What is Twitter?

If you are a lot younger that  am (and who isn’t?) then you probably already understand what Twitter is. For the geezers in the audience, imagine one giant worldwide chat room feed that is search-able. A chat room where the messages are somewhat temporary and brief (140 characters or less) and where you can filter out everybody except those few who you are specifically interested in.

A lot of messages on Twitter are simply personal status updates — what the twit is doing now, his opinion of some experience that just happened to him/her etc. However, with the people I’ve decided to follow, Twitter is much more like a bunch of super-talented, super-intelligent people pointing out items they find interesting or thought provoking. In general, I’ve tended to follow famous computer programmers and science fiction authors. But I also follow people I find that are in my business or live near Vero Beach. And then there are those who I just find really odd or bizarre — purely for the entertainment value.

For awhile I followed the user @cwalken who was impersonating Christopher Walken. You were never sure if it was him or not. The tweats were quite bizarre and if it wasn’t Walken you found yourself hoping that this was what he was really like in real life. Alas, he was finally revealed as a talented imposter. I still follow the @formerlycwalken and his flashes of brilliance now seem to be fewer are farther between somehow. But every once in awhile he can turn in a doozy.

I also was amused by the recent twitter war between CNN and Ashton Kutcher – a race to see who could assemble the greatest number of followers. It was a reasonably close contest but Ashton came out on top. I hear that @mrskutcher also has quite a following.

Use Twitter to announce product availability

I read a news story this morning about Korean Taco trucks in Los Angeles (no we don’t have those in Vero Beach yet :/) that announce their current location and menu specials via Twitter. Trucks that don’t tweat are losing out to those that do. Restaurant advertising is the most often cited example of using Twitter to attract more people to your business.

I have installed an extension in this WordPress-based blog that generates an automatic tweat each time I publish a blog article. So that’s another example of announcing product availability on Twitter. To do this successfully you must have either a very large following or you must imagine what people might be searching for and use those terms in your announcement. For example, if you are a local retail business you could include the words “vero beach” somehow in your announcement so that people searching will find it. Or many will use tags like “get 20% off any menu item at Happy Family #verobeach next 3 hours”.

Prostitutes kicked off Craigslist find Twitter

In the wake of the Boston serial killer who used Craigslist to find his prostitute victims, that site has now deleted its “erotic services” section. Is it any coincidence that I am now seeing my “Vero Beach” search feed featuring prostitutes alongside the real estate brokers normally lurking there? I think not.

This brings up a major point about Twitter… there are an awful lot of commercial messages on Twitter and this would tend to spoil a medium to some extent. But on Twitter things are a little different. You would normally never see such messages unless you are performing a search. So consumption of advertising is managed by the reader to a very large extent. Twitter advertising is much more highly targeted to the interests of the reader than, for example, the context driven ads on Google search results. This is a huge advantage.

Finding new friends and customers

TwitterHawk is a very interesting new service that is basically a bot that watches the entire Twitter feed looking for telltale words and phrases that you might want to respond to. The service is a little controversial in that it could be used to assist with the insertion of a blatant commercial message into what would otherwise be a somewhat private coversation (private in that it would be lost in the tremendous deluge of the public feed). Such a use of the service would be a violation of the terms of service, but still….

But you can use this sort of service to look for people who share your interests or your business focus. Its akin to having a friend at a party tell you that that guy over on the other side of the room is a computer programmer looking for work. You have an open position so you might want to go over and introduce yourself. This can be a great tool to finding new friends and expanding your horizons. And its free unless you use it to send automatic messages — something I don’t think is very useful anyway (unless you are a spammer, of course).

Twitter Clients

The twitter experience is much enhanced if you use a capable and feature-rich client. I use TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop, depending on my mood. With each of these programs you can set up a separate feed windows, each with its own search criteria. TweetDeck also has a window that suggests some search terms deemed significant from the public feed. Its seems that this should be a more useful capability than it actually is in practice. I don’t understand why or how it selects some things over others. But these two clients do add significantly to the Twitter experience over and above using the web interface.

My Favorite Twits

formerlyCwalken / Christopher Kutcher (so he says – but this is the original name of Ashton Kutcher)

pennjillette / Penn Jillette (genius magician)

ryancarson / Ryan Carson (web 2.0 expert)

garyvee / Gary Vaynerchuk (outrageous wine store owner 2.0 and motivational speaker)

jasonfried / Jason Fried (programmer)

textfiles / Jason Scott (archeologist of computer tech)

codinghorror / Jeff Atwood (programmer)

scalzi / John Scalzi (science fiction author)

neilhimself / Neil Gaiman (science fiction author)

zoblue / zo.blue (Zulema) (web site developer)

thesarahcoleman / Sarah Coleman (very talented artist)

foofighters / Foo Fighters (rock band)

newscientist / New Scientist (science news)

Oh, and don’t forget to follow @bitlizard if you get involved with Twitter! But be warned… it will be a bit boring when compared to those mentioned above.

Remember the Milk is just such an application. Its a task list manager – an application that almost all of us have used at some time or another. Make a list, check off the tasks as you complete them, rinse and repeat. Simple… and RTM can be used in exactly this way. But for those desiring more, there’s plenty of horsepower under the hood here. Do you need to prioritize? Just select some tasks and press 1, 2 or 3. Do you want to keep track of a due date? Just select a task and enter “2 weeks from Friday” in its “Due” field. Do you want to establish tags for searching? No problem. Recurring tasks? Enter “20th of each month” into the “Repeat” field. Do you need reminders sent to your cell phone? Suffice it to say this is a task list on steriods.

But oh so simple and accessible. The thing I like the most is the natural language approach to the setting of due dates and establishing repetition. This is a sweet bit of code. In my pipeline integrity application “ProActive”, establishing these data items is much less convenient — i.e. a cumbersome calendar control or, for repetition, a combination or 3 or more controls. Take a lesson, Ron, sheesh.

RTM offers a free version to get you started. However, the “Pro” version is only $25 a year. Well worth the price if just to insure that these guys keep churning out the great software.

But anyway, even though FOWA is short for “Future of Web Apps” (and although there was some mention of that here and there) this was a show about software development; how to do it better, how to get paid, what you are doing right, where you are going wrong, and just what the hell were you thinking???? This was just what I needed personally. Reminders to step back and rethink the process, measure and improve. Plus a good kick in the pants there at the end courtesy of Gary Vaynerchuk.

I really enjoyed Jason Fried and Joel Spolsky. Both were predictably great. This is the first time I’ve heard either of them speak, though I knew who Jason Fried was and I’ve been a customer of Joel Spolsky’s CityDesk and FogBugz for years. Both had great ideas for improving software development and, in fact, business processes in general for that matter. Say Joel, that “General Motors” style of organizing the developer space — that bears a striking resemblance to what I endure daily. Gotta make some changes there.

Jason, Joel and Gary were the highlights of the show for me. I enjoyed the Virgin guy’s “People are the new brand” idea. But I can’t glean anything actionable from it. (Except that I opened a FaceBook account for the first time today so maybe something stuck.)  A lot of people seemed to be very impressed with the Atlas demo by the guy from Cappuccino. To me this was a demo just like a lot I’ve seen in the past that appear to show something akin to drag and drop programming. These products demo nicely, but get them outside the confines of a demo and you start to see the drastic limitations. Then the shine comes off the apple so to speak. So color me skeptical — and I definitely do NOT think software development just changed very much. That comment by Ryan Carson was just a little over the top, in my view. But it was very good theater. And maybe I’m wrong about Atlas. Time will tell, I suppose.

I also enjoyed the demo of Ubiquity which is an wonderful FireFox plugin that definitely breaks new ground. I actually installed it a few months ago and had a play with it. It is definitely impressive. If you use FireFox you most certainly need to check this puppy out.

I wish I was better at networking and going up to strangers and introducing myself.  There was no shortage of interesting looking people to talk to. And after one of these shows I always feel a little disappointed in myself that I didn’t interact with the people more. Another one of those personal things to work on, I guess…

One of the benefits of being a minor mover and shaker in the early days of personal computers is that I got to personally meet a number of people now considered legends. My path crossed with Bill Gates of Microsoft fame a number of times. I had a product named “Show Partner“, a graphical presentation program for MSDOS which was like the eccentric (and possibly senile) grandfather to modern programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint. But it was a compelling enough application in those days to win a bundle deal with the Microsoft Mouse.

In fact, the Brightbill-Roberts business in those days was chiefly centered around turning these Mouse Show Partner users into full-on Show Partner F/X users at $300 a pop. I think it was around 1986 or so when IBM attempted to increase its dominance of the pc market by introducing its PS/2 line of computers. The PS/2 line had a number of enhancements not the least of which was drastically better graphics capability. As you might imagine given the sort of program I was authoring, this was a very big deal for me. But, try as we might, we could not get IBM to disclose the technical details to us for its new computers. We were a direct competitor to one of their own products — Storyboard. And perhaps that coupled with our small size made us beneath consideration in IBM’s eyes.

Enter Microsoft. They were working away on making sure everything in the mouse box would work with the new PS/2 line. Without disclosure, the update to Show Partner was going to be coming in well after the PS/2′s release. So began my short but (I’d like to think) illustrious career at Microsoft. I resigned from my own company and hired on at Microsoft after the attorneys had reviewed everything. I lived out of the Residence Inn in Redmond for 3 months, flying back to Syracuse every once in awhile when circumstances dictated I had to be there. And I feverishly worked on adding support for the additional “VGA” graphics modes of the PS/2.

Long story short… a fully updated Show Partner shipped with the new Microsoft Mouse on the same day the first PS/2 computer shipped. IBM’s own Storyboard update did not ship for another month after that… the schmucks. Ah, yes. Glory days.

So during this period there were 5 buildings on the Microsoft campus with, I think, 2 or 3 more under construction. I remember attending a full Microsoft company meeting in a high school gymnasium (yes, the entire company fit inside at the time) where I was referred to as “half an employee” by Bill in his speech… as in “and the hardware department has now grown to 9 and a half employees (heh heh)”; an inside joke about my coming to work there as an end-around IBM’s stonewalling.

I met with Bill Gates several times while working there and a few times after leaving the company, returning to my own fledgling firm. It must be tough being Bill – he is invariably going to be the smartest guy in any room he walks into. Not to mention the richest. Its going to be difficult for anyone to relate to him as a peer in any given situation. Certainly I did not consider myself to be his peer in programming, business or anything else. Ha! Except maybe in poker. I think Steve Brightbill actually came out on top in a poker game that included Bill at a trade show in San Diego one year. Steve was extremely proud of that as I recall.

Bill Gates also had some behaviors that I now associate with mild autism or Aspergers syndrome. The rocking and repetitive movements while concentrating, for example. These behaviors always seem to come part and parcel with super-extraordinary intelligence, at least among those few geniuses I’ve had the good fortune to meet. On the other hand, Bill was reasonably extroverted and gregarious. And he is and was a fine public speaker. Witness his recent stunt of releasing a swarm of mosquitos into an auditorium as part of his TED speech on malaria. These traits are very un-Aspergers like. So I definitely consider Bill Gates to be one of a kind — all the good stuff and none of the downside.

In the final days of Brightbill-Roberts & Co., as things were starting to come unglued, I went back to the Redmond campus on my return from Seoul where I had been helping a company translate HyperPAD into Korean Hangul. I stopped off to interview for the post of managing the multimedia department there. But as I talked with the programmers there I realized I really had no insight into the stuff they were working on. Microsoft Windows was making my existing programming skills obsolete and I didn’t know a filter graph from a hole in the ground. But the trip was not at all a waste of time as I got to pay a final visit to all the friends I had made at Microsoft over the years. I have many fond memories of my time there.

I signed up with Twitter a few days ago and was not sure at first whether I was going to get anything out of it. Nobody I know is a Twitter user except my wife, and she doesn’t use it very much if at all. But I found a few people who I have heard of and who I think are quite interesting. And I must say, its making a believer out of me. I’m running into some interesting stuff that I would probably have missed without it. So I think its definitely worth your while to try it out. And look ol’ bitlizard up while yer there!

FreshBooks provides an api (application programming interface) for manipulating the functions of the service from another program. You could, for example, write an application for your PocketPC-based cell phone that would allow you to enter an order from a customer while at his location and have FreshBooks deliver the invoice instantly via email. Or you could review your client’s payment history, log time against a project, add travel expense, etc. If you were proprietor of Accounting software, you could offer a link to FreshBooks as a replacement or alternative for printing invoices and envelopes.

My wrapper classes allow a C# programmer to easily access the functionality of the FreshBooks.com web site. The first few classes were started by Donald Halloran and I later picked them up and extended them to cover the entire api. I also created a test routine that exercised a significant portion of the methodology. The project is being released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, which means it is free software that can be used for any purpose, free or commercial. Derivitive works, such as a repackaging of the library or expanded the library to include additional functions, must also be distributed under the Lesser GPL.

And let me give a shout-out to the team at FreshBooks.com. They have scarily reposonsive customer service and the developers are fully engaged and communicating. I admire them a great deal and would like to reshape my own development team along similar lines.

Wicked Cool PHP

Books on programming are not typically the most enjoyable things to read. However, I can’t help but be very entertained by . I bought this book in combination with one of those giant programming reference books for PHP. But I started reading this one first because I was intrigued by the title.  Now at the end of this book I find that I am getting quite proficient with the PHP language and have not felt the need to even crack open the giant reference. I think I will just put it up on the shelf for future reference. Meanwhile I can see the my copy of Wicked Cool is already dog-eared and showing some wear.

Now for the disclaimer – I am a seasoned programmer and master of many programming languages old and new. So what suffices for me may be different than what might suffice for, as an example, a script kiddie trying to patch a php-based web site.

But even in that scenario, I think the kid could glean some worthwhile insight into the language, its syntax, and how to use it all in the real world. So I think I will add this to BitLizard’s bizarre Bazaar for the consideration of any programmers who find their way here.

A great way to see what the program can do is to check out the tutorials on the product site. Or there’s some also some great stuff on the fan site gimp-tutorials.net.

So I saved myself and my company $700 today and got the job done in fine style. Can’t beat them apples!

But perhaps this year I will add significantly to this map. I have prospective gigs in China, Pakistan and Azerbaijan. I don’t know whether any of them will pan out, but time will tell.