In the past week or two, I have been playing with a number of new toys that promise to tie the social networks Twitter and FriendFeed to my blog a little more tightly.

TweetSuite

First, there’s TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella.  This is a err.. sweet little self-contained plugin that makes your WordPress blog aware of the Twitterverse.  There are four main components that make up TweetSuite:

1. A tweet this button that can be floated in the upper-left or upper-right portion of a blog post.  Very similar to a Digg button.
2. An area below the post that tracks tweets about the article and lists them, complete with the optional ability to include a re-tweet button next to them.
3. Four fun Twitter-related widgets that can be dropped in the sidebar: Most, Recent, Last, and Favorite Tweets.
4. Last but not least, TweetSuite will optionally update Twitter when a new entry is posted.

I am not so invested in Twitter that I can tell if TweetSuite is catching all the Twitter buzz surrounding my entries.  It did detect one tweet on my last entry and a couple more on older posts.. but that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this post!  To see if it works.

FF2Disqus

Second, I am using a cloud-based app called FriendFeed-to-Disqus (or FF2Disqus).  This little utility is by Carter Rabasa, the guy who wrote Twitter2FF, a handy utility for synchronizing your Twitter and FriendFeed friends.  Anyway, this web app isn’t a plugin, and in fact hooks in to FriendFeed and Disqus, so it isn’t specifically bound to WordPress blogs at all!

What it does is monitor a service on FriendFeed (say the RSS feed for your blog) and utilizes the Disqus API to push any new comments on the relevant entry in FriendFeed to your blog entry.  So in effect what this does is bring the comment activity back in to your blog.

There have been a rash about this utility and the value that it brings to blogs and FriendFeed.  I have to admit that I share a few reservations about deploying it full-time on my blog.  But I decided, I would jump in with both feet and see how everything turns out.  Hopefully, everything will be great.

Final Note

I have disabled Glenn Slaven’s excellent FriendFeed Comments plugin for the moment in order to avoid redundancy.  But don’t think I don’t like it – far from it!  If FF2Disqus doesn’t work out I’m going straight back to using this plugin!

As the new year starts, I am increasingly thinking of changing my follow habits that I have maintained since I first logged in on Twitter and FriendFeed. 

Mutual Respect

My attitude was, mutual respect. You follow me, I follow you. I can learn from everyone. I still think it’s a good attitude to have, and I wish it was the right one. But increasingly, especially on Twitter, I don’t think it is. 

I’m going to rant a bit here, just warning you.

For months, I have been using FriendFeed and Twitter actively. At the beginning, I followed anyone who looked interesting and didn’t care about who followed me back. I maintained what I thought of as a fairly altruistic policy toward both services, just concerning myself with finding great people.

More recently, my active search for new great people has begun to taper. First, I found tools for both services that figure out who my ‘mutual followers’ are.. and I have to admit, they have shaken my original innocence.. people who I thought I had connected with weren’t following me. I was disheartened. 

I briefly thought of whining.. but that doesn’t feel right to me. It’s very difficult for me to impose myself on other people. That’s why I can’t effectively use services like Digg and Mixx.

Anyway, I maintained my mutual follow policy. On FriendFeed, I just try to keep myself ignorant of any gaming that happens. I follow those who follow me, and I hope they respect that. Twitter, though, is a different story. With the rise of tools like Twitterless and SocialToo, I can see exactly how much ‘gaming’ is going on.

Gaming

And Twitter gaming is seriously on the rise.

I could (and perhaps will) write a whole different post on how people are gaming Twitter.  But the behavior that is really irritating me recently are these folks that follow a lot of Twitterers and then, 10 minutes to two days later, un-follow all of them in the hopes that a certain percentage follow them back.

Why do they do this?  Because Twitter now has a follow ratio that prevents people from following X number more than they have followers.  It seems fairly arbitrary and people now see it as a challenge to defeat.

It irritates me no end. I’ve taken to blocking the people who exhibit this behavior with me. For example, recently one dude (TheBobBlog on Twitter) had the balls to follow me, send a robot DM when I followed him back, ignore a separate DM that I sent him asking about tumbling his photos, and then un-following me the next day!  BLOCKED.

Ultimately, I don’t want to be reactionary with a new follow/discovery policy going forward.  That’s why I have taken a step back and started thinking about what I really want to do going forward.. and help me in more ways than just addressing the gaming going on.

Two Paths

The way I see it, there are two ways I could go. I can go all-inclusive: Open the floodgates and follow thousands of people on both services a la Robert Scoble and just filter out the stuff I find interesting on the back-end; Or I can go exclusive: Start hand-picking those people I find interesting, go in-depth with them and re-grow my social circle with care.

Either way, I would not actively try to influence who is following me. And I am aware that going to exclusive route can have some negative backlash if folks place a lot of emphasis on mutual follows.

However, I am starting to think it is worth the risk.

Why?  A few reasons:

• I fear I am missing too much from folks I respect as well as new people I follow, due to the increased amount of noise.
• I am spending more and more time just trying to keep up with what is happening in FriendFeed, much less exploring what the folks on FriendFeed are doing on their own blogs and other services.
• I wonder if I am missing opportunities to connect more with great people, as the crowd I follow gets ever larger.
• I find myself getting frustrated just using the social media tools that I found so enjoyable a scant few months ago.

Taking A Risk

So, you might notice a change as I radically upset the balance of followers to following.  And if that’s the limit for you, I don’t blame you.  But I can promise I’m not ‘holing up’ and disconnecting – just the opposite.  I won’t be surprised if I end up following more people than I am now.. but I will have arrived there with a different methodology, and hopefully with more to offer those following me.

If you have ever used Twitter (and who hasn’t, these days), you already know about the service’s famous 140-character limit.  Similar to a cell phone text message, that’s all you get before you hit ‘send.’  Of course, you could break your message up into multiple short messages but the real effects of this limitation are two-fold:

• It forces Twitter users to think of brief, hopefully elegant ways to transmit (or ‘tweet’) their thoughts.
• It forces creative solutions to common problems such as sending an accompanying web address (or URL) with a tweet.

I could probably add a few more points on how this limit also defines how conversations happen on Twitter but that would be a whole different post, which has probably been covered many times by now.

For the Shorties

Let’s focus on the second point though.  Almost immediately after Twitter started picking up steam, URL-shortening services that already existed (and many more specifically for Twitter) started gaining in popularity as well.

These services, such as tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im, bit.ly and many more, all do basically the same thing.  They take a standard uncompressed (and hopefully easy-to-read) URL and associate a new, coded, very short URL with it.  They do this by acting as a ‘redirect’ between you clicking on a shortened link in Twitter and ending up on the destination page.

The Pros

The benefit is clear: more of those precious 140 characters is available for actual message, less is taken up by the web address.  There are other benefits as well.  Some of these services allow customization of the shortened url (using a key word for example), and others offer statistics on just who clicked on the shortened URL and when.

The Cons

The drawbacks are also clear.  For one, you have no idea where a shortened URL goes before you click on it.  This has given rise to hugely popular internet memes such as the RickRoll, which basically is a shortened URL pointing to this YouTube video but in a tweet or other location that doesn’t indicate anything about where the link goes.  Walla, click on the link and you get rickroll’d.

Efforts have been made to make the redirect process more transparent, such as adding a custom version of the shortened URL that sends you to the redirect service with a full-text link to click on.. but these hardly get used because people want instant gratification, not the requirement of clicking through to the actual page or waiting 5 seconds, etc.

Another somewhat haphazard solution so far has been browsers and other tools that ‘expand’ the short URLs back to their original targets in-line, or at least show the target in a pop-up.  The problem has been these have been single-shot solutions for the most part, working for one particular service but not the others, and/or only working for certain sites, such as Twitter.

Prediction

So, I am predicting that we are going to see a more concerted effort in the form of a browser plug-in (say for Firefox?  Fingers crossed) or maybe a whole new browser that handles these compressed URLs natively, perhaps expanding them inline or in a popup, no matter what site you are on or what service the URL was compressed with.  In addition, publically available statistics could be gathered from the redirect page at the same time the uncompressed URL is harvested, transmitting that info back to the recipient as well.

I think there is a great need for such a tool, and so I am prognosticating that it is already being developed.  Hopefully we’ll see it soon.

Final Thought

On a final note, I’d just to think out loud, and wonder why Twitter doesn’t improve their 140-character algorithm so that it does not add the characters inside a web URL and, while we are at it, any username mentioned in the tweet (preceded by an at-sign: @) or a hashtag (preceded by a hash-sign: #).  I mean, if you are only giving us 140 characters, why can’t they all count toward message?

Tangent Post from Louis Gray: BigTweet Sends Tweets from Any Web Page (Up to 280 Characters)

This weekend Twitter has been more reliable than Identi.ca. Steve Gillmor ‘dented a threat about returning to Twitter. And Dave Winer tweeted that he was thinking of mirroring his tweets to Identi.ca.

During the conventions, and up to and including this weekend, Identi.ca has found out what Twitter already knows: the Jabber chat protocol “firehose” can be a wild stallion, even for a site that is an “increasingly quiet echo chamber”. It’s the same feature that brought the Fail Whale at Twitter during the primaries in May. It is now disabled at Twitter but for approved vendors such as FriendFeed and Gnip.

[ ... ]

I was at CNET in San Francisco last Friday with Evan Prodromou and representatives from Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Disqus and Seesmic. Evan mentioned that there could be millions of MicroBlogging networks in a few years.

There was a 58% drop in unique visitors to Identi.ca, that’s the only service where anyone can take their friends and the site’s software and make their home base wherever they want to. That probably affects the site’s traffic numbers.

I implemented the very same openmicroblogging protocol myself this summer. The 0.1 version of my Identi.ca-compatible software, OpenMicroBlogger, has been downloaded about 700 times in 3 weeks.

– Brian

Originally posted as a comment by brianjesse on louisgray.com using Disqus.

Ok, for today’s rant, I’m going to pick on those folks that signed up for FriendFeed, added a few services, and then never logged back in. More specifically, I am going to pick on Steve Gillmor.

Take a look at my headline shot. That’s Steve Gillmor, famous writer and technology news pundit. Talking head on the Gillmor Gang radio show. Insightful, critical, and accomplished.

Also, a poser!

Sorry to pick on Steve here, but when I saw his name in the FriendFeed recommendations it inspired this post.

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I was burning some time online a few days ago, and I came across this discussion on FriendFeed about last.fm versus Pandora.  In the thread, this was my contribution:

.. last.fm and Pandora are both great but, like Twitter and FriendFeed, have completely different goals. Pandora works behind the scenes to tailor a stream to you. last.fm throws everything together in a huge pot and gives you the sliders to make a great listening experience. They call this "scrobbling" (actually, the AS in LAST stand for "Audio Scrobbler") .. anyway, like a stew, the more stuff you put in it the better it is. Add a bunch of people, hook up last.fm to your itunes, go nuts!

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