Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Qwitter, a tool which informs you when someone unfollows you on Twitter, is likely to break relationships, sometimes before they’ve had an opportunity to prosper. This is the complete opposite to the ethos of the Twitter community.

I first learned of Qwitter (it didn’t have a name at the time) in January, when the developer asked for feedback on the functionality. I thought then, that it was a very smart widgetery piece of functionality. I still like it from a technical perspective. However, I don’t like the idea of a tool that is likely to give some of its users the wrong impression.

How can it give the wrong impression?

1. Some followers subscribe to my RSS feed instead of following on Twitter. I know this because a few of them took to the time to write and say that I shouldn’t be offended if I didn’t see them following me. Some chose RSS so they didn’t miss any of my tweets, whilst others thought I had too much to say and they didn’t want their stream taken up by so many of my tweets.
2. Some people follow/unfollow/follow… depending on the noise level they receive from individuals like me.
3. Some thought they were following me, but weren’t, as the system unsubscribed them for some reason.
4. Some thought I wasn’t following them as they were unable to send me direct messages. I checked and confirmed I was actually following them.

You could argue that Qwitter is a nice way to enable users to nudge friends who they think should be following them, but aren’t. Whilst this might be true for some, it won’t be for most. I’ve been using Twitter for longer than most - before it became a conversational tool. So, I’ve had time to learn all of the above. However, some less experienced, or people with less insight, will undoubtidly get the wrong impression and assume that people have unfollowed them for the wrong reason and without asking why, may reciprocate.

Hello - Paul Carr here, live in Terminal 5 of London’s trendy Heathrow Airport with a special guest post to thank Wubud for kindly agreeing to be drinks sponsor for Smack My Pitch Up.

What?

Smack My Pitch Up - the only tech pitch event happening in San Francisco this Tuesday. The idea is simple… you have 50 seconds to pitch your very worst tech business idea. The word ideas, best presented win exciting (crappy) prizes. A grand prize of $50 is on offer to the very worst best.

More details can be found at The Long Fail.

See you on Tuesday. And, remember, as long as Wubud are paying, drink early, drink often.

I twittered this morning

Bloggers who think posts which are relevant/warrant ‘trackbacks’ to my blog, should quote the stuff they find interesting…

Within a short space of time, I received 6 emails and DMs (including two from journalists) asking if I was referring to them. To ensure I don’t insult anyone or give the wrong impression, I’ve decided to write a slightly longer explanation here, as Twitter’s restricted 140 characters does little to help right now.

Before I continue, I’d like to explain what Trackbacks are and how to use them, as they’re not fully understood by all bloggers and they’re almost always underutilized. Even the most seasoned bloggers don’t make them accessible so others can reference their work easily.

What is a Trackback?

Why reinvent the Wheel?! Wikipedia has a great description

A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

NB. I’ve not only quoted the origin of my source, I’ve also provided a Linkback to the Wikipedia page. Italics are mine.

How to use Trackbacks

It’s simple. Copy the Trackback URL from the blog to which you are going to reference and paste it into the Trackback field provided on the administration page where you’re writing your post. If you can’t find a URL dedicated to Trackbacks you should use the URL for the post. The rest happens automatically. The author of the post to which you refer, will receive an email notification and their blog post will be updated with a link to your post - assuming they’ve enabled that feature of course.

Trackbacks normally appear within comments - click here to see what they look like on this blog. Displaying Trackbacks provides commentators a platform from which to promote their opinion on their own blog. I’m a fan of people writing their own post which has been inspired by another blogger - but only when they provide an opinion, rather than doing a copy ‘n paste.

Some reasons why you might want to write your own post instead of leaving a comment:

1. Your comment is, in your opinion, too long. (I don’t mind long comments - the comments on one of my posts last year fetched over 17,000 in word count)
2. You feel so strongly about something that you wish to solicit opinion from the readers of your own blog
3. You don’t feel comfortable or like leaving comments

It’s standard practice to provide a Linkback to the post from which you were inspired to write an opinion piece. So make sure you always link to your source.

How to implement Trackbacks on your blog

If you have a blog, my advice is to ensure the Trackback URL is the same as the post URL. This will enable others to copy and paste the URL in the address bar instead of having to go searching for the Trackback link. TechCrunch changed it’s blog to include this obvious feature. Read Write Web hasn’t - Look at this post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_buys_shelfari.php - you must scroll down the page to search and find the Trackback, which is http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4747. If they were the same URL you wouldn’t have to go searching and I wouldn’t have just confused you. It’s blogs like this that make Tracbacks more confusing than they ought to be.

When to use Trackbacks to this blog

I appreciate it when people include a Trackback to my blog - it means they rate my opinion on a particular topic and would therefore like me to read their article and potentially post a comment. In fact, I’m flattered - please don’t stop. You just have to look at my tag cloud on the left of this blog to see what’s relevant. Although, you can check out the BIMA and Segala blogs to see what else I write about.

However, some people write posts which are not relevant to me and wish to simply get my attention for some reason. Remember, I get email notifications each time someone links to my blog. If there’s absolutely no relevance I’m going to view it as spam and never return to that blog. Stop doing it. Please.

Earlier today I was contacted by a friend at a major international TV broadcaster - looking for a recommendation for a WAP/Mobile Web development company. My recommended supplier will build the platform that will deliver its entire content for a major brand via mobile. It’s a massive project and they only had 2 hours by which time to appoint a supplier. I hope they get more than 2 hours to deliver the brief.

WAP and Mobile Web are areas close to my heart, as some of you will know - in fact, one of my blog posts on the subject attracted comments that exceeded 17,000 word count from companies such as Google, dotMobi, Microsoft and Opera. So, you’d expect me to rattle off a couple of companies right away, right? No. My mind went completely blank and I couldn’t think of one provider, even though I know lots. So, I sent a message on twitter and emailed Mobile Monday - I did explain that I could only recommend a company I knew. Within minutes I received a direct message (DM) from Tom Hume via Twitter. I know Tom and was delighted to recommend Future Platforms. Tom would have been one of my first choices, if not my first, had I thought about him without the gentle nudge.

Not a bad reason to be on Twitter? That project alone is likely to pay for all of Tom’s time on Twitter. I get asked to recommend agencies and individuals all the time - Twitter is always my first port of call if I need to make an announcement. Isn’t that use case alone, enough to spend a little time on Twitter?

Follow me on Twitter if you want to be driven insane by the noise.

Fire Eagle, a location enabler for social networks is now available to the public. (Don’t mistaken it, for a social network.)

As an end user, Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, it allows other services and devices to update that information or access it. It allows the use of your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services and stuff like that…

As a social network/friend-finder, Fire Eagle enables you to make use of, users’ location - assuming you, or another social network, can capture it on your/their site and store it on Fire Eagle’s. Confused? Just think OpenID and you’ll get it.

For Fire Eagle to be a success, Yahoo! must encourage application developers to adopt it and for developers to make doption for end users seamless. The latter I fear, will not be easy. Like OpenID, a social network must send end users to the Fire Eagle Web site in order to store their location preferences. This is likely to disorientate users as they get shipped off to another brand which has nothing to do with their task in hand. This is the reason OpenID is a great solution for early adopters thus far. Great technical solution. Crap user experience.

I could be wrong of course as I’ve never used it. I’ve only seen a demonstration from Yahoo! It’s the ’shipping off to another brand’s site’ that I dislike, not the technical implementation.