Twibes, Twitter and Viral Propagation

As I do each night (it’s not something I have access to during the day) I fire up Twitter, and today (thanks to @Yoshi123 of Intridea) I discovered Twibes.

Now Twibes is a good idea, nicely implemented and all that, but the real gem here is how much viral activity it creates in Twitter. I created two groups WebConcepts and ShinyThings which cover a couple of primary interest areas for me (WebConcepts being serious and useful web applications, and ShinyThings being gadgets and generally cool distracting techs). In creating those two groups, I probably sent out about 10 tweets which would have drawn followers back to Twibes to start their own groups. Now I have a limited follower base at the moment so the impact would be minimal, but for some Twitter users the reach for a new application is incredible by using this mechanism.

It really is very impressive. The application utilizes twitter as it’s communication layer to handle creating new groups and sending invites, which in turns creates viral traffic that will pull people to their application. Excellent use of both Twitter’s existing infrastructure and dedicated followers.

I was putting together a similar concept for trying to coordinate small events using Twitter (I’ll try to post about it soon) so was very excited to see an application doing this kind of thing very effectively already. If there are other web applications using twitter as a comms channel then feel free to comment here or join the WebConcepts Twibe and let me know.

Miro's New Funding Model – Adopt a Line of Code

This is great – a really clever way of raising funds for an opensource product (probably the cleverest I’ve ever seen). It’s cute, it’s sustainable, it’s absolute gold in the social web (I think it’s more interesting than Susan Boyle – even though hers was a heart touching moment). This is just so much cooler (and certainly a bit heart touching as well).

I’m now a proud new parent of Timbert (see below – at the moment he hasn’t taken my last name as I had to pay through paypal and it didn’t give me a chance to provide my details).

Miro is a great product so I am really happy to see them pull together such a great campaign. I must admit though I would have been tempted to adopt a line of code if the product had been something I thought was ordinary. And now we sit back and wait for someone to start running a similar campaign for some old COBOL banking system – that’d be a laugh

If you too would like to adopt a line of code, head over to the url below and for just $4US/month you can:

https://www.getmiro.com/adopt/

Update:

1. It looks like a lot of people are getting a line of code with the last name of Swartz which probably means a lot of people have having to use paypal.
2. There is an excellent post on the adoption campaign over at ReadWriteWeb

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to feed the little guy…

VoteFlow – A Twitter Friendly Workflow Alternative

There are two things that are true at the moment (among all of the other truisms of the world):

1. Twitter is gaining mass appeal and is going mainstream.
2. Corporates are either looking to use or are already using twitter as a method of communicating with their customers

Which leaves me with a single question:
How are they managing the quality of their communication via this channel?

Why bother? Well to prevent blunders that have the potential to damage a reputation.

An Overview of Workflow
Traditionally, organisations are using workflows in systems to manage the quality of their communication. In general, most users involved with workflow in these systems admit the process is somewhat slow and cumbersome to manage. I remember once when speaking with James Robertson of StepTwo, he felt there was a general unstated acceptance in organisations that workflow doesn’t work (his post is well worth a read).

Whether workflow works or not for the current applications it is being used for is beyond the scope of this post, and not something I will go into. Will it work for the time sensitive “What are you doing now?” style applications like Twitter? I don’t think so. Applying a workflow process that has many eyes checking even 140 characters for correctness, alignment to brand, compliance, etc, will probably turn a “What are you doing now?” into “What I was doing 3 days ago”.

A Twitter Friendly Alternative
So what’s the solution? Well honestly, I don’t know – but I do have an idea or two. I believe workflow processes should only be used to handle information or data that has a relevant flow from A to B to C, and relevant quality checking can happen along the way. Information that needs to be dispersed to a wide audience such as an enterprise’s customer base should travel a different path. Certainly in the case of a tweet I believe using a different paradigm for quality checking is warranted.

One of the primary methods for speeding up the total time an item spends in workflow, is to use parallel workflows where possible. This enables multiple approvers to approve / reject the changes implemented. I believe this can be taken further, where a single parallel step with a wide number of participants can speed up the process even further. A single parallel workflow…. sounds just like a vote – and that’s what I’m thinking of. I will try and elaborate on the ins and outs of the process below.

The Vote Process
In the case of a tweet, let’s say I think my organisation’s (the ficticious Acme Widgets) customers should know that “Launch a new range of widgets, and the first 50 retweeters win one free”. I would then submit that to the twitter queue and the vote process would begin. My co-workers in the organisation would either vote-up my tweet to the point at which is was published, or vote it down so it wasn’t published.

In my mind I would see the voting process supporting two different publishing triggers:

1. Item published once x votes were received.
2. Item published automatically in x business minutes/hours, if 0 decline votes are received.

The reason the second publishing rule exists to keep people attentive to the process. With only the first process in place, I believe that individuals would be all too keen to defer their responsibility for voting something up to others rather than take on any risk themselves. With the second voting rule in place, it means people have to make an effort to monitor the content stream as all defined parties would have the chance to prevent a content blunder from occuring.

Defined Voting Groups and Weighted Voting
Obviously, nothing in this world is ever simple. I don’t for one second think this is as simple as pushing all corporate communications through a single voting engine with no ability to configure rules for content publishing and review. Different types of communications require different sets of eyes to review the content, and thus the system needs to support this. Additionally, I believe the voting process needs to make allowance for weighted votes (as this is relative to the way the real world works). For instance, if the CEO of Acme Widgets felt that the announcement was ok, then his/her vote would carry enough weight to mean it’s published as soon as the CEO ok vote is received.

Feedback
At this stage, what I have proposed here is a very raw concept. Does anyone else have ideas about alternative quality management solution that would suit a twitter style application?

Planning your website with Jumpchart

Starting out building a new website leaves you with a whole pile of stuff to think about and plan. Generally you get drawn to thinking about how you’d like it to look, and maybe some of the swanky new features you’d like to incorporate. Easily the thing that I get bogged down in though, is the content and the information architecture (what goes where). Maybe it comes easy to some, but for me it feels like a real slog.

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TextboxList for jQuery

Guillermo Rauch of devthought has very recently released a new version of his excellent textboxlist control, and this time he has built a version for jQuery in addition to mootools. This is definitely worth a look.

If you are looking to build an application that uses tagging, then this control will make your application feel very slick indeed. So without further delay, head over to his project and demo pages. I encountered a few issues with IE7 (which I’m sure will be resolved very soon) but it worked fantastically in Firefox.

Prezi – Visually Compelling Online Presentations

This one is a goody, and in all honesty I thought I was on the tail end of find it. Apparently not. I’ve seen both lifehacker and techcrunch blogging on this particular application recently and have to add my two cents.

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Task Barn for Free Multi-Project Management

If you haven’t seen it already on other blogs around the place (lifehacker or makeuseof) I’d recommend checking out yet another online project management system – taskbarn.

Even though it is entering a pretty overpopulated field in terms of online project and task management solutions, it’s delivery is exceptional (and best of all it’s free). Feature-wise it’s on the light-side, but in many ways that’s a relief. I’m definitely a person with lots of things on the go at any one time, and whilst I’m happy to use full blown project management solutions in my day job, it does feel more than a little over-the-top for my “out of hours” initiatives.

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Groovy Google AppEngine – Looking towards the GRAILS

Recently I logged into the Google AppEngine dashboard, and was pleased to be greeted with the option to take an “early look” at their Java support. Nice, I thought. Java on AppEngine – that’ll be pretty handy. Didn’t think too much more about it. Then today in my normal web reading time I came across a post on SpringSource about How to write your Google AppEngine applications in Groovy. Now *this* was interesting. Groovy is a language that has caught my attention on more than one occasion, and has actually proved pretty useful for writing small utility applications.

Using Groovy for Web Application Development
Groovy is well suited to the domain of the web programmer. Being fairly impatient types, who would like to produce applications quickly and would rather not write more code than we have to, Groovy is an absolute diamond in the J2EE coal mine. Groovy offers groovlets in the place of servlets, which essentially do the same thing; but some of the syntactic sugar offered with groovy builders make generating HTML pretty simple.

The quest for Grails
As it stands, groovy is pretty useful for building simple scripts, but of course it’s not going to compete with the popular frameworks out there at the moment. Well along comes Grails. I came across Grails a little while ago, but have to admit passed it off as “just another Ruby on Rails clone”, and without being too harsh, it more or less is (with some minor differences). Without having committed myself one way or the other (a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none, perhaps) I could have gone for either RAILS or Grails without caring too much.

The potential (and likelihood according to SpringSource) that GAE will eventually work with Grails applications, really tips the balance for me. GAE hosting is probably some of the most economical and easy to manage scalable hosting environments currently available. With a framework as powerful as Grails deployed on it, I would expect more developers showing an interest in, and migrating to both Grails and Groovy. This in turn, would probably encourage more developers to use AppEngine to deploy their applications.

A note about CRON
Additionally, I noticed today that there is a menu item for Cron Jobs now in the AppEngine management interface. Anyone know when that popped in there? Was it at the same time that they implemented the Java support? At any rate, I’m pretty excited about it – previously I was thinking I would have to run an EC2 instance or something to handle background tasks required by my web applications. Now I don’t think I will have to