My 5.000th twitter follower: Archie!

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The Easter bunny had a great present in store for me this year: a couple of days ago, I was about 100 followers short of 5k. So I announced that my 5.000th follower would receive a free review of a site of his choice – but instead of a text review I am going to show you some pictures, and I'm honored to announce that the said person is not a human being, but a famous internet dog. Welcome Archie! And Archie does not run a blog himself, but he stars in a large number of great pictures, so I decided to post a selection of my favorite Archie photos. All shots have been taken by Phreak 2.0, the other end of Archie's leash.

Mr. Tweet: find those like-minded folks

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mtbannerOf all twitter add-on services, Mr. Tweet has surprised me most during the last week. That basic aim of the service is to let you find folks in whose tweets you might be interested in. Since twitter is still growing so rapidly, topic-specific selection becomes more and more inevitable. Yet while I'm quite sure that in the long run the retweet-rate will act as twitter's “backlink factor”, Mr. Tweet introduces a well thought-through recommendation system.

Basically, Mr. Tweet is one of those services you have to trust enough to hand over your twitter account data – that's the one thing I don't quite like about it, yet still the surplus value is great. On each twitter users profile page a number of statistical data presents an overview of the type of twitter who's at work here: Updates per day, percentage of conversations, posted links plus additional notes (like “usually follows back”) give a better impression about the realness/spammyness of any account:

mrtweet

And there's more: the service regularly provides very interesting twitter tutorials as well as suggestions for new follows – and these work really well in comparison to what Twitter itself has to offer:

Twitter's suggestions for me include a grocery store, the microblog of an online shoe store CEO and a mommy blogger. On the other hand, Mr. Tweet has actually recommended people I have met or at least know professionally.

The founders of the company refer to their service as a personal networking agent, yet while this label sounds a bit exaggerated, some truly juicy candy is hidden inside the recommendation system: Mr. Tweet encourages its users to ask for recommendations by other users and to issue these to their own favorites users. Such recommendations are tweets which look like this:

#MrTweet I recommend @username because [insert reason here]

Not only do these messages raise awareness for ones account, their overall number is also used by Mr. Tweet's follower algorithm which determines the follow-suggestions. Besides, you get to know some nice bits and pieces about other tweepers – so in other words: please go to Mr. Tweet and recommend me! :mrgreen:

Since I really like the service and the idea, I'll recommend one of my favorite twitter friends each day for the next two weeks. Using Tweetlater, that's a breeze – even the scheduling option of the free version are great, but to harness the full power of pre-tweeting, I highly recommend the pro version, which enables you to schedule replies and direct messages.

Want some recommendation love? Since I'm a big fan of reciprocal network building, of course I'll gladly return to favor if you write a recommendation for me!

Old Man Stewart shakes his fist at Twitter

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Comedian Jon Stewart has his popular character “Old Man Stewart” explain our favorite Microblogging Service. Why is everybody at congress going crazy about 140 chars, especially congress? And why is everybody on Grunter these days? This is just hilarious! Read more

Twestival Vienna: The Movie

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twestival Vienna videoDan aka @MountainDan aka The next Stephen Spielberg uploaded his video about Twestival Wien to Vimeo – expect some pure HD Goodness! Very smooth job – and I'm not just saying that because Dan interviews me as well :mrgreen: I cannot help the feeling that we just recently became aware of the tip of the iceberg called micro-blogging. And the fact that it's possible to organize such an event in a couple of days and to raise almost 500 Euros demonstrates that – as opposed to what culture critics don't get tired of repeating since the age of print media – the power of media can be used for good! Read more

Welcome, dear new follower!

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I recorded this 1-minute introduction video for all my fellow tweet-geeks: micro blogging is great, and it's even more fun if you can put a face to the name. So this is how datadirt (that would be me) rolls:

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Pownce shuts down – And the moral of the story?

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pownce shuts downMicroblogging-platform Pownce announced its shutdown on 15th of December yesterday. The company was bought by Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and TypePad. The team will continue to work for Six Apart on new projects – seems the company saw no light at the end of the infamous twitter-tunnel: while Pownce hat a couple of unique features to offer, the community never reached the critical size that turns microblogging-fun into a profitable business.

Pro-users who had to pay 20$ per year for premium features will be notified via e-mail, a new export features enables powncers to export their blog for future re-import into TypePad and/or WordPress, check the official pownce blog for details. My personal grief is strictly limited, as I wasn't a regular user. Why would I? Contrary to blip.fm I didn't see much value in maintaining a second microblogging account; Twitter is already consuming enough of my time. And I was not the only one to abandon ship:

I

Twitter: cosmetic skin updates

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While US, Indian and Australian users are still able to fully use twitter's great SMS features, European twitter fans dearly miss the fastest and most direct way to receive updates, a proven system that even works with a 10 year old mobile. I was pretty shocked about the seemingly impossible mission to find a partner for the European market, as one would guess that players like T-Mobile should actually be pretty interested in hugging twitter closely. And I don't believe that a few cosmetic design touches will make up for missing SMS support. I hope that twitter finds a way to enable short message service usage in Europe again, but on the other hand that's the best market-entry point for competitors, as long as they are able to offer SMS integration.

There's no doubt I like the new design – no major surprises in here, just a few investments into the future:

The most significant change you'll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we've moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we'd run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won't see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).

The completely unnecessary archive tab has been removed (finally – it showed exactly the same tweets that are listed on the personal profile page), some more Ajax is supposed to speed up page loading and the customizable design editor has evolved, featuring a couple of standard templates. The “fave” and “archive” icons have not disappeared completely, but they only become visible now when the mouse pointer hovers a tweet.

Like most power tweeters, I don't care much about those things – I don't know a single heavy user who is actually using the web interface, so the look of the skin is not really a big topic here. There's a large number of clients (from iPhone to Linux) available, and brilliant little pieces of software like Twhirl make twittering a lot more fun. I'm really curious about the new features, and I'm pretty sure the next release will not just be cosmetic one.

btw: Friendfeed bought some new clothes as well.

Plugin.Mania: WP-dTree

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Ever been jealous of you neighbour's miraculous dTree? Oh, I see – you have no clue what a dTree is. Well, those things don't grow in gardens, that's for sure: we're talking Scriptaculous here: dTrees are the nifty little menu structures with the “+”-signs that make hierarchies expand or collapse.

No more need for manuel coding, WP-dTree by a guy who calls himself “Plugin Author” does the trick:

WordPress

twhirl: sometimes twitter needs a break

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The really annoying thing about the otherwise gorgeous thwirl client is its inability to pause the live-feed: on my windows mobile pda I use tiny twitter.

The client updates my contact feed every 5 minutes – but it does not auto-scroll, which means that when I start reading again I start exactly where I left off, scrolling through all the new tweets.

I really miss this option on twhirl: in my opinion, one of twitter's key-strength is the overview-factor… but with twhirl, I allways have to scroll back. New tweets are marked with an asterisk, but still I miss my “pause”-button…