Code and Coffee

There has been a lot of buzz lately about Twitter, the micro blogging service. They made a play to acquire FriendFeed before Facebook beat them. They are releasing Geolocation API’s to developers, and now Co Founder Biz Stone said that you can expect pay business Twitter accounts by the end of the year.

Now do not get me wrong, this is cool, especially since this can go in several directions on what these accounts will offer. I understand that Twitter has been under pressure, mostly from reporters, to formulate a business plan and make profits. So, yes, these accounts may help with that. However, as a developer I would rather see Twitter unleash its data to developers. I mean no more API throttling, and give access to other statistics and functions. Why? Well if we have learned anything from Facebook, arguably Twitters biggest competitor, is that if you give developers access they will build really cool stuff, and it turn increase traffic to your site making it more relevant and giving you the ability to monetize.

Look at all that has already come out of Twitter, services like URL shortening, and how many other cool sites? I myself am working on a Twitter base service, RTPeeps.com, and would love un restricted access to their API.

Maybe these business accounts will have a higher threshold for the API. I can only hope.

Not a day goes by that I do not see more that one article in my RSS feeds along the lines of the sky is falling and everyone should move underground. Turn on any news outlet on your TV, and you will see the same thing. Everyone wants a story, everyone wants there to be a huge news story, when really there is nothing to report on. I do not get it.

So yesterday it was all about the BBC article that reported on how Peer Analytics did a study to find out that 40% of tweets on Twitter were useless. That of course led to numerous articles, tweets, blog posts, on how “Social Media is Dying”. Funny enough, a lot of them were from big outlets like eWeek, and News.com.

So the basis of this study that Peer Analytics did, is for two weeks they took a random survey of 2000 tweets and classified them into several categories, and determined that 40% of tweets are crap. Well, I really do not even know where to start here, but I will give it a shot:

1. 2,000 tweets in compared to the amount of tweets that Twitter takes on in a day is no where near a reasonable enough sample to make your result conclusive. Additionally you only polled every 30 minutes, and did so for a limited time frame in the day, and for two weeks! TWO WEEKS!
2. You were biased in how you categorized the tweets. A tweet like ‘Joe is getting coffee’ may be utterly irrelevant to you and you would there for categorize it as junk, when you are not Joe’s friend. If you were Joe’s friend that might be important, because you could meet him for coffee. Maybe you should have done some social graphing of Joe’s friends and seen how many were local to him in distance that might find that tweet relevant.
3. You “40%” number, that as I stated above is highly inaccurate really means nothing anyway. I would gander that if you were to go to Google, which has the largest database of websites on the Internet, they would tell you that more than 40% of those sites are total junk and useless. However, that does not mean the Internet as a whole is useless, and it most certainly does not mean that the Internet is dying and people are packing up their cable modems in order to trade them in and to go back to newspapers, Playboy, and a pager.
4. Lastly, you just polled Twitter. Twitter by no means represents “Social Media” all together. Facebook, MySpace (arguably), Friendfeed, Brightkite, TwitPic, Digg, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Flickr, Picasa, Orkut.com, Meetup.com, Xanga.com… the list goes on and on and on.

So please, next time do a little more research. Be involved in the Twitter space actively on a daily and even hourly basis if you are going to make some “study” about it. And for all those news outlets: eWeek, News.com I am looking at you, instead of reporting that “The Sky is Falling” just to sell ads, I would rather see you write an article like this that tears into the study, and challenges it. But then again, I could not find one of writers that wrote about this article on Twitter.

Well it’s been a while since my last post, and I apologize for that. I have been very busy in my personal life, and any time in front of the computer has been spent working on RTPeeps.com; expected to launch soon.

I have been working a ton on my home machine lately, and have a local web server setup on once of my Macs. Well there are a ton of backend cron scripts for RTPeeps.com and even though I am not scared of the command line, a visual representation for the cron in OSX has been a huge helper. I have been using Cronnix for this purpose. You should check it out if you work in the cron a lot. It helps out a bunch.