Alex Bosworth's Weblog

Tweetbe.at live twitter chat

I’ve been working on a side project for Twitter, which I discussed in a previous post - what it is is a live chatstream for twitter, which builds on the #hashtag idea

With tweetbe.at you can see who else is watching a #hashtag and chat with them. You can also fold in other searches or hashtags, or posts from other users into the stream:

The idea is based on the similarities between IRC and twitter, this tries to bridge the gap and add some of the benefits of IRC to twitter. In IRC you can start chatting without having to build a network of friends to chat with, and you can chat about some subjects at some times and then leave them alone at other times.

Right now it’s a proof of concept, but everything should be working mostly ok, and it features oauth integration so you can chat directly from tweetbe.at

You can change channels via the location hashtag ie: http://tweetbe.at/#tv - http://tweetbe.at/#javascript - http://tweetbe.at/#socialmedia

Channels can have added users, searches, hashtags, and also block users from appearing.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

Tweets are serious business

I’ve been working on a new tool for Twitter recently which is actually pretty involved, and this has gotten me seriously into twitter, which I had originally struggled to find any point to.

But twitter is serious business as demonstrated by the #iranelection stuff and even here in Beijing by a service from the US Govt that shows the air quality at our embassy. The ‘official’ numbers from the Chinese govt are characterized by particularly optimistic estimates of the air quality here, so it’s very handy to have some numbers from a more impartial observer.

I actually am worried that the feed will be shut down as it’s been growing more and more popular among Chinese visitors, and today it was featured in the China Daily.

As I’ve been getting into twitter, here are the problems with the service I’ve been working through:

• Tweets are very boring/mundane -> unlike blogs, which I find interesting based strictly on their content, twitter feeds are interesting based on how interesting I find the person, not what they post. Also, being disciplined about not ‘following-back’ has led to an improvement in my twitter feed.
• Following people concentrates too many subjects into a big mess -> I’m not interested in tech stuff or beijing stuff all the time, I want to group the people I follow. The tool I’m working on helps solve this problem by letting me see what different groups of people are talking about.
• It’s not easy enough to find people to follow -> follower lists are full of spammers, twitter searches are becoming full of spam too - wefollow is not used very much and ranking people by follower count is semi-useless. The tool I’m working on helps with this too.
• Twitter’s web interface is very poor -> following and block and unfollowing is very slow and clumsy on twitter.com, so is following threads of conversation, plus many other simple problems, such as no built in url shortener. It’s very tempting for me to try and solve these issues, but so far I’ve only addressed some and I like everyone else just use twitter’s 3rd party tools to get around its shortcomings

Anyways, I hope to be able to launch my 2nd twitter tool pretty soon, and hopefully twitter corp won’t shut this one down for being too subversive!

Single sign on seems to be everywhere now, with federated logins provided by facebook, google, twitter, openid, etc.

In theory this is really good, but I find now on many sites I can’t remember which login I used - did I sign in with facebook or make an account or did I use my google credentials?