Philoking.com

This is a little something I found on accident recently. For 80% vanity and 20% link longevity, I decided I set up my own URL shortener for Philoking.com at pking.me. There is a nice free URL shortener called YOURLS that runs on PHP/MySQL (basically the same setup that will run WordPress.)

Setting this tool up is very simple, only a bit more technical than setting up WordPress itself and once you are in business, you can set up other tools to use it.

This weekend I set everything up and was excited to see cute little pking.me links running around. That, as it turns out, was only a small part of the fun.

I use Tweetdeck to follow Twitter and decided to look into making my own shortener the default for Tweetdeck. It was very simple to do, and once I had, I saw something very interesting.

I had just posted this tweet and then checked my YOURLS admin page to see there had already been 25 clicks on my shortened URL, that’s feedback you can’t get from Google Analytics, at least not right away. It’s pretty interesting to be able to see.

With a little bit of creative querying, you should be able to tell what times your most viewed tweets are, and what URLS or tags draw the most attention. Talk about adding some fuel to your Tweeting intelligently. Nice!

It’s pretty common to see this type of pattern. Usually it’s us geeks who get there first. We were the first to chat online, we had email and digital cameras first, heck, who do you think it was that made online porn go mainstream. Early adopters, or internet pioneers as the more pretentious ones like to call it, are usually the same folks.

Something cool comes along, we pass it along our own little channels, it grows and grows, and eventually someone who isn’t wearing taped up glasses and high water pants notices. That’s what happened with Twitter. I hate to break it to Matt Stenning, the author of the post “Is Twitter Losing Respect?”, but your little special place of geekness was lost long before Trends got screwed up or Direct Message Spam. I can breakdown the spiral in two words: Ashton Kutcher.

But there is something interesting, in this reality, the spiral doesn’t go down, the spiral goes up. Instead of being an internet celebrity with 5 figure followers and moderate notoriety on Digg or Engadget, now the real stars have showed up with 7 figure followers and brought their fans with them.

It was over when they started giving out Twitter IDs on the nightly news, or when every event known to man had a feed. But over isn’t over. Over is the beginning of a new type of social media. Twitter made micro-blogging matter.

The reality is that Twitter has a user base now. And that user base could care less if @JohnReese, @MikeFilsaime, @ChrisBrogan and @ProBlogger took a flying leap off of a mountain. Between the four of them, and their 219k combined followers, they pale in comparison to Oprah’s nearly 2 million.

Those four combined don’t have 1/4 of the followers of the bottom of the top 100. Reality check folks, you were a big fish in a small pond. Just because you can’t keep up, doesn’t mean it’s over.

I wish I could have saved Trent a little time. Having cut my internet teeth in 1993 lurking in IRC chat rooms, I know all too well the kind of people that plague the internet. I say plague because like any social ecosystem there are the deviants that attempt to corrupt it because they cannot find a way to participate in it in a constructive manner. It’s just a sad reality that we have come to accept. So with this, the idiots have ruined it for the rest of us and Trent is leaving Twitter.

Thanks for giving it a shot Trent, I enjoyed it while it lasted and will continue to check out NIN.com from time to time.

In Trent’s case, it was pretty easy to see this coming. Think about it for a minute and you will find that for any system, there will be anarchists who thrive on trying to break down the organized collective. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t value in Trent Reznor’s experiment. That doesn’t mean that I don’t applaud him for the effort. I will miss his presence on Twitter because I enjoyed seeing the human side of the fierce music.

Anonymity Sucks

I bet you hate that one. That’s really the trick though. If you were to look at all of the hate comments I get, and I get a lot, almost all of them are posted with bogus email addresses. I am not a celebrity. I might reach 20,000 people a month with my blog. Trent Reznor reaches millions. Take the hate I get, amplify it by exponential idiots, religious zealots and the Metal Sludge contingents he mentions, and you have a perfect storm of hate. The sad truth is that most of the people spewing this garbage would gush and fawn if they met him in person.

I seriously doubt that if I met one of my haters in public they would walk up, punch me in the face, yell Microsoft sucks and then take away my laptop. That’s what they would have you think. I am often told I am too stupid to own a computer. Yes, I develop software for the largest computer software maker in the world. I create music and artwork on computers and am quite savvy on the little electronic buggers, but obviously a 15 year old Digg user knows much more than me and by that feels the right to banish me from the internet. Riiiiiight.

Facebook Can Help

Facebook is ubiquitous and has something really powerful going for it. People have their friends and family on there. It publishes your activity. I am sure you are wondering what Facebook would have to do with Nine Inch Nails, Digg or Engadget type user communities. Facebook Connect could be the key.

Real Identity

Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

It will be hard to get through the ability to create an account just to hag with, but potentially there could be ways to thwart that. Maybe you have some rules in place like minimum account life, number of friends, etc. Create some way to prove that it’s a person who is actively using it. I guarantee you that the number of hateful profane comments is seriously limited when people you know and have some respect for can see them.

It’s not the answer, just an idea

Adding a big brother element isn’t the right answer. It’s just a thought of where we can start. As awesome as anonymity is when you want to order some weird sex toy or order Viagra, (heh) there are some ways that it is limiting the growth and usefulness of the internet. I guarantee I am not the only one that completely ignores comments on Digg.com. I bet I am not the only one that goes out of my way to avoid getting drawn into a flame thread on a blog. Even in IRC chat on #Wordpress on irc.freenode.net, which is a really valuable forum for people developing with WordPress, there are trolls. They come in and dog people, flood people, and are just simply dicks. If we figure out a way to keep these pricks from hiding behind an ISP and a fake (and probably cooler than they really are) persona, the quality of conversation on the internet will probably increase exponentially.

Alex King’s Twitter Tools Plugin is a must if you are a WordPress Blogger and Twitter user. It’s most compelling feature is that it can automatically post a Tweet when you post a new blog post. This also works for time delayed posts, it Tweets when the post is published. One of the things I didn’t like about it was that it prefixed every blog post with “New Blog Post: “ which is a sure fire way to make sure more than half your followers don’t click it.

The thing is, you have already said what you want to say in your title hopefully, so how about we just Tweet the title and a link? Changing this code comes with one dire warning, you have to keep something in the prefix, that’s how the plugin finds Tweets to create the digest post, so instead of “New Blog Post: “, I am going to change mine to just “BP “.

Editing The Code

There is one class in the source code that defines the settings you can’t change in the UI, that class is called “twitter_tools.” Lines 18-27 define UI items, and 29-36 are supposed to not be end user editable, but we aren’t going to let that stop us.

   1:  class twitter_tools {

   2:      function twitter_tools() {

   3:          $this->options = array(

   4:              'twitter_username'

   5:              , 'twitter_password'

   6:              , 'create_blog_posts'

   7:              , 'create_digest'

   8:              , 'digest_title'

   9:              , 'blog_post_category'

  10:              , 'notify_twitter'

  11:              , 'sidebar_tweet_count'

  12:              , 'tweet_from_sidebar'

  13:              , 'give_tt_credit'

  14:              , 'last_tweet_download'

  15:              , 'doing_tweet_download'

  16:              , 'doing_digest_post'

  17:          );

  18:          $this->twitter_username = '';

  19:          $this->twitter_password = '';

  20:          $this->create_blog_posts = '0';

  21:          $this->create_digest = '0';

  22:          $this->digest_title = __("Twitter Updates for %s", 'twitter-tools');

  23:          $this->blog_post_category = '1';

  24:          $this->notify_twitter = '0';

  25:          $this->sidebar_tweet_count = '3';

  26:          $this->tweet_from_sidebar = '1';

  27:          $this->give_tt_credit = '1';

  28:          // not included in options

  29:          $this->update_hash = '';

  30:          $this->tweet_prefix = 'New blog post';

  31:          $this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.': %s %s';

  32:          $this->last_digest_post = '';

  33:          $this->last_tweet_download = '';

  34:          $this->doing_tweet_download = '0';

  35:          $this->doing_digest_post = '0';

  36:          $this->version = '1.0';

  37:      }

Lines 30 and 31 are what we are concerned with. Line 30 defines the Tweet Prefix. On my blog I changed this to just ‘BP’ to shorten it and get me back some characters. Line 31 defines the format string for the post, I also wanted to get rid of the colon, so I changed it to read:

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.' %s %s';

That’s it, now when your blog publishes, it will post a Tweet that’s a bit more concise and looks more like you wrote it rather than an automation.

It was so subtle, most people didn’t notice. Those who did complained at the top of their lungs. I for one, welcome the change and think it’s the first step in making Twitter more usable.

In case you don’t know, here is the deal. Until yesterday, when someone you follow, replied to anyone, you saw “@soandso this is probably a reply but you don’t know what to, so don’t you won’t get it.”

It was such a problem that a few sites crept up, like TweetConvo that you could paste the url to the Tweet into and it displays the entire conversation in a threaded fashion so you could figure out the context around the Tweet. It’s actually a pretty cool site that is most likely crushed by this development.

Personally I get it. I do understand that it will make it more difficult to find new people to follow based on who your friends talk to, but I am also part of the group that think people “Friend” way too many people as it is.

So as of now, on the web and in 3rd party apps like Tweet Deck, you will no longer see @replies unless you also follow the person being replied to. This should take major strain off the network and make your feed quite a bit cleaner to see. Even if you hate it, get used to it, it’s a change for the better. And tell your friends to #FollowFriday people that they think you should follow!