideal twitter backup tool look like? A few thoughts:

1. be available as a desktop client or Adobe AIR application rather than yet another online service asking for your twitter password.¹
2. At first run, it should allow you to retrieve your entire (available) twitter history, including tweets, replies, and DMs.
3. After the initial import, it should provide for periodic incremental backups of your tweets/replies/DMs, at an interval you specify (ideally, a five minute interval minimum).
4. It should preserve your friend/follower relationships, and let you import everyone you follow onto any new twitter account or export all their RSS feeds as an OPML file.

What else? There’s definitely a niche out there for an enterprising developer to take Twitter’s API and create a tool focused on backup rather than yet another twitter client. Hopefully before I reach the 3200 tweet limit myself!

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Backing up your tweets

1. Twitter’s implementation of OAuth or OpenID or some other authorization system is long overdue, by the way.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger fame has launched a new blog, TwiTip, aimed at introducing Twitter to new users. Darren always has an interesting and insightful take on blogging and so I think his insights will be worth reading even if you’re a veteran twitter user. Given how much I blog about twitter I can fully understand the appeal of starting a blog devoted to it!

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TwiTip

At RWW, Bernard Lunn asks readers to suggest a revenue model for Twitter, that satisfies two criteria:

1. Do not irritate/interrupt the user and even occasionally add value to the user.

2. Provide a value proposition that is so compelling that even conservative buyers give it a try.

There’s actually a fairly simple solution that meets the criteria above, and it relies on a relatively new feature that Twitter introduced primarily for the 2008 presidential elections: selling ad space on topics pages. The common topics pages are candidate-specific ones like “Obama” or “Palin” but there are also new topical ones being generated such as “Muslim” or “Colin Powell“. Note that these topical pages, unlike the candidate pages, are dynamic and fade into and out of existence based on the real-time activity of twitter users, so these truly are a snapshot of current discussion rather than any kind of archive or comprehensive index. There’s even a “tag cloud” at the top of the main election page that shows what the current topics are and the topicscan be filtered by candidate (for example, “Obama and muslim“)

These topics and candidates pages are election-centric for obvious reasons, but there’s no reason that they can’t be expanded in scope, analogous to the breadth of various topics at alltop.com. The crucial difference here however is that the content is entirely user-generated tweets rather than RSS feeds of news and blogs, and is presented as a real-time “river” of information.

So, then, how to monetize? Simply, to imitate Google, and sell ad space on the topics pages. Twitter could even partner with Google or Yahoo and share the revenue. Imagine a partnership with google, for example: adwords purchasers would buy ads for specific keywords, and if/when those keywords become Topics at Twitter, their ads would display. Likewise, contextual ads based on the real-time river of tweets for a given topic could also scroll by in the sidebar, or appear interspersed.

The point here is that Twitter has created instantaneous portals for the hottest topics of the day, and what makes it so useful as an end-point destination for websurfers is that the twitter users are generating the content, providing both links and commentary. So, the real estate created by these topics pages has real value for advertising, as long as it is contextual and targeted. But targeting is easy because instead of having to analyse the entire webpage (as Adsense does at present), the contextual algorithm has a head start because of the topic itself. Then the remaining contextualization can be done on the river of tweets for fine-tuning. This should ensure better relevancy and higher click-through overall.

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A revenue model for Twitter

Are you on Twitter? Share some cool people to follow.

I like Musab (@musabb) – he twitters exclusively in haiku If you’re really into haiku on twitter, you’ll need to follow Haiku Twaiku (@haikutwaiku), but they updated a bit too often for me, I just use #haiku to get my fix as needed instead. There’s also Twitter Lit (@twitterlit), which only posts the first line of novels.

There are some interesting “utilities” on twitter, ranging from weather (@Forecast), to do lists (@rtm), and even tracking your gas mileage (@fuelfrog).

Twitter is also a handy source of news – you can get breaking news from CNN (@cnnbrk) or international news headlines from Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish). I also rely on News Junkies (@newsjunkies) for politics headlines and Tech Junk (@techjunk) and Read/Write Web (@rww) for tech news. I’m also a fan of China Web 2.0 Review (@cwr) and Malaysia Matters (@malaysiamatters).

Of course, the punditocracy is well-represented as well. In politics, there’s The Politico (@ThePolitico), Joe Trippi (@JoeTrippi), Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini), Joshua Trevino (@jstrevino), and Marc Ambinder (@marcambinder). On the tech side, there’s Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer), Dave Winer (@davewiner), Mike Arrington (@techcrunch), and Michael Parekh (@MParekh). You can also follow Lawrence Lessig’s new organization, Change Congress (@change_congress).

There are also a lot of simply interesting people and celebrities on Twitter. For example, Muhammad Saleem (@msaleem), Om Malik (@om), Felicia Day (@feliciaday), and Wil Wheaton (@wilw) (yes, that Wil Wheaton). The Mars Phoenix Lander (@MarsPhoenix) also is quite talkative.

Finally, I confess to liking the bad guys – Darth Vader (@darthvader), Admiral Piett (@admiralpiett), and even Al Qaeda (@alqaeda)

So, who are you following? Don’t forget to follow @azizhp – or @talkislam for that matter

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Who do you follow on twitter?