Fanboxes - considered evil, please move on.

The time is nigh, the tipping point will occur soon when social media will create more link bait and spam than actual content.  This is starting to be seen on Twitter quite a lot now, pointless retweets from bots, follows from bots and now the hacked account direct message fiasco..... we've given an inch and the others have taken a mile.

The "fanbox" is something else that's a bit of a circle vulture as well.  It's a self serving tool for two sets of users.  Firstly the likes of the issuing site (Facebook for example) who are wanting to drive traffic back to their wares to justify the advertising revenue costs.  Secondly are the "fans" themselves.  What I've noticed though is that these "fans" aren't really fans.  Most of the time these "fans" are desperate to be noticed to so they'll join anything to get noticed.  Fanboxes merely spread the thin veil of nonsense even further.

In our social media quest to be noticed users have wanting put their name to anything to be noticed.  Yes the power of social networking is great, mighty and all that but it's starting to water down to the point it's nearly a homoepathic treatment.  

And how to you truely measure the returns from these fanboxes anyway?  If someone adds you on a networking site it's never mentioned (most of the time) where the referral has come from.  No one I've come across anyone asking to link with me and leaving a note, "Hi, I saw your profile on the fans of solenoid relays, you seem like a cool kinda guy.  I'd like to add you to me network." 

Fanboxes only work if you truely are a fan in the first place.  I personally believe they don't create a lot of traffic to you or your brand.  Perhaps it's now time to take stock, think responsibly and see where all of this is going.  If it carries on this way social networking will be 1% useful and 99% useless.

 

Girls, Rock 'n' Roll & Design......

Unless your head is stuffed in a vat of marmite you may be aware that Build Conference is going on in Belfast today. I'm not at it.... no need for me to be at it, I'm not designery.

Andy McMillan just posted this on Twitter.

"Girls, Rock 'n Roll & Design" — Ryan Sims, describing the typical web designer lifestyle at #buildconf

Which now explains everything in webdesign to me. It's like being in the band, everyone wants to be the lead singer so they can be at the front, pull the chicks and get all the glory :) The real work comes from the rhythm section at the back, the bass player and the drummer (or programmers as I now know them) who just lock in, get on and don't make a fuss.

And for the record, 24 years of bass playing and the only people I got to wanted to talk about effects pedals and the strings I used (long shiny ones).

It all makes perfect sense to me now...... (yes it's all tongue and cheek).

Andy's put on a brilliant conference, well done mate.

The curse of the short url.

Microblogging (Twitter, Friend Feed et al) has lifted the status of link shortening to new heights. They're not new either, I remember friends putting together Make A Shorter Link which then got acquired by tinyurl.

Then it all went quiet for a while as we didn't really need url shorteners as the majority of the time the resulting links were just put in normal webpages.  The reason their popularity wasn't huge was the same problem I have with them now, acting as a gateway to another site without knowing where my destination is, well that's bad.

So, do short urls have a shelf life? Are they time based or a done deal and will remain pointing to that link forever?  There's nothing to stop one url becoming the link to something a little less savoury....

My other real concern is the way that some users going about publishing them, I know that says more about them than me.  If it's from a trusted contact then I'll more than likely have a look.  If there's no strap line to tell me what I'm clicking on then I won't touch it.  And, lastly, if it's from a complete stranger I just move on.

Does Social Networking cost the British economy £1.38bn?

The Telegraph reports that social networking is costing the economy £1.38bn.

I'm always bemused by these sorts of figures but there's so many strangled routes on how to get to the big numbers. How does a survey of just over 1,300 works get to £1.38bn (apart from long multiplication and is this the US or UK version of a billion?).

So a company loses 40 minutes a week per employee to social network, much lower than I expected.

A number of local companies asked my opinion on such matters. My idea was to limit access during the working hours and release the Facebook IP's over the lunchtime period. So you could do your thang before 9am but then it was blocked until 1pm where the flood gates opened until 2pm then it was back to the grind until 5.30pm. I'm not even claiming that to be my idea, it was just sensible.

As for the company content, it's really up to the company to put together a policy of nominating one person to Tweet/Facebook on behalf of the company and make sure it's in the job description.

Giving customer service via Twitter comes with it's own set of challenges. As it's a service in realtime users expect responses in real time. The classic 24 hours to reply (as in the days of email) doesn't wash anymore.

Throwing Sheep - It's not about Farmville!

As much as I don't mind answering questions about social networking....

There's a phrase that's getting chucked into conversation a lot:

"I was at this course and they were talking about social networking and throwing sheep, I assume they are talking about the popularity of Farmville....".

First of all, it's nothing to do with Farmville. It refers to a book called "Throwing Sheep into the Boardroom", which is all about how companies need to wake up to the fact that social networking relationships can improve their bottom line. It's not a bad book all in all.

Throwing Sheep is not to be confused with "to throw a sheep", which is about getting someone's attention in Facebook (a bit like poking for example).

I'm starting to get tired with all the social media training that's out there, most of it's pretty simple easy stuff that you don't actually need to be taught in the first place. Just my opinion....

So you want a mortgage, so how much do you really spend?

Though it's not officially confirmed that this will happen, a number of the newspapers are reporting the fact that the FSA want to push through new checks for mortgage applications. The main one is that applicants will be "forced" to prove their spending habits including such wonderful matters as childcare and drinking (not that the two are linked).

In the good old days anyone with an ounce of sense could cobble up a basic spreadsheet with their income and basic outgoings and that normally kept the bank manager happy.
I was thinking of taking it a little further. Opt in to carry a Tesco Clubcard or Nectar card with you from 3-6 months and prove your spending habits. Then let the bank mine your data prior to getting a decision. Yes it can be mildly fixed that everyone is on their best behaviour for those six months but you'd still get an idea of what the general basket size of the applicant is each week.

It won't be long before a quick mine of Twitter and Facebook data will also show predictive modelling. If you are posting up photos of yourself pee'd up to the nines on Facebook on a Sunday afternoon then there's a good chance you went on a bender Friday/Saturday night. Just check the timestamps of new activity in the photo stream and you can get an idea of the drinking patterns in no time.

Sweeping generalisations, yes. All in the realms of possiblilty? Yes.

Social Media Training: I don't see the need for it.

This might rattle some cages..... (here's hoping anyway).

I was approached a while ago about teaching Twitter to anyone who really wanted it.  The organisation wanted to target beginners and that was fine by me.  No one signed up.  No skin off my nose to be honest.  Then pondering it yesterday evening and today, there was no real need for it in the first place.

What does it really take to introduce someone to Twitter? Not a lot, that's what.

• Go to www.twitter.com
• Click on "Join Up"
• Create an account
• Type something in that big box at the top.

Congratulations, you are now on Twitter....  You'll eventually get the hang of all the retweets, replies and direct messages in very little time.  If you desperate to find your friends and follow them there's even a link called "find people" that will do some searching for you.

Do I need to pay a company to tell me all this? No I don't.  Nor does the rest of the population.

More to the point if you are a business

TWITTER DO THEIR OWN BUSINESS TWITTER GUIDE!

Facebook is just the same....

• Go to www.facebook.com
• Click Join Now
• Go through the process
• Wait for the email and then activate your account.
• Find your friends and start telling them stuff.

Easy.

Even using the for business there's not much to hinder your progress with a few hours will invested work, just see how everyone else is doing it.  If you feel the need to go and either buy a book or sign up for a hugely expensive course to explain the above then that's fine.  Go ahead and have a nice day, you're basically paying for lunch and the venue.  What the course providers often don't tell you is the case for NOT signing the company up to Twitter or Facebook so you become the easy information prey of your competitors.

If you want to ask me questions on Twitter/Facebook then fire away, I don't mind answering for free.  It only takes a few moments of my time, or collar me at an Open Coffee Coleraine meeting or something.  But this coughing up of £200+ quid just to be taught what someone spent an hour looking up on the net.... pull the other one.

Barcamp Derry - the aftermath

My head is still full of information.....

Of the 172 registered attendees about 120 turned up (around 70%) which was excellent news.  As agreed the day before I'd kick off in the morning, so at 10:30am I presented "Bootstrapping a Startup (or how to eat a fajita)" (a picture for proof if any were needed).  If ten people turned up I'd be happy.  When I looked up there was about 70 people in the hall and some notable names as well.  Best comment of the day, "he's very English" :)

One unwritten rule of presentations is that a normal 60 second minute will shrink to 45 seconds per minute, a lot of speakers found this out the hard way with various gestures of "5" or cutting actions being offered from various parts of the building.

As much I would have liked to sat down and listened to a number of talks it just didn't happen, the full day turned into networking day, I wanted to listen to Ted Leigh talk on time travel....

Lunch was pizza and excellent pizza it was, all the while in more meetings with various folk.

All I remember of the afternoon was sitting through Mark Nagurski's talk on blurry media and en route going into a room to talk to someone and not coming out for 90 minutes.....

Barcamp Derry: present, learn, network and then lager shandy - perfect.

The ongoing twitter stream.

NITechBlog Podcast (by Davy Sims), interviews with Paul from Learning Pool, Mark Nagurski, Jason Bell and Martin Gilchrist.

Datasentiment talk at Barcamp Derry

I'll be doing a quick 20 minute talk on customer loyalty, the mobile platform and what Datasentiment is doing on Saturday (10th October) at Barcamp Derry.

As it's an unconference I have no idea what time I'll be on.... 

The NWLLA Talk

Peter Boyle from NWLLA came up with the excellent idea of inviting industry types to Limavady to speak to the current intake of IT folk. I have to admit to start off with I was little skeptical because I've done this sort of thing before with mixed response.

What I thought was going to be 30 minutes ended up being just under 2 1/2 hours. We covered the harsh reality that it's pretty crap out there as Northern Ireland goes, especially the North West. On a positive note we went through the emerging technologies to keep an eye on over the next few years. Moving aside from actually getting a job we then talked about starting up on your own, that's where it got real interesting. Ideas were flowing I went around the room and asked everyone to share what they really wanted to do, plus we showed the power of the network (in reference to Open Coffee Coleraine/Derry/Limavady/Mid Ulster). With most of the ideas I could put them in touch with two or three people who might be able to help in one way or another.

Plus it was good practise for me as it's been a while since I spoke in front of anybody, so it was a good trial run before I speak at Barcamp Derry.

Article: Invite-only discount sales are the hottest ticket in town

My second article for the Belfast Telegraph. You can read it here.

People ask me why I rent.

Many folk ask why I don't own a property and pay rent (or as some call it to me, dead money) on a house.

I'm paying for a service: for a landlord to supply and maintain a property for a given fee a week/month.  My earnings (I'm currently unemployed due to this wonder recovery recession) pay for that service for which I'm normally happy.  If not happy then, depending on the circumstances, the landlord has to put it right.

I looked into mortgages years ago but the mere fact of paying three, perhaps four times, the amount of money back to the bank full well knowing at any time they could recall the debt, well it begs belief why anyone would do it.  Between 2001 and 2004 I was watching house prices going skywards with no sign of stopping.  That sinking feeling when I turned to my wife and said, "I think we've missed the boat".  

The one piece of information that stuck in my head was from an old Open University programme describing how house prices work on average 15 year cycle from bottoming out to peak.  If you say that they last bottoming out was in 1991 then by 2005/6 you'd expect to see something happening.  At the start of 2008 I had friends merrily gloating under the illusion that "you never lose on property".  How wrong they were.  I had to watch as they lost jobs, paniced and desperately tried to sell up as prices and demand took a sharp nosedive.

I'm not planning on getting a "dead pledge" anytime soon.  And why?  Well the rental rates work in my favour.

If I want to buy a house right now for say, £175,000 then my monthly repayment over 25 years would be (at 5% as a baseline) £1034.72 a month.  Now the interest rates are rock bottom but the bank rates aren't, so any rise (and it will happen eventually this feel good on the interest rates can't last forever - we need to get real).  Nice rule of thumb is to work out the worse case senario, if the interest rate ever hit 12%, which is possible as it's happened before, could you afford £1859.37 (that doesn't include the insurances you have to take out either so you could be hitting nearer £2000 a month).  An average rent is well below the 5% baseline figure right now.

The rough guide is that a mortgage should take no more than 33% of your monthly income.  So at worst case are you earning £6000 a month if the worse case happened?  For some reason this modicum of sense totally escaped people and the banks over the years.  Asset bound wealth is no substitute for cash in hand.  Assets can create avenues to generate cash in form or loans or recouped money from rent.  If the demand falls though so does your income from the asset.

For all the people, marketers, media, PR who are spinning out that the recession is over.... it's utter rubbish in my eyes.  On the street there are people panicing and no longer over the value of their house, it's now a case of not losing their job so they can continue to pay for it.

From Unemployment to Startup (if you are west of The Bann)

A quick reality check, the job situation is crap out there.  Regardless of the all the headlines stating the recession is over, it's crap out there.  West of the Bann, it's really bad with Derry, Limavady and Strabane chalking up the higher end of the unemployment figures.  Also, reality check number two is that Project Kelvin will not create the jobs that people will expect.

So while the unemployment figures just keep climbing it doesn't give much heart to try something.  On the other hand it's a good time to have an entrepreneurial heart and give something a bash.  The number of micro sized (five employees or less) is certainly on the rise.

Right, first of all the bad news.  If you are signing on there's a good chance that money is tight and you're watching every penny.  So startup funds are well short, given the other fact that the Start A Business Programme now doesn't give money on completion of the programme (which has whittled down from £1500, to £750, to £400, to £250 to nothing) it's now more difficult to startup from scratch.  While InvestNI go hunting for export opportunities in Northern Ireland companies (and anything else that makes good press releases) the rest of us are entitled to very little.

Yes the SABP does run but they are just seminars, that's it.  No money now.  They are handy, don't get me wrong, though the main reason for doing this route was for the cash at the end to give a helping hand to setup, though the amount was piddly by any stretch of the imagination.  If you really need money then it's friends, family and savings (if such a thing still exists).

So, what for the unemployed with a dream.... well don't let any of that stop you.  In Branson terms, screw it, let's do it.  The reason that software startups are a good one is that the cost to market is low.  If you are stuck for ideas there are plenty around (you can go have a look at http://www.oneforten.info if you are really stuck and desperate).

From there it's networking and tons of it.  Open Coffee's are a good place to start and they are all over the place... Derry, Limavady, Coleraine and Mid Ulster if you are west of that river and then Belfast, Newry and Lisburn if you are east of it.  Attend Refresh and all the other uber cool nights that go on in the province.  There's a sacrifice of your time but you'll meet you who need to meet at those events.  Plus they are the nicest bunch you'll come across.

For the totally adventurous among you, you can have a look at the Propel Programme run by XCel Partners for InvestNI.  Applications are online and will give the final 30 an eight week seminar programme from which the final 15 are 50% salary paid for the next 10 months.  I did talk to Diane at XCel about the salary band for the unemployed but still haven't heard anything back at the time I'm writing this.  Propel is interesting in terms of it's goals of developing networking and being able to stand in front of VC's.  The bit that did stick in me is that the initial seminars are in Belfast and I've not seen mention of any travelling expenses being paid to the unemployed if they are accepted on to the last 30.  All routes may lead to Belfast but there are a number of companies that reside outside of Belfast.

These are the times that Twitter is useful to put you in contact with people who know the funding routes.  There's a load of groups on Facebook as well.  Incubators in the North West are few and far between, there is Noribic in Derry but I never have any idea what they are doing as their website doesn't really work properly.  The blog's great but you have to find it and it doesn't link from the front page (in other words useless).  It's currently under construction which means all my whinging may have paid off.  

The North West is desperate for a digital content high point, something that I'm hoping Barcamp Derry will do.  So if you are in the area and are doing something startup (even if it's on the paper planning stages) then it would be good to see you, talk to you and offer some encouragement along the way.  I know from bitter experience of the last five years living in the North West it can be a lonely existence in startup world.  From doing more talking through networking I'm doing more talking.... watch out for DevDays in 2010. 

Meeting: Final reminder for Open Coffee Coleraine tonight.

What: Open Coffee Coleraine, informal business, tech, startup and creative business networking but without the pressure and the name badges.

Where: Starbucks, Kingsgate, Coleraine.

When: Wednesday 19th August from 7pm to 9pm.

Cost: Nothing but you'll have to pay for your own coffee/tea.

Jam and the joys of music distribution in today's world.

My first piece for the Belfast Telegraph appears today in the Web Watch column.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/opinion/watching-web/jam-and-the-joys-of-music-distribution-in-todayrsquos-world-14456679.html

Upcoming on the tech radar in NI.

The good news is that Open Coffee's are crawling out of the woodwork, so if you want to network you have no real excuse for saying that things aren't going on. The reason I started Open Coffee Coleraine and not Open Coffee Limavady was simple, everyone in Limavady practically knows each other and in Coleraine it seems to be the opposite.

So crack open your diaries and get this lot noted down.

Wednesday 19th August - Open Coffee Coleraine: 7pm-9pm @ Starbucks (www.opencoffeecoleraine.com)

Thursday 27th August - Open Coffee Derry: 6pm @ Waterfoot Hotel (www.opencoffeederry.com)

Wednesday 9th September - Open Coffee Mid Ulster: 6.30pm venue TBC (www.ocmidulster.com)

The Belfast Open Coffee meetings happen every fortnight on a Thursday, the dates are listed on the their website: www.opencoffeebelfast.com

The open coffee meetings are no pressure, no name badge affairs. You get what you put in basically, if you want to talk to someone then introduce yourself to them and there's a high chance they'll talk back and then get you talking to someone else. It's not all techie businesses that turn up to these events so don't think it's just for dull programmers with nothing else to do. It's far from that.

If you are a dull techie with nothing else to do you'll be interested in these bits as well:

Monday 17th August - Refresh Belfast: 6.30pm @ Black Box all about iPhone development this time. You will need to register to get in.

Saturday 19th September - Bizcamp Dublin: All Day - Too much going on to list here.... (www.bizcamp.ie)

Saturday 10th October - Barcamp Derry: All Day - Too much going on to list here.... (www.barcampderry.com)

Thursday 4th - Friday 6th November - Buildconf: you will have to pay for this one but the schedule looks great. (www.buildconference.com)

BarCampDerry, interesting notes from the PHP front.

It was nice to see the BarCampDerry site come together quickly. Between Mark Nagurski, Greg Wallace, myself and a some others in the background that I may never know about... well it came together good. As small favours go, I liked this one a lot.

A few things to keep in mind for anyone putting that sort of site together in WordPress, from a geeky dev perspective.

1. Have a clear vision of how you want your code to work before you try and weave it into WordPress. For me I had the attending/speaker thing written when Mark first talked about the Barcamp site. I knew it would be in Wordpress so PHP was the obvious choice.

2. The route of least resistance is the best. I used the ExecPHP with Wordpress, it has advantages and disadvantages. Main disadvantage is that any errors or warnings don't show up, it's got to be some pretty bad for it to do so.

3. Make sure you have decent PHP code ready in advance. Mainly because trying to edit in Wordpress editor is like painting art through a letterbox.

4. Ensure that all the team know what the score is. Wordpress WYSIWYG editor is disable with ExecPHP installed otherwise the html prettying screws up the code. So don't expect to make too many friends on the team if you don't tell them not to use it.

The first step to success is not to depend on everyone else.

For those who know, I have a little website called "OneForTen" (http://www.oneforten.info) it was based on an idea from the Six Month MBA team. It was good excuse to build a quick Ruby On Rails app to get used to the language etc.

Over the weekend a few folk had been adding some new ideas, which is great. So I put a little post on Twitter to mention the existance of the site.

This arrived in my replies:
@jasebell ideas are bountiful, funding sources are impossible ;P should make a variant for that

My reply was
Why is it that the first step to success is to depend on everyone else? You don't always need funding. Bootstrapping does work.

I find it interesting that in order to succeed in this digital world we have this desire for other people to put the money in first. The initial stumbling block is not money, it's the motivation to see the idea through to a concept. I'm hazarding a guess that a good 50% of startups never get past the "in my head" phase because of this notion that you'll never find money. I admit if it's a production facility you are setting up you will need investment capital of some form, or a bank loan, or money from somewhere. For a software startup.... no. It needs you, your time and your commitment to do something.

Case in point, my own, I'm in the middle of coding a startup project together. I've run it past a number of people who've said it's definately a go-er. Do I need the money, I suppose I do (need a Mac but can't afford a Mac) but I want to get something out to prove that I've put my heart, soul and passion into the project from the outset. It won't show good to investors when I roll up on their doorstep with a pencil sketch ("It's a go-er but I haven't started it yet"). The webkit demo will do in the first instance until the revenue is there to work on a native iPhone app. The idea doesn't just stretch to an iPhone app, it's mobile devices, set top boxes, web.... you name it.

Bootstrapping does work, once you are at the point you have something out there then look for funding, even then keep it to friends and family. VC's are out there but need some convincing that your idea is, essentially, going to make them money. Plus in these troubled times the equity stakes are usually higher. Less money going around and more risk.

If there's one simple question it's, with hand on heart ask yourself, "Would I invest in me?".

Aura Leisure: The internet is wealth of information until you need some information.

We can order books, they arrive the next day. We can keep in touch in just about realtime with anyone around the world. Get the price and information to a swimming pool? No.

So I know I'm going to Letterkenny, my wife has plans for the afternoon so it leaves me and my daughter to find something to do. Go swimming seems like a perfect choice as I've promised it during the week. My quicky look at the Aura Leisure website gives me opening times, that's a start, at least I won't show up at 1pm and not be able to get in.

First problem, there's no pricing so I have no idea what I'm paying to get in. I have ten Euro in my pocket and need 11.20, fine but I then get stung on their Sterling £1 for 1EUR rule. Fair enough, we get in and get changed, we head for the water. We get in the water. Next thing I know the lifeguard is behind me, "where's your headgear?". "Didn't realise we needed any, there's no signage to say so in reception". "Hold on a second.....". So we sit in the water with my daughter eager for her Dad to show her how to use her new board.

"You buy the caps for 2.50 each, we don't have any", "I've just got stung on getting in, I'm only here for the day". And this is where policy and problem come in. Their rule is (and I quote), "kick 'em out and give 'em a freebie pass."

"I'm here for the day, I ain't coming back. How am I supposed to tell a seven year old she's going to get kicked out of the pool?". I then have a good conversation with the lifeguard who then tells me the power struggle between front office, the lack of customer information, and the lifeguard (back office) who usually are left to sort it all out.

My result: leave, child in tears and get my money back. Money then used to good effect on ice cream and a Dora DVD.

And to Aura Leisure: two simple things for your website. Pricing and swimmers information. Would have made my life a lot easier and my daughters' life a lot happier. As it stands, you just lost a couple of customers.

The three simple rules of software development.

For anyone who doesn't really know, I'm a bass player. Not a bad one to boot according to others who want to use me on the odd album, tour or session. In 1987, or there abouts, I read an interview in Guitarist magazine. I'd not heard of the guy up until that point but he was just compelling to read about, the bassist was Doug Wimbish.

At the end of the article there's the usual end of article cop out of, "Doug do you have any advice to other bass players?". The response was pretty what I considered off the wall. "Share anything about your playing to anyone and don't go around thinking that your sh*t doesn't stink!".

In photography we now have the likes of Dave Hobby, Joe McNally and Chase Jarvis and a legion of other great photogs willing to share. They'll give you the whole nine yards on lighting techniques, shooting techniques the lot.

Lastly I've been busy organising the first Open Coffee Coleraine meeting. There's no real forum for businesses to get together and just share, so I created one and Starbucks willingly offered a venue. Networking never used to be an issue to me, my network was pretty much online but that technique has reduced vastly over the years. Showing your face and personality has become important again. It's not about programming, it's about branding, the brand called You!

So, the three rules of software development:

1. You are only as good as your network says you are.
2. Be willing to share anything with anyone.
3. Don't go around thinking that your sh*t doesn't stink! :)

JTwitter free download, last day today.

Just got a tweet from Anton Hutton at EyespyFX, their Twitter client for J2ME is available for free today. Point your mobile to http://www.jtwitter.com/wap and you can download it from there.

Twitter is not a newswire but the most wonderful idea virus.

The evening (I'm in the UK) when Michael Jackson died uncovered some startling truths about realtime shouting/twittering.

Everyone is happy to jump on a story whether it's true or not, without a smidgen of regard for following up the facts. When I logged on to Twitter at 11.50pm and I saw a handful of tweets telling me that MJ was dead, first things first check the valid news sources. Since the story was from TMZ and I'd never heard of TMZ, the site only half worked and looked like a bag of onions I was a little wary of it's content. Reuters were reporting nothing, PA and AP newswires had nothing, only reports that the emergency services had been called.

Back on Twitter though, if TMZ says it's true then it's worth saying he's dead anyway. Then that spilled over to Facebook and the same pre-news news had the same wildfire effect. It took another twenty minutes before the real confirmation in the LA Times came through, a trusted source, I can live with that. Poor chap RIP.

No matter, but in the same timeframe we learn of Jeff Goldblum's demise while filming in New Zealand. The Twitter sneezing army went to work just as quick and Jeff's death and it became a trending topic. All very well except he wasn't dead, or in New Zealand. Stephen Colbert summed led the tributes nicely on the Colbert Report with Jeff Goldblum paying tribute to himself on the same show.

Twitter is the perfect idea virus, put something out there and get some sneezers to shout about it even more. All very well when it's something like a cool website, a product or a hot boy/girl for example. Twitter is not a news feed, well certainly not a trusted one. It's an immediate news source which is great but the danger is that it's crowdsource and unchecked. Spells danger to me in every sense of the word.

Ticketmaster and ticketing in general - a cloud opportunity.

The obvious news from the last 48 hours was the death of Michael Jackson. The first thought that I gave was the obvious battering that the likes of Ticketmaster and Seatwave were going to get. Initially it was the purchase of tickets, now it's for the refunds.

Any large scale event will alway incur a spike at the time tickets go on sale. Something like:


(Apologies for my crude Google Chart example).

It stands to reason that an elastic system would be of benefit to any high volume ticketing system. Deploy n number of servers to cope with the demand. Michael Jackson's O2 shows were a good case in point. There in the region of 250,000 tickets on sale and they went in a matter of hours. If those 250,000 sales represented 1% of the hits the site was getting then you can easily estimate that the server could potentially get 25,000,000 hits in a short space of time.

There's also a maximum return on investment (ROI) from only having the servers you need available at peak times, instances then switched off during quieter periods. Saves having a server farm full of running servers.

Meeting: Open Coffee Coleraine networking event.

I've finally got the first of my Open Coffee Coleraine meetings sorted out. It will be held at Starbucks, Coleraine on Wednesday 22nd July 2009.

The Open Coffee meetings are informal get togethers for businesses, startups and creatives to network, have a coffee and even perhaps generate some new ideas.

Starbucks have kindly offered us their cafe after hours, the event will run from 7pm - 9pm, plus free filter coffee and tea if you are prepared to give a donation to their chosen charity (if you want a quad shot skinny latte then you'll have to pay :) ).

Last bonus is that from 1st July if you are a Starbucks card holder then you get Wifi for free.

The blog is at http://www.opencoffeecoleraine.com and there's also a Twitter page as well.

Hunch, if you want to learn about me you need to give some better option answers.

As Robert Fripp once said, "The quality of the question determines the quality of the answer".

I was just having a noodle around with the new startup Hunch. It was all going so well until....


Well, actually the answer is neither, I don't like chocolate full stop, it makes me barf huge amounts. Can I have a third option please, "Don't like chocolate". I'm fairly sure I'm not the only person in the world that doesn't like it (I know people don't eat it for a variety reasons).

The new Java Store and the main core of the problem.

Three cheers for the new Java Store (though I can't see as I'm in Northern Ireland, can't sign up, can't join, well not for the time being). From reading press releases and the rest it sounds good on paper but I'm far from convinced that Sun can actually deliver.

Eric Klein said,“We're building new business opportunities and are thrilled to launch the Java Store to connect developers with hundreds of millions of Java users. The Java Store will become the destination for the most interesting, useful and entertaining Java software and content.”

And here starts the main point of the issue. Not everyone with a Java runtime knows they have a Java runtime. It's all very well to say there's 2.4M mobile devices but out of those how many truely know they have Java on the phone and they can download stuff. Not 2.4 million for sure. Set top boxes are another good example, I don't know many who can download software for them, so it's all very well saying there's 800M of them.

At present the Java Store is a big marketing exercise from what I can see. It's a good idea and I desperately want to believe it will work. Everyone is looking at Nokia Ovi and a bit of a tramsmash launch. I'd hate to see the Java Store go the same way. We're going to end up with an app store deluge and the single one fact remains, Apple is doing it better than anyone else regardless of whether you like Apple or not.

The incline to a beta release.

The Open Coffee Derry meeting gained some valuable feedback on the new startup, I demoed a very rough and ready J2ME app. I'm not a great networker (fine online but will very rarely go out and meet and do all that stuff), but this meet is a good small encouraging one.

From them it was a case of go for it or back off and think of something else. I'm glad I put the time in to do the demo mobile app, talking about "the idea" well it just isn't the same. Here's the app, here's what it does and here's the benefit to you. Basic feedback was great, same ringing in my ear was "do this on an iphone or ipod and we'll talk some more".

So I went and got an iPod Touch....

Much to do but with this release the demo rollout can happen, but it's opening up some other interesting possibilities.

Open Coffee Derry meeting tonight.

The location has moved from Starbucks to Da Vinci's on the Culmore Road. Start time is 6.30pm. More updates and info can be found on the website or on their twitter.

Focus your gaze, writing little apps won't make you rich (normally).

Interesting timing, I've been thinking about this post all day, then Techcrunch have just put up an interesting article about App Store hype which reflects on a post by Stromcode.

My view has never been about selling applications (whether they be Java, Brew or ObjC) but about connecting users to the solutions themselves. I've been doing much thinking today in regards to a startup project I've been working on (I was thinking of doing a stealth launch at Open Coffee Derry but I think I'm still going to keep it under my hat for a little while longer). Mobile applications should be a gateway of connecting users, as websites do with the browser, offering solutions and benefits along the way.

Games are games and people will play them and there will be games developers, but whether those developers will make a living from their apps seems a bit of a long shot to me. I have to admit I got caught in the make-me-an-iphone-developer mantra with the possibility of $$$ but reading I got put off.

Mobile phones are about connecting people, their applications should do the same.

Sun going into the Java App Store business.

Mainly to promote the Java runtime but it makes sense. Jonathan Schwartz' blog from Monday outlined the new Project Vector in part but he's leaving the meat on the bone until JavaOne.

And that's what Project Vector is designed to deliver - Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we'll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world's largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX. What kinds of companies might be interested?

Applications are on application and will have to be real good to get on the space. As with Apple's way of doing things the apps that will really make it are the ones that get profiled on their site. You need money to make money.

It's an interesting concept (though you'll see by the comments that there a few confused about how it's really going to work for developers). No real mention on J2ME apps either, this looks like a big push for JavaFX on the desktop to get away from all those nasty browers.

Yahoo drops every other mobile platform to move to iPhone

And it's all down to user experience. Both The Register and Techcrunch have reported that Yahoo have sent an email to beta testers that they are essentially shutting down the Java browser app they profiled a few months back.

So yet another iPhone++ and J2ME--. Shame.

Creating a new app store seems pointless all of a sudden.

The risk of there being too many app store type thing for mobile applications would always be in the back of my mind. Plus this is something for the community, this is about business, making money for the developer and the company as a whole.

While Apple have never maintained that the App Store was a primary focus for them (not matter who's breakdown of the revenue you read), others have jumped on the wide open band wagon of other app types. So Java, Brew and Blackberry apps are under heavy scrutiny as to how they can be made to good use.

There's been plenty of waves from Nokia about Ovi, due to open in the next few days if the rumour mill is anything to go by. Qualcomm sent out a press release today indicating the same thing regarding an app store, finally the Microsoft Marketplace will also be selling apps as well.

Brew developers have their own set of problems (very much like the way J2ME has it's own set of problems), very much a vendor lock in but Apple just seemed to do it better. Apple's selling point is the hardware, the apps are just a little icing on the cake, they just control the icing gun, where it goes and how much goes where.

My research over the last few days has just shown me that a lot of Java apps aren't that great, we missed a big trick there regardless of how many billion devices it can go on. When you start talking to end users they very rarely download any apps onto onto the said billion or so devices. So it all starts to make bleak reading.

No matter which way I looked at it, do my own app store for pure Java mobile apps, or write a decent app (why has no Twitter client on J2ME remotely embraced running it through SVG?, it would look great), at that point I gave up, jumped ship and started looking at iPhone/iPod development.

Shame, it's a great shame. I see the larger vendors possibly sinking an aweful lot of money that could be a lame duck.

Yowza - I wish I thought of that, oh I did I just didn't get off my backside and do it!

Techcrunch brought Yowza (Yes, the startup with Greg who is in Heroes) into my field of view a few weeks ago, in fact on the same week I was thinking about what I'd possibly do if I owned an iPhone, a Mac and the SDK.

Mobile shopping coupons, save on paper and all that. Perfect, I'll get an iPod Touch... Then I was beat to it.

This happens all the time, coded up a UK version of Ideeli and GiltGroupe type sites and on the day I was going to pick up the phone and start talking I was shown the full page advert for Brand Alley and immediately stopped. There's been a bunch of others, the most comfort I can gleen from all this is (as put to me by a Silicon Valley veteran), "well at least you are thinking the same as the big guys".

There's no Yowza in the UK, but it won't be far off. There's a possible avenue of looking at another platform (J2ME perhaps) and going down that route. All things are possible it's just getting the merchants to sign up and the everyday public to download the app in the first place.

The Java App Store

Starting to take over my thoughts quite a lot. The much fanfare of Nokia's Ovi having 20,000 applications is all very well but they are not just plain applications, there are a lot of feed services weaved into all that as well.

What's interesting to watch in Java space in regards to applications is the content layer that folk are using. Nokia have Widsets which totally failed to impress me. The best I've seen so far is Snaptu, searching around there are claims of a developer API but I can't find one anywhere. In developing a mobile client for the app store I'd like to have something with a decent look and feel, Snaptu's interface looks great, I just don't know how to get my hands on it.

What really excites me is the inclusion of JavaFX into mobile devices. This could turn J2ME's fortunes around but Sun seriously need to look at the consumer and not heavily focus on the developers. As to what devices will support JavaFX remains to be seen, but I seriously think that this second wave of decent J2ME/FX mobile applications could be a good thing.

The J2ME App Store Manifesto

Something in it for the developer?
There has to be a revenue share between the store and the developer. Sun's main failing on J2ME was to oversell to the developer and not talk up the benefits to the everyday consumer. Apple has got the mix right with a 70/30 split, any other app store should be looking at the same. Developers still have to shout loud about their apps regardless of platform. You can make the money but it takes effort on both our parts.

Intelligent ID
With the iPhone there's really only one phone to worry about. This is a major showstopper on a decent app store for Java mobile apps. I have a Nokia E51, brilliant phone, but I don't really know what apps are going to work with it. There has to be some form of intelligence detection when the phone queries the store, "Hi I'm an E51 what apps will work...."

Verification of Apps
Manual checking of newly registered apps. Apple are choosy, so am I. I want the creme de la creme of J2ME apps, it's makes it easier for me to sell them. Developers should be striving to get their apps within the top ten of the Java App Store.

Is Free gonna do it?
Is free a real business model for you? For games, more than likely not. For some services that can make revenue from other sources like cost per click activity or supplier buy in then fair enough. I don't have an iPhone but I was impressed with the idea behind Yowza (that nice chap from Heroes, Greg Grunberg, it was his idea and boy that helps with the marketing too).

Sun heavily got into the "community" and the open source thing but some developers mistaken that community as free. It's nice to give some stuff away but it's also nice to put food on the table. The Cathedral and The Bazaar still has a place in the hi tech economy but are the open sourcers really making money?

Build It and They Will Come
Now I'm working on that bit....

So, are you building J2ME apps?
Good ones, real good ones, yeah. Perhaps we should talk.

So so so busy....

It's been heads down for the last couple of weeks, though I did surface for the Open Coffee Derry meeting last week.

So I'm still grappling with the whole J2ME/iPhone App Store thing with a lot of ideas bouncing around my head. My train of thought stopped as I was asked to cover the Danny Boy Festival for a local paper (still got my photography business to think about).

What from all this data?

Okay: here's a basic list of the things I'm signed up to.

Blogger, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, my Amazon account for something to read etc. Keep in mind I have over ten blogs on various topics, a handful of Twitter accounts and most of my likes/dislikes listed in Facebook and MySpace, and finally my work and professional connections on Linkedin.

Here's a senario I'd like to see over the next couple of years.

I book a plane ticket. London to New York for arguments sake.

i) As soon as the ticket is booked an email arrives with a few reading suggestions - linked to my Amazon account. Even better, I'm paying a few hundred pounds for my ticket - the airline can pay for a couple of books for me :)
ii) From the existing booking list it can see which of my business contacts on Linkedin I'd be travelling with and gives me the option to either network with them at the airport or during the flight.
iii) Be able to figure out what interesting blogs and websites I'd like to see when I'm flying.
iv) Be able to figure out an in flight listening (from last.fm feeds) based on my Facebook/MySpace details and music likes etc.
v) Do I have an iTunes account? Nah, so there's a good chance that I might like to buy an iPod duty free.

A lot of this can be sourced from one point of contact, an email address. Yeah it's a bit freaky, perhaps limit it to premium customers. The technology is there..... perhaps I should create a company.

Sometimes being open is not such a good idea.

Over the years the open source advocates have ebbed and flowed. There are some great products out there that you can download, install and use. Sun Microsystems jumped on the Open Source community and the way that Java was being used to power all this cool enterprise stuff.

Now in 2009 I think it's really bit Sun on the arse. Apple give us the biggest wave of vendor lock in and it's a beautiful thing. Developers are willing to pay to get their apps listed on iTunes, willing to let 30% of their revenue go to Apple for everything sold on iTunes. And aside to that Sun turned away from IBM and went with Oracle.

Though Sun boast wonderfully about how the Java Micro Edition (Java ME or J2ME depending on when you started all this) is on over 1 Billion devices worldwide. The big mistake was to leave the consumer out of the equation and just focus on the developer. So now we have a plethora of applications floating around in space. Sun missed the boat but it's given me an idea.

Onwards and upwards to Open Coffee Derry.

Could J2ME ever had an equivilent App Store?

I've hit a real big junction at the moment. It's a whacking great T junction of a decision that I have to make. It all boils down to mobile apps. With OpenCoffeeDerry approaching this Thursday I'm giving lots of ideas a lot of thought. I missed BarcampBelfast yesterday, but I was recovering from photographing a wedding the day before. Anyway, I digress....

One of the reasons that the iPhone and iPod Touch work so well isn't really down to the hardware, it's down to Apple's way of working in terms of the App Store. You can to sell on the App Store then you have to register as a developer (at $99) then write your app and get it approved. So there's already a level of commitment to producing a good app. If it ain't good it don't get in (you on the guest list, sir?).

Over to J2ME.... hmm I'm struggling with this one. If I look at something like Getjar.com there's a lack of clear layout, that's more to design than anything else. My next problem is finding what I want and for my device... urgh this is getting messy. Give me the App Store for J2ME PLEASE!

More to the point, are there actually any really good I-can't-live-without-this apps in J2ME for mobile devices?

Sounds like I'm talking myself out of this one.

On the opposite side of the coin: first of all buy either an iPhone or iPod Touch (which is going to cost me anything from £165 - £350 depending on what I get), learn Objective C, get a Mac so I can get the SDK (call that another £800), the economics are starting to work against me. So for my £1100 I need to make sure that I'm going to get enough downloads and marketing clout so the downloads happen.

Perhaps I should just build a good J2ME App Store.

Why Twitter?

I'm beginning to see four distinct groups of users using Twitter. Each have their own way of doing things.

1. Casual friends and family.
Basically they want to keep in touch. Nothing wrong with that and easier to broadcast than copy/pasting an email all the time.

2. Users who broadcast but don't care who listens.
The more followers the better and the more people they follow the more will listen. After a while though it becomes noise and difficult to track who is saying way. Take 10,000 followers and a bunch of them @reply to you, how will you know? At the end of the day most of these category of user won't really care. I suppose you could call them Twittagers :)

3. An industry/business collective
Keeping up with a specific domain of intelligence. I keep up with designers, hitech and data miners, some of them even keep up with me.

4. The bots.
The ones that give me cause for concern and the want inside to make my tweets private. If I mention golf then there's a bot tracking the word "golf", next thing I know there's a bunch of followers because I said golf. To give you an idea how lax this system can be, I was stating the fact that I would never ever play golf.

As much as I thought Twitter would be a complete waste of time I do use it a heck of a lot, but mainly in a specific domain context. I do have problems with the signal to noise ratio hence I try to control my follows and followers to a degree that I can see messages that come in. Now I'm also using rTweeter, written by Stuart Manning, which will let me track keywords and phrases as well.

Now I can start putting the collective intelligence together.

It's okay to be a #TwitterSnob!

Your network should be a reflection of i) you and ii) where you want to personally/professionally want to see yourself in the next phase or season of your existance.

Just because one person decides to follow you on Twitter or befriend you on Facebook doesn't not automatically give them the right to be followed back. Derek Hall was being given a hard time about not being reciprocal about every Twitter follow he was getting. A debate then ensues about this and an army of #TwitterSnobs is born. Me personally am happy to be one.

It's not about the quantity of follows, it's about the quality of follows.

Cutting through the bull - when things just don't add up.

I have worked in IT for twenty one glorious years, never thought I could see the day. Programming languages come and go, fads, fashions, websites I've pretty much seen it all. There is one thing that has constantly cropped up in my profession, fake advertisements.

To start off with it was agencies posting fake IT positions on JobServe (and hey, it still happens). In Northern Ireland they calculated that 50% of the agency positions are made up. No shock there. But it's not just the IT job market, oh no.

If you have a Boeing 737-200 for sale, for example, you'd expect any sort of "exchange and mart" sort of sale to happen. I've got a plane, you want a plane, let's talk! No. I've got a plane, and ten brokers want a piece of the action as well. And in time and honoured tradition of the fake job ads in the IT world there's a bunch of made up aircraft for sale or rent notices as well. I'm sure it happenes in every other domain that exists.

Back to my Boeing 737. The senario is:

Owner -> Broker->Broker->Broker->Broker->Broker->Broker->End User

You could add an infinate number of brokers in that chain, it would eventually end somewhere. Each of them is trying to claw their 1% commission for referring a sale. It's the same as estate agent and just as sleasy. Letters of intent mean nothing.... neither does an NDA.

Money is not made on data alone, it is made up on the quality of data. I've used the aviation industry as an example as it's one that I know an awful lot about from the startsup I've done over the last four years. It's all about signal to noise, something I've blogged about before with Twitter and the alarming number of data I seem to amassing. To gather meaningful data is becoming more of a pain.

I'm working on some tools for the aviation sector but I am constantly aware of just becoming another signal to noise service, providing more noise and what constitutes as free advertising ("as long as my phone and email address are on the site, that's all I care about!" sort of mentality).

The question should really be how to cut out the noise.

Google App Engine: on Eclipse it's a dream.

My first proper morning of having a look at the Java support for Google App Engine. A tip for anyone who is developing, make sure you have Eclipse and the AppEngine plugins, it works wonders.

Coding the app up is no real problem. If you are used to JDO queries then you'll be fine, I'm so used to JDBC hell that I had to read the docs. Where the plugins really shine is on deployment. It totally removes the whole command line procedure. Click once, enter your username and password and up it goes (fortunately not in smoke). All done and working.

Not a design classic but here's the first app.

Java in the cloud: First look at Google App Engine for Java

I was lucky to be one of the first 10,000 developers to get a closer look at the new Google App Engine for Java. Up until now it's been Python developers who had all the fun.

What's it got:
The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

First things first, if you use Eclipse there are some plugins that Google have developed for the development and deployment of Java apps for AppEngine. There's also a good guide on getting started here.

The problem with these sorts of things is thinking of something to code up. So I'm going to a think and come up with something.

More later.....

The great IDE clutter

Perhaps it's old age creeping in, perhaps it's just wanting a simpler life (now a reality since I ditched Bebo, my Twitter account will more than likely head the same way).

Next on my list, development tools. Just too many of them, but then again there's not one day when I know what's coming. For Java I use Eclipse all the time, have been since 2002 (I even said nice things about them in 2003). The guys at Silktide have got me into PHPEd for all things PHP, though I have to say the installation did kill my Apache 2 config and removed any trace of PHP. Ruby on Rails, uhm this is a problem child at the moment. I swing from Textpad to Komodo Edit 5.0 and then back again.

In an ideal world everything would run off Eclipse. PHPEd doesn't seem to really create much of the way of PHP code for me. I want a class, I should be able to pull a table from MySQL and it create a class for me. Older versions of Eclipse support a PHP plugin but as I'm on Ganymede a few of the plugins don't seem to be supported yet. I'm just too cutting edge sometimes. As for Ruby on Rails, RadRails was built on Eclipse but was replaced by Aptana's Studio (also for Eclipse as a plugin but, alas, not Ganymede).

Taking a tip from David Heinemeier Hansson, code generators or more importantly scaffolds are a way forward for PHP. I'm just wondering if there's any use in modifying the Ruby scripts to generate PHP code as well as Ruby code?

The purge continues.

The Big Social Network Noise Pool

I cancelled my Bebo account, it was turning into a giant teenagers playground. And, I for one, wasn't wanting to sit around to watch.

I did a purge on my Twitter followers, they responded in the same fashion (as to be expected really), "if you don't follow me, I won't follow you". Fine by me.

Tonight was Facebook's turn. My original intention was to keep this one to people who I knew but as time wore on friend of friends start turning up and I blindly accepted thinking that their comments here and there may have been useful. In most cases it was a waste of time.

The signal to noise ratio is increasing at an alarming rate. Twitter's @reply is me basically shouting in a field of 100 other people with the person I'm trying to reach standing at the other side. The mere fact that @replies don't get email alerted has caused me more misses than hits. Identi.ca solves this problem (yay!) but the interface isn't very inviting to use and, finally, is treated more of a techy plaything than anything else.

Myspace is in decline, ITV are desperate for a buyer of Friends Reunited, Twitter isn't money making yet. I'm starting to wonder where this is all going. We could have the biggest set of redundant data on our hands, just waiting to be mined or searched but never quite got round to it.

While a few companies like Salesforce.com, SAP and Sysomos are trying to get sentiment out of social networks and blogs the amount of increasing noise will make their lives more and more difficult. While the ACE Conference in Northern Ireland says the province needs to concentrate on it's social applications there's a good chance that the boat has already been missed and the decline to a more normal way of doing things will start to appear.

Twitter to Speech in Java

During the working day I glance at Twitter quite a lot to see what folk are saying. I'd personally rather have it talk to me instead, if something interests me then I can go looking on the website.

(Now I know mobiles do text to speech well already, this was more of a basic exercise to see how easy it would be in Java).

First of all we need some Tweets.
public class TwitterSpeech {
public TwitterSpeech(String username, String password){
Twitter twitter = new Twitter(username, password);
List messages = twitter.getFriendsTimeline();
for(Status s : messages){
System.out.println(s.getUser());
System.out.println(s.getText());
}
tv.closeVoice();
}
}

The Winterwell JTwitter API works really well for what we need and I don't see the point of overcomplicating the matter by reading JSON and Atom feeds. So, a username and password are passed to the method and the getFriendsTimeline() method pulls the last 20 Tweets in the timeline.

Now for some speech.

The FreeTTS project is on Sourceforge and provides a nice way to get text to speech in short space of time. Here there is another class that sets up the voice synth and gives a way of passing a text message to it to be processed.

public class TweetVoice{
VoiceManager voiceManager = null;
Voice helloVoice = null;

public TweetVoice(){
voiceManager = VoiceManager.getInstance();
helloVoice = voiceManager.getVoice("kevin16");
helloVoice.allocate();
}
public void closeVoice(){
helloVoice.deallocate();
}

public void speakTweet(String message){
helloVoice.speak(message);
}
}

Kevin16 is the voice set to be used, a bit robotic but fine for our needs. So now, back in our original code segment, it's just a case of plumbing in the speech synth and passing tweets to it.

public class TwitterSpeech {
public TwitterSpeech(String username, String password){
TweetVoice tv = new TweetVoice();
Twitter twitter = new Twitter(username, password);
List messages = twitter.getFriendsTimeline();
for(Status s : messages){
System.out.println(s.getUser());
System.out.println(s.getText());
tv.speakTweet(s.getUser() + " said " + s.getText());
}
tv.closeVoice();
}

public static void main(String[] args){
TwitterSpeech ts = new TwitterSpeech("myusername", "mypassword");
}
}

It's plain and it's simple but it works rather well and has scope for a few other applications. If you wrapped a Quartz Scheduler or a mechanism to retrigger a thread then you could leave it run and grab new tweets for you. This example will always grab the most recent 20 tweets for you, it would be easy to modify the code and get the most recent tweets by id or date.

The great Twitter user purge

I went on a Twitter purge today. It was all down to something I noticed last night, I'd reached a tipping point where it was becoming difficult to maintain a meaningful amount of data coming in.

I'm not on Twitter to data mine, I changed my mind about that a few weeks ago. But out of the 146 people I was following, how many was I having a contract of information with? About four all in all. To be fair I've made some new contacts in Northern Ireland, creatives that I didn't know existed etc. The rest was just turning into link bait, shameless advertising and pointless content. It's creating content for contents sake.

What got me thinking? Well I had about fifteen alerts from Twitter saying that folk had added me, why had then added me? No idea, more than likely to bump the numbers up and not based on anything I was actually saying. So why am I adding folk I don't really know, what value are they adding to my knowledge? Very little, so I went on a purge.

It's not just limited to Twitter, I found the same with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Bebo. How many of these contacts are actually meaningful? How many will add value for me in the long turn?

Since the Facebook redesign I hardly log in, only to keep in touch with a handfull of folk that I'd normally talk to (ie, I have already had a face to face conversation with them BEFORE adding them on Facebook).

Back to a simple life I think. Try and reduce the paper in my office, get all the CD's on to some form of media player. Try and live a bit simpler.

Twitter ideas: bring back the bots.

Why can't Jetblue/Virgin America or any other airline have a crack at this? Here's the story, I want to fly from New York to San Francisco.

There's nothing to stop a direct message from Twitter to JetBlue's twitter account.

"JFK SFO 2009/3/20 2009/3/30 A2 C1"

Fly me from New York to SanFran on 20th March 2009 and return on 30th March 2009, two adult and one children are travelling. Especially handy if I can send the direct tweet from my mobile and get a dialog going.

Send me a TinyURL back with the price and where to book and I'll go for it. Even better as you have my Twitter username you can link it to my Frequent Flyer account and give me better discount for continued service to your brand.

The last two weeks have been a blur.

I can't believe that two weeks have passed already. I'm head down into a large app for Silktide Studios. All in Java - Hibernate is taking the brunt of the db duties nicely.

Highlight of last week was STP's pointing to the direction of this blog and my minor rantet on the lack of DOB info in Twitter sign ups.

This morning was getting back up to speed with Ruby On Rails. I tend to pick it up and then put it down. In my "I must learn at least one language this year" thoughts, I really should get Ruby under my belt.

Twitter data mining, there's one element missing.

I've been umming and ahhing over this one for a week or so and the immediate answer just wasn't in my field of vision. There's lots of talk about data mining Twitter feeds as a use for company feedback. SAP already have something called the "sentiment engine" as part of their Business Objects Text Analysis suite that was using the Twitter API's to gather information on a company or product and predict what the buzz was.

Twitter signups are lacking one major piece of information and that's an age range for user accounts. It makes slicing any form of decent information a real challenge. Facebook at least asks you for a date of birth but extracting it something I have never tried.

Tesco learned the hard way about not knowing age segmentation when the Clubcard was in its early days. Pensioners were not wanting money off vouchers for Coca Cola as they simply didn't drink the stuff. They weren't quiet about it either. Localisation would work well with Twitter analysis as you can define a geocode radius to the result set.

So we can easily find out what people think about our products but never find out what age they possibly could be.

Original blog post on the Sentiment Engine in the Insurance Technology Blog.
More on the SAP BOTA here.