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Warning: the following makes no sense at all, has no impact and no real value. It’s just me wandering around …

Quick and dirty maths: so say Exxon made $400bn in revenues last year, $40bn in net income, and the average price of gallon was $3 in 2007.

Well if we take those numbers, 30 cents of each gallon you bought went into Exxon’s pockets … Nice ;-))

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I followed mainly through the Gmail chat client, and when I’m off grid receive all the updates by email. I filter through the twitter-noise and try to get the important updates (market intelligence, benchmark, locations, …).

So I just installed Twitbin, and it didn’t last hald an hour until I got the “Unfortunately you’ve exceeded Twitter’s maximum hourly requests.“.

Yeehaa, I am off to a great start !

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I was really looking for it after Job’s keynote, and thought the $199 worldwide price tag would get Apple a world domination (Luke, I am your father) in the cell phone market. The iPhone is cool, the iPhone is sexy, the iPhone is feature-full, the iPhone has everything to take over the Nokias and the RIMs.
Except a bad distribution deal.

Even though the demand is sky-rocketing, I am sure they could/would do better on the long term without locking customers to a specific carrier or increasing the price. This scheme looks exactly like any other offer and business model on the market.
But, why would Apple have to be different ?

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On the other side, FaceBook mini feed has been there for ages. Unfortunately, it is limited to Facebook’s news, not like FriendFeed. And the status updates are great and usually funny to follow. But my frustration was that it was a one way communication system. How many times have I wanted to comment on items in that mini feed ??

So the news this morning that Facebook is introducing mini-feed comments and comments tracking is great news ! But Twitter might be in a difficult situation now, and the two features are going to be stepping on each other’s toes.

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Two sizes available: 300×250 or 160×500. Click on Share, below, to add the widget to your favorite homepage or just copy/paste the code to your blog template !

In 300×250:

Or in 160×500 format:

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I put some AdBrite ads on My Life Sucks ….. Big Time !! about a week ago (6 days to be accurate) and it’s the first time since I started publishing on the web (1996) that I make money online (not even a dime …!). On this promising track, I should be able to buy a cup of coffee in 2 years !

Everything has to start someday, doesn’t it ?  ;)

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I didn’t find that wordpress feature/plugin on the web (did I miss it ?), so I had to develop it myself. It’s a fairly trivial piece of code, and it’s actually more about putting things together. I’ll try to describe the process below. WARNING: I am not a developer, I am an amateur, the code might not be clean, so please comment to improve !

1) Prerequisite: you need the Thickbox plugin installed and working. I prefer adding a thickbox layer than opening a popup.

2) Understand how the Twitter API works. You can start here, and continue here.

3) Get a good script. I used this one from a guy called Gareth Rushgrove, as it’s php+curl and works well.

4) Modify the script: for the moment it just encompasses the “update twitter” part. You’ll need to create a form that includes three fields: the user twitter’s login and password and his message. I used only one file to do that: it first checks if the form was submitted - if Yes, it sends the update to twitter and tells me if it succeeded ; if No, it displays the form.

Download my version of the script here (note: no css, no javascript).

Remember to receive the permalink of the article in the textarea:
<textarea….>Excellent: <?php echo $_GET[’link’]; ?></textarea>

This is the result I on My Life Sucks … Big Time !!!:

5) Insert the link in your Wordpress files. I decided to align it after the post title (in theloop.php). For the ThickBox, I used the iFrame option to make sure things would run smoothly (as twitter.php reloads). Insert any argument before the ThickBox arguments.

If you copy paste this link, it should work:

<a href="PATH_TO_SCRIPT/twitter-update.php?link=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=320&width=550" class="thickbox">Tweet this !</a>

You’re done !

6) Add some cosmetics (optional) with css formating in your file as well as some javascript code to determine the number of characters in the message (140 per tweets!).

Here is what appears on my Twitter account:

Again, I am an amateur. So please do comment with any update/improvement/advice/rant I should include !

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