The basics

Twitter is a realtime platform on which you can share what you’re doing in less than 140 caracters. Using it is as simple as pronouncing its name: you create an account on http://twitter.com and start feeding it with your status, like “I’m eating noodles” or “Can’t remember my PIN code”. Each time you feel like sharing what you’re doing, you log on Twitter and update your status. You can follow people’s statuses and people can follow yours. This way you stay updated in real time of what everybody’s doing around you.

The power of APIs

Twitter alone works well, but the smartest move was to build a powerful API for the web service. As I explained, illustrated and demonstrated in previous posts, a good web service must escape from its very own URL and start spreading all over the web (and beyond) through a powerful, reliable and secure API. Twitter has one and it works. Dozens of apps have been developped based so far: some of them enhance Twitter’s default features (like adding pictures or creating groups of Twitterers), some bring Twitter to the desktop (mainly AIR apps), some mash up Twitter’s data with anything else, etc. Twitter can now be fed from other websites, from your browser, from your mobile phone. Twitter’s API made Twitter more reachable, more flexible and dramatically increased its presence. As confirmed by Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, Twitter API traffic is 10 times Twitter’s site.

Early criticisms

Twitter encountered early criticisms - some of them justified. The service has often been down in the past - see TechCrunch’s archive - which caused legitimate anger in the blogosphere. Some pointed the very language Twitter is built in (Ruby) and accused it of being too slow. Some attempted to describe how the very thing Twitter does makes it so hard to scale. Twitter’s former architect was heavily criticized for not being able to properly manage Twitter’s scaling. The very fact that Twitter has been early criticized is the best indicator of the tremendous interest early adopters had in the product. You’ll never see such hate directed towards a web service no one cares about.

Shown by big names

I have to admit I’ve been quite amazed to see CNN’s Richard Quest naturally looking at his laptop in the middle of Quest Means Business and readout recent Twitter updates about its very show. TV is an old and established media: not only does it show off Twitter to millions but it also participate in establishing Twitter to the rank of indispensable media. I doubt whether Facebook will ever make it to a TV show for what it really offers - of course Facebook will make it for Zuckerberg’s karma or the challenges of preserving online intimacy.

A Twitter ecosystem

Twitter is part of the palette of services covered by social media consultants: people are making money out of Twitter through consulting fees. Freelancers are also showing a growing interest in offering Twitter freelance services: some webdesigners seem to be specialized in customizing Twitter accounts, another fancy name for building static pictures shown as the profile’s background. Modern design weblogs are integrating Twitter backgrounds in their traditional lists posts and there’s even a gallery dedicated to Twitter backgrounds.

Vision and monetisation

There is no official monetisation strategy announced yet, but it is said that Twitter wouldn’t be sold for everything in the world. So there’s a huge potential. The trendy analysis is to compare Twitter to Google and explain that Twitter is a realtime search engine whereas Google only searches in published websites and documents. It is true that it takes more time to write a blog post than to update a Twitter status. In a way, Twitter is like Reuters by and for individuals and it has shown its power during 2008’s earthquake in China. We could imagine scientists checking out earthquake-related statuses on Twitter.

Spam

As shown in a recent article on RWW, Twitter users can be victim of spam. Spam stinks but it only goes where traffic goes. Spam forces the application to evolve and fight back to protect its users and, along with scaling, is one of the major challenge every big web service has to tackle. Again, had there been no buzz and no growing fame for Twitter, there would certainly have been no spam.

The shorter the better

The main reason of Twitter’s success is surely its 140 caracters limit. Users are forced to cup the crap and only write what matters. This is perfectly in line with the behaviour of online people who don’t read but scan - I would be very glad to know you have takent the time read my post so far but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn you have only scanned the titles. Time matters and keeping it short ensures it can be updated in real time.

As far as I’m concerned though, I still can’t remind to feed my Twitter account with fresh data. I would definitely need one of these Firefox plugins to update my status directly from the browser since browsing Twitter’s very website is still far from natural for me.

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The four winners have been randomly selected among people who left comments using the following query where, of course, XXX stands for the actual post_ID of the contest post:

SELECT comment_ID, comment_author, comment_author_email
FROM comments
WHERE comment_post_ID = XXX
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 4

And the four lucky guys winning 250 free business cards each (courtesy of Uprinting.com) are:

• Steve Robillard
• Aetoric Design
• Michael Saganowski
• chris

Congratulations! They will all receive an email soon with further details about their prize.

Again, thanks to everyone for having participated.

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Happy new year 2009 to all my fellow readers! To celebrate this coming year, nemetral.net has tweaked its CSS file and offers you this fresh redesign focused on asthetics and readability.

Win free business cards

With the help of UPrinting.com, I offer a giveaway of 1000 free business cards! To participate, simply leave a comment to the present post stating what you would do with free business cards. Then we will select four answers and give them 250 free business cards each*.

The deadline for the comments is set to Friday 30th January at midnight.

A thumbs up in Digg or Delicious or any social goodness would be greatly appreciated.

Above all, don’t forget to leave a valid email in your comment!

I leave my comment now!

UPrinting is a trusted online printing company committed to providing a high quality printing experience at affordable prices. They make nice Business Cards. Be sure to spread the word about Uprinting’s Business Cards printing services!

* Business cards will be shipped for free towards United States and Canada only.

History of redesigns

This redesign of nemetral.net being the 4th one since the creation of the blog, here is a little retrospective of the different CSS dresses you could see over the last year.

Good luck for the contest.. and be sure to spread the word!

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1. Explore the niche

Nemetral.net is a blog dedicated to out-of-the-ordinary posts on and about webdevelopment, with a strong focus on clarity and education. Contrary to most other blogs, the posts written here are supposed to mature but not to get outdated: by tackling issues generally beyond day-to-day webdevelopment (like deep explanations about coding techniques or introductions to architectural patterns), the posts are aimed at satisfying demanding readers even months after they were originally published. This blog is complementary to mainstream “flow” devblogs and targetting readers desiring to step back and take the time to examine specific issues related to webdevelopment.

2. Write bimonthly posts on design and code

To my view, design can’t be separated from code and this blog will keep on publishing articles about both sides of webdevelopment. This resolution therefore consists in clarifying the frequency of posts on nemetral.net: there will be new posts twice a month.

3. Redesign

A new design is on its way, totally original and, as usual, created from scratch. It will be launched to celebrate the New Year and will come along with an update to Wordpress 2.7. Here is a sneak peek:

4. Expand

More and more topics are to be covered: step-by-step tutorials on how to handle CodeIgniter, discussions about PHP frameworks and architecture of webapps, analysis of design trends, howtos and introductions to non-mainstream tips and techniques. Nemetral.net may also start publishing guests’ posts as well as posts answering readers’ needs: don’t be afraid to ask an explanation on something you don’t understand, and I would be extremely please to write a full post on that specific topic, as I’ve already done.

5. Secret project

2009 is gonna a busy year, but I really wish I will find the time to kick off that secret sideproject I have in mind for months and which I have somewhat started to design. Yes, it’s gonna be a webapp, and yes it’s gonna rock!

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This is now over: Google has officially accepted my humble name as having its own meaning. What a rocking piece of news! I’ve officially added a new word to the not evil Big Brother.

The funny was: back in the time people used to see the suggestion line, a plain Google search for “nemetral” used to bring back some 900+ references, whereas now the number of references found surprinsingly went down to 700+. In other words: the total number of references is not key to being recognized. That’s because of overlapping references: you’d better have 700+ references coming from 200 websites than 900+ which are all pages of a mere 100 websites.

Google is a first step, but there’s much more to be done. When checking Pressflip.com after having read some RWW presentation on it, a search for “nemetral” brought me back to the good ol’ joke. See below!

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However, I don’t fully agree with the point of this post. Here are my 2 cents: most webdesigners won’t find their clients online; to my view, traditionnal “real-world” networking is still the best way to get new clients and believe me, to non-techie eyes, little difference is made out of a portfolio and HUMAN attitude is much more important; so unless you’re absolutely willing to grab the job of redesigning the website of a high-tech web 2.0 superstar startup, there is less need to separate ourselves from the pack. The separation is already a fact due to our respective (and unique) HUMAN networks. I’m often surprised by the number of people I know who design websites and get paid for that without even having an online portfolio.

My point here is to emphasize the fact that for the rest of us, there’s little probability to close a deal online with tech-savvy clients anyway. Looking elsewhere than on screen, you realize that most of the world is still less than partially connected : will your future prospects ask you for pixel perfect cross-browsing experience back to IE 4.0 and meticulously check the validity of your markup? Developping one app to start to get known online is good, but this should be done on your extra free-time only, for you don’t have 100 million guys out there to outperform with a brand new app. Instead, try to develop your human network and get known within your existing customer’s customers or friends. This is how you stand apart, for your network is unique. And this will surely bring you some more work.

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Here is the thing.

3 questions:

• how much time do you spend each day to go to the websites you like?
• once you’re on the said websites, how much time do you waste screening the webpages to find new information?
• are you sure you’re not forgetting a few websites in your daily checking routine?

In case you’ve answered “yes” to at least one of the questions above, reading the following will be extremely useful for you.

1 answer:

RSS reverses the whole checking process: instead of going to the websites to check what’s new on them, just let the websites come to you and deliver the news! The secret? Feeds. Feeds are files containing only the content recently published on a website: each time new content is posted on a website, its feed will be updated. Today, most websites generate at least one RSS feed (some generate several thematic feeds; for example, this very website generates one main feed and also feeds per categories). To benefit from these feeds, you will need a RSS aggregator. Once you’ve downloaded a desktop-based aggregator or created an account on an online one, you will be able to gather all the feeds you like on this aggregator.

The final result is: to know what’s going on on your favorite websites, just fire up your aggregator and check all feeds at once in a single place.

As all blogs, mine generates a RSS feed. You can grab it here.

In case you still have a few minutes to devote to this fantastic way of saving you literally several hours a week, why not watching this video which explains what I’ve written above in a maybe funnier way?

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