Weekly Wrap inc. #f8 #twitter #google #uncrunched #yam

This post is a wrap of this weeks stories in tech, social and mobile that caught my eye...

 

Facebook F8

The biggest event was of course the annual F8 Facebook conference.

New timeline profile view, and deeper interaction via new verb buttons were the highlight announcements. You can read about it here, here and the Spotify bit here.

F8 also inspired me to write my first ever tweet that anyone seems to have cared enough about to retweet it a whole bunch of times! If you know the developer hack, you can see my new Facebook timeline style profile page here.

 

Michael Arrington launches UNCRUNCHED

The fall out at TechCrunch continues with Michael Arrington launching his own site, UNCRUNCHED. You would have though he could have found a higher res photo ;-)

 

How to throw a REAL party

Call Scott Parker! Check out his recent Forbes cover story.

 

Google+ API

Lets hope finally exposing an API gives Google+ a shot in the arm, becuase frankly I think its the biggest pile of over hyped doo-doo since, er, Wave? Already a few services I use [Empire Avenue and Klout] have adopted the API, although judging from the results I'm not sure how useful the first version is.

 

CANT miss event in London

I hear a rumour that Jason Calacanis is the latest to sign up for this.

 

and to end...

 

Not one, but TWO shameless BlueVia plugs...

Firstly the rather exciting, some even called it seminal, news that Twitter has integrated into BlueVia's MMS API to allow O2 UK customers to upload photos into their Twitter timeline. Secondly if you are a developer in the UK, make sure you get involved with London Mobile Week. Over The Air 2011 kicks us off, and we are giving away £10,000 worth of free advertising spend as first prize. Yes we ARE that awesome!

@Twitter Integrates with @BlueVia APIs - my brief thoughts #yam

So yesterday felt like a coming of age moment.

 

As some of you will know, my day job is running marketing for BlueVia, the developer program from Telefonica. Its a job filled with immense highs and some lows. Convincing developers that a Telco is a credible partner is not an easy job, but then who wants an easy job!

 

BlueVia launched some 9 months ago, and came out of closed beta in April. In that short timeframe we have released two drops of software, signed up a good chunk of developers, and are now starting to see some really interesting products coming through using the BlueVia API's. #himum being one of my personal favourites.

 

The coming of age moment yesterday was the announcement that Twitter has integrated into BlueVia's MMS API to allow O2 customers in the UK to send picture messages to their Twitter timeline. Its was the culmination of a great team effort from the folks at Twitter, Telefonica, BlueVia and O2 UK. I hope this announcement signals a tipping point for the platform, and send a positive message to developers that if BlueVia is good enough for Twitter, then maybe we are worth checking out.

 

Now of course Twitter simultaneously announced the same service with other carriers around the world, including Orange in the UK, so "what's the big deal?" you may ask. Well the reason we, and some others, are excited is the "how" they have done it. 

 

Because BlueVia has exposed RESTful API's to a number of core Telefonica capabilities, the resources expended to integrate Twitter into our infrastructure were substantially less than a standard direct integration, with of course the associated speed to market benefits. In addition, BlueVia exposes a common MMS API interface for multiple Telefonica operating businesses, meaning replication of an integration is seamless, compared to the traditional approach of multiple local integration projects.

 

Below is a selection of articles on the announcement:

 

O2 UK Press Release

Twitter Blog Post

BlueVia Blog Post

The Guardian App Blog

Alan Quayle Blog Post

 

 

Bigging up Latin American Twitter Dev Talent #twitter #yam

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Loving this article from The Next Web, which highlights 8 of the best Twitter based services coming from Latin American developers. The first just happens to be powered by BlueVia :-)

You can check out our case study of Twitea.me here:

2010 through the eyes of the digital giants

All the big online sites are releasing their wrap up's of 2010 ahead of the new year. Here is a selection of the best...
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Facebook publishes it 2010 Memology: Top Status Trends of the Year Twitter provides a comprehensive run down in it's "Twitter 2010: The year in review" covering Who's new, Top trending topics, Most powerful, Most retweeted, with the final instalment coming soon! Google: Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review YouTube Rewind 2010: Year in Review Happy New Year!

I'm going daily, thanks to Paper.li

I Beg Your Parton is going daily! Don't worry I'm not attempting to become the next Rupert Murdoch...This post on GigaOm led me to a startup called Paper.li who offer a pretty cool service that auto creates a daily newspaper style site made up of content from any Twitter username, hashtag or search. It's still in Alpha so there are a few things I would like to change to get my ideal look and feel, but it's pretty nice and surprisingly fun to read a Twitter stream in a more visually engaging style - kind of like Flipboard, but without the need for an app. What I really like is it pulls in content from not just the primary Twitter account used to setup the paper, but also the content from its followers. The real time nature of Twitter means that often you can miss great content passing by in your stream. With the Paper.li daily all that great content is captured for prosperity each and every day - plus with archive. I guess only time will tell if this UI style catches on for consuming Twitter, but If nothing else Paper.li instantly becomes a valuable Twitter backup & archiving tool. Anyway, I'd appreciate you checking it out and subscribing here: http://paper.li/jamesparton Let me know what you think. I hope that as the service develops new features will make the experience even more enjoyable.

20 people in mobile to follow on Twitter

So I've returned from my summer writing hiatus, and the first thing I wanted to talk about was this blog post on aumnia. Dustin Luther (@tyr) has created analgorithm that determines the “most influential” people in a particular subject area on Twitter. You seed the algorithm with 10 Twitter usernames who are in the subject area, and then it analyzes their Twitter profiles and determines who is most followed amongst their peers. Like many of the people commenting on the blog post, I was surprised by the quality of the results. Amazingly I was already following 100% of the list, so I'd encourage you to follow everyone on there.

Bedford Tweetup

After spontaneously connecting with local Twitter peeps @ericswain and @efficiencycoach, we have all decided to organise a Tweetup for Bedford and the surrounding area. It's set for 18:00 on the 3rd August 2010 at the Embankment Hotel. The Eventbrite page to sign up can be found here: http://twtvite.com/bedforduktweetup I look forward to meeting you there!

Reflecting on my first 2 years of using Twitter

At the risk of looking grossly self indulgent, I’ve felt compelled to write about my experience with Twitter for some time. Many writers have described, far more eloquently than I ever could, the social and business impacts of Twitter & social media, so let me state up front that this is purely a personal reflection of my experience of Twitter. I don’t put myself out there as some social media guru. I don’t have that many followers, and I was relatively late to the party. However, one of the key stimuli for this piece has been the increasing number of “real life” meetings and interactions with people that begin “Ah, I follow you on Twitter”, so whilst I do have a relatively small following, it would seem to be fairly well targeted and relevant to my work. The fact I’m doing this at all highlights for me how remarkable and unique Twitter has become for me. No other online service (or offline for that matter) has ever motivated me to reflect or assess my experience of using it and I’ve been “into” computing since 1982, online since 1994, and running my own website since 1996 so plenty of other things have had the opportunity to grab me! Over the past couple of years I have been lucky enough to occupy a fairly high profile role in a large company. My original decision to sign up for Twitter was business led, as I was keen to adopt new communication channels to begin building relationships with potential members for a new service I was planning called O2 Litmus. It was very clear from day 1 that Twitter was somewhat unique. Firstly I was determined that I would blend both my work and personal worlds. This is challenging to pull off, and I have to say I have failed miserably to achieve this on Facebook, but that’s a story for another time. Despite the commonly held view from Twitter non believers of “just that how important can 140 character text updates be?” the authenticity, especially if you are directly or indirectly representing a large company is vital. For me the worst possible outcome would be people suspecting my use of Twitter was just a marketing tactic, or worse still a PR company posting on my behalf. Secondly, I took time to think through “why would people want to follow me?” If all I did was use my account as another channel to announce work related activity it would quickly get dull, and from the marketing mix perspective just duplicate existing channels like our blog and forums. In my marketing role I spend a lot of my time reading industry related analysis and news, so I decided to effectively “open source” my desk research. As any marketer will know it’s a significant personal investment to keep on top of your sector, especially one as fast moving as mobile and digital. Therefore I thought why not help people by flagging the stuff I found interesting – this could actually add some real value back to people who took the time to follow me. Little did I know at the time what I was taking on, but the point I’m making was there was a conscious thought process about a) why would people follow me and b) how can I differentiate myself and what I put out. In the two years since joining Twitter I have tweeted 3,659 times, averaging exactly 5 posts a day. What I think is intriguing is unlike many services my usage is actually increasing – I’m getting more addicted. There is not the familiar novelty period then gradual decline. Researching this post has left me frustrated – there is a real lack of tools that allow you to run analytics on your tweet history. I wanted to share data points like the time it took me to reach my first 1,000 tweets vs. my last 1,000 tweets, intuitively I think creating the last 1,000 has been significantly quicker. What has been my peak day, week or month over the past two years, and what could I attribute those peaks back to, which posts have been most re-tweeted? The best I could find was a combination of Tweetscan,Tweetsheet, and Twistory but none of these gave me the historical data analytics I wanted at my finger tips – that would seem a prime monetisation opportunity for Twitter, especially with more and more brands now adopting Twitter as a key element of their marketing mix. If anyone can point me to a tool I’m missing, I’d love to hear from you. So what have been the “highlights” from the 3,659 posts and two years? Well I’ll admit I’ve shown a complete lack of dedication by not going back through all those messages one by one, although I now suspect I couldn’t even if I wanted to. That should be a key consideration for marketers: backup as you go for easy archive access and analysis. Anyway, four stick in my mind: Twitchhiker An amazing thing happened 6 months into my use of Twitter proving to me what a powerful business tool Twitter can be. Paul Smith was undertaking a crazy personal challenge for charity, and through Twitter word of mouth I found myself with a great sponsorship opportunity and a chance to support Paul’s remarkable efforts. You can read how the relationship came about in Paul’s own words here, and read a description of the Twitchhiker project here. Turning customers into fans I wish I could find the original tweet and link out to it, but I can’t. However, the interaction is fairly easy to replay and has happened more than once. A clearly frustrated and angry O2 customer was failing to resolve a problem he was having (I can’t actually remember the detail now, but that doesn’t detract from the point). In desperation he had obviously done a random search of Twitter and found my details and sent me a plea for help. By promptly responding and taking ownership of the problem I like to think I went some small way to turning around his perception of the company that I work for and turned him into a fan. Brands will quickly have to figure out how to measure the value of these kinds of interactions, which will be vital when justifying digital investments. Bedford Tweet Up No technology or service I’ve ever used seems to have the level of humanity that I’ve experienced with Twitter. People seem to go out of their way to help one another. Even buildings are getting into the act! Big Ben tells me the time and even Heathrow Airport welcomes me and tries to make my “experience” more pleasurable. The most trivial of tweet was triggered when I stole the mayoral status for my local train station from a fellow tweeter. Within 17 minutes Eric had suggested setting up a local Tweetup, and my immediate reaction was, “yeah, totally!” no hesitation at all. We are currently planning something for early August and who knows what new networking and relationships that will bring. My question is what makes this kind of behaviour unique to Twitter? Chat boards, forums, and Instant Messaging have been around for years, but no one would have dreamt to suggest these kind of impromptu meets up’s – that would feel like front page of the Daily Mail material…I’ll leave the answer to the “digital” psychologists.
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O2 Litmus is bigger than Christmas Finally for a bit of fun, you can’t buy a headline like that. The use of hashtags are vital for tracking conversation and creating community around your activities. When we soft launched O2 Litmus in December 2008 our hashtag trended higher than Christmas, leading us to our cheeky boast. We won’t mention that the West Coast of the US was asleep at the time, that’s just detail ;-) So my takeouts from the past two years, for what they are worth:
  1. Carefully consider the work / personal balance of your Twitter account
  2. If you want to build a following, plan out why people should follow you – have a purpose
  3. Ensure your Twitter Bio is fine tuned with key words describing you or your business. You only have 140 characters to get it right.
  4. Take offline backups of your Twitter activity for analytical and good practice purposes. You never know when you may need to look up a statement or commitment you or one of your employees has made
  5. Be prepared for your life to move to being always on and real time. Responsiveness is now measured in minutes, not days or hours. I’m now effectively permanently at work. If you think Blackberry blurred the line, it doesn’t compare. Be ready and embrace it. I can’t go back.
  6. Ensure you and your people recognise they are representing your company at all times, even if tweeting from personal accounts. The web doesn’t respect boundaries – don’t write dumb stuff, and don’t tweet drunk!
  7. Kind of obvious, but no spamming. Don’t pump out unsolicited crap to your followers
  8. Be wary of 3rd party plug in’s. Loads of services now make it easy to connect into your twitter stream, Foursquare being a popular example. Make sure you don’t water down the quality of your output. Only 2.4% of my tweets have been generated by Foursquare, yet I’ve had more than one follower contact me to say they will stop following me if I don’t control frequency of updates.
  9. Be yourself – add personality
  10. Use and promote hastags to create community around your brand or specific activity
  11. Integrate Twitter into your events as a live back channel
  12. Magical stuff “just happens” as your network widens. Unexpected opportunities present themselves from the most innocuous exchanges.
On a spooky weird closing note, I kid you not that I woke up at 3:00am this morning with the idea for this post swirling in my head, but that not the strange bit… After tossing and turning for an hour I decided to stop fighting it and get up and start writing before I lost my inspiration. When I started researching the data points of the post I made a rather freaky discovery; It was exactly two years to the day that I joined Twitter! I was so taken aback I took a screen shot of my desktop with my Twitter join date and current date on my desktop. Sure I could have doctored the date on my PC for artistic effect, but believe me I don’t have the time or the inclination ;-) Go figure that out!
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#himum

“My mum told me she is now following me on twitter so she knows what I'm doing as i don't ever tell her, lol. Hi Mum if you are reading this” 8:51 AM Mar 11th from web

So I posted what I thought was a rather unremarkable tweet back on the 11th March.

I’m so busy at work, and spend my life talking to people about what I do, I always fail to devote as much time and effort in communicating with my parents as I should. It has become a bit of a running joke in the family. “How can you stand up and present to hundreds of people, yet when you speak to me you can’t manage more than a mumbled sentence”, you must know the kind of thing I’m talking about?

I do often feel like Chandler from Friends, where no one quite understands what he does for a living.

Anyway a few weeks ago I was literally stunned when my Mother tells me, “Oh I’m following you on twitter as it’s the only way I can see what you are up to” This from parents who are not exactly technology leaders, and only had Broadband installed in the last few months.

Quite how she had discovered Twitter, and then found me I’m not quite sure. I will have to quiz her this weekend. (Mothers Day and all that). May be we can tweet each other from across the table when we go out for a meal!

I was equally surprised yesterday at the O2 Innovation Day when @tonyfish said he has starting seeing people including “hi mum” in tweets after my original message. I’m not sure if I truly am the trend setter Tony positioned me as, but thanks Tony anyway! If this is all old hat with you Twitter Vets, then apologies, I am fairly new myself to the Twitsphere. (Is that a term??!)

Still, spurned into action by my cyber stalking Mum, I will be including #himum in all my whereabouts status updates from now on.

So I wonder how many of you find yourself in a similar position via your use of social media, and I guess examples like this reinforce Twitters move into the mainstream.

Friends Electric or Billy No Mates?

What I noticed this last weekend was just how much of my online time I now spend managing lists of friends I have scattered across the various sites & online services I use. Every time I update my personal website I have to remember to post in four different places to ensure the people that have indicated they are interested in what I'm producing get to hear about the update.

I don't know about you but I feel I'm at breaking point and now refuse to join any other social networking type service, not because I don't enjoy exploring a new innovative product, it's simply I just don't have the time to invest in building up yet another isolated island of friends. It will have to be a one in one out policy from now on.

I'm not the most prolific online friend maker, but here's an idea of what I'm faced with managing, by service and number of friends / contacts:

LinkedIn (686), MySpace (505), Outlook / Blackberry / SIM Card (383), Twitter (202), Plaxo (187), Facebook (160), Hotmail / MSN (118), My Forum mailing list (25), YouTube (12)
That's a total of 2,278 people.

How many of these are duplicates? How many of them are "engaged" and regularly contacting me or visiting my site? How many of them are connected to other contacts I know? How many could introduce me to the killer contact to achieve my next business objective? I have no idea!

This isn't an exercise in "how many friends have you got?", just to request for someone smart to come up with a way of managing this mess from one simple interface, a one stop friend shop in essence.

Islands without interoperability have been proven to hold back the potential of great ideas time and time again. The internet has brought great innovation and services to the mobile industry, but the mobile industry has some learning's to share back.

We got some pretty basic things right. Going on a business trip? Well I can travel around the entire world and my phone will just work, however to charge it I need a bag of power adapters because the folks in the power companies never sat down to work out what a plug should look like.

Phone calls, text messages, and increasingly picture messages (but admittedly we have some work to do there) wouldn't be as useful or as prevalent if you could only communicate with people on your own network. It's the crossing of boundaries and universal communication that drives adoption.

So there's the tip. Feeds, RSS, mash up's are only the first step in making this stuff easier. FriendFeed is a step in the right direction, aggregating together various service updates and feeds, however it's the friend management that is burning all my time and limiting what I can do with these services.

I need a single site that can aggregate all these islands of friends together, which can be manipulated to show different views like "service of origin" e.g. Facebook, YouTube, plus handle updates and messaging from a single interface.

Taking it a step further can we achieve a single online address book serving all of our digital needs, accessible from your mobile phone, PC, online services, car, TV / set top box? I suspect technology is not the issue here, probably more an issue of trust, security and ensuring provision of consistent, reliable network connectivity.

Get this right and suddenly your "friends" become a really invaluable tool and asset to get stuff done. Friends become electric. If it carries on like this I can't afford the overhead and would prefer to be Billy no mates!