My thoughts were echoed on RWW follow up post to what happened. Just a brief background on what happened. People searched “facebook login”, came upon RWW’s article, mistook it for Facebook, signed in via Facebook Connect and ranted how its new “design sucks ass”. To all of us in the “know”, it is funny and facepalm worthy. How idiotic could these people be? Can’t they distinguish between these things?

Apparently not:

As the web is becoming global (1 Billion+), it is becoming the playground for people not literate at all with basic things like a URL. They see Facebook as a product/service, not as a website that is part of the WWW.

It begs the question if these people are actually idiotic at all? Yes, they might not know the inner workings of the web, do you know the inner workings of a TV (or something equally complex)? Bad example, but you catch my drift.

Shouldn’t this “portal” to the net, being Google’s search bar allow us to take us where we want to go on the “interwebs”? It makes perfect sense to want to type into Google, “login Facebook”, to take me to where I want to be, without having to click on a search result.

How Google would deduce this when people would just want to “search” the term I’ll leave to the semantic experts. I have some ideas though.

1) Once it becomes clear what the user’s purpose is for each intended search, Google could ask the “searcher”, considering they are logged on with a profile, if that is their intention each time? Click yes, and it does it all the time.

2) We could use the power of humans to vote on preferred actions for terms. People vote that if you type in “login facebook”, it takes you there, while others might vote that it should stay a search term. There are obvious flaws with this approach and possibility for exploitation.

3) Pay? Enough money will convince Google. Instead of using the normal “sponsored by google” ads at the top of some search results, it could be a different colour with a click-able link that immediately takes you to facebook. If you cookies are set, it’s logged in. I guess this approach is very much similar to ads, but there is the potential to add further action with these links.

4) Invent new search “terms” such as the already established “define: <word>”. If you type in “login: Facebook”, it should take you stored Facebook login data on Google’s profile and immediately log yourself in, or just immediately take you to Facebook if you are already logged in.

——–

These are just some ideas I had to write down. Kept thinking about it whole day. What do you think? The approaches above are flawed. Can you think of any way to approach this? Would Google even want people to NOT view their search results?

So, I present Twimemachine.com. It’s old tweets, but kinda better. Think oldtweets 1.2.

So, if you want to browse your old tweets with a simple interface, go to twimemachine.com and browse away!

Yes, twitter still doesn’t allow third party developers to browse past 3200 tweets.

Got any question, just post here. I’m also hosting a competition. I want a nifty “novel app” frontpage design, so anyone who thinks they can design a neat frontpage, can have a link to their website on the frontpage.

Due to monetary and time constraints, I had to get up a watered-down version of Tweekly.fm: It only works manually. You enter your data and click send. As easy as that.

When I come back in January, things will hopefully start working again as it should (tweeting automatically). While last.fm did not want to buy Tweekly.fm, there is something else in the pipeline that will get Tweekly.fm back to its (automatic tweeting) glory it had a month ago. Hopefully it will happen sooner than later.

Sorry for the inconvenience guys! Thanks for the year as well!

And remember, keep listening.

I started it in the beginning of the year with next to no development experience. I still don’t have any legit development experience apart from hacking together MySQL and PHP with ducktape. This past few weeks has been an insanely hectic ride for Tweekly.fm!

First, I moved away from my current shared hosting to Mediatemple’s (dv) which completely failed on me. It hit the memory cap from all the traffic that was coming in. This week, I moved to Rackspace Cloud Sites. So far, I’m really impressed with the service. It could keep up with traffic really well, until I realised it had a hard cap on its .php scripts of 15min, which meant instant fail for my completely inefficient script.

I’m at a loss with what to do now. I realise the way I’m doing it now, simple just won’t work with the resources I have. I’m currently busy with a redesign, but I can’t keep the current Tweekly.fm up and running efficiently.

Considering that I am still a full-time student, I can’t spend all my time developing it.

So from next week unfortunately, Tweekly.fm will not be automated anymore. It will only work manually. You enter your data, you tweet. I will work to the best of my ability behind the scene to get it back to automated form when it is possible.

There is also another way to keep Tweekly.fm going… Get last.fm to buy Tweekly.fm. This way, the automation can occur with real ease on super slick servers and better programmers making it great.

If you would like that, I would appreciate an RT.

Apologies to those who like their Tweekly.fm to be automated.

The idea itself is brilliant, probably garnering many facepalms of “why didn’t I think of that?”. What intrigues me most is that this basically means, bar a few examples, that carrying money around has once again become even more pointless.

With the advent of the internet, money has been disappearing into digital numbers, something that’s never in your “hands” anymore. You still have to carry cash around for “petty” payments, but with the advent of Square I see it lessening even more. It is disturbing actually to think that the essential thing that determines my well-being is actually so frivolous. I can’t physically account for my well-being anymore. It is disappearing.

I say bring on a new crowdsourced economy without money driven by our desire to innately collaborate  through the reduced opportunity to communicate through the internet to share what we love to do.

I don’t have the funds and the banner on top here will barely cover the costs of hosting a dedicated server.

In the past week I’ve received generous donations, thank you very much! I don’t want to resort to having sign-ups be donationware, so I ask you, Tweekly.fm user, please donate any amount. I plan to attain only $1000. If only a quarter of you pay $1 it will be more than enough!

All the money will go towards paying the hosting in the upcoming year.

As a reward the person who donated the most will receive a permanent thank-you on the frontpage of the new Tweekly.fm.

Click here to go to the donation page.

Given the incredible growth of Tweekly.fm, it has really been struggling under its current hosting. From this coming Wednesday, you will only be able to sign up with Tweekly.fm if you make a donation.

This is only temporary. As a full-time student (sitting with my textbook beside my laptop: writing exams next week), I just don’t have the time to research servers, optimise the code and work on Tweekly.fm.

When the holidays arrive (sweet glorious 2 months of freedom), I will do everything in my power to upgrade the Tweekly.fm experience, move onto new servers, etc.

SHORT FAQ:

1) Service will continue as usual. Old users won’t have to do anything. Just sit back as usual and enjoy the tweets roll by.

2) Any new users from Wednesday will have to pay a donation to sign up until Tweekly.fm can handle the growth.

3) This is only temporary. A new server will most likely appear in the beginning of December, when I will switch it back to its current state.

———–

This coming wednesday, Tweekly.fm will probably hit 15 000 users. So, this is just another BIG thank you to all you music lovers! If you are current user, donations are also welcome! Just go to Tweekly.fm (it is on the front page).

I will keep you posted.

Keep listening.

The concept intrigued me so much that I spend this whole year developing a business plan AND entering a competition for it. It didn’t win (too pie in the sky). Just as it finished it, I realised that I took the wrong approach. It shouldn’t be centered on the individual’s attempt to “tag” themselves, but rather by other people’s desires to tag each other. We are already doing it, but just not “storing” it. It is called stereotypes. We have a desire to catalog people and put them in boxes. It makes our lives easier.

When @KevinRose tweeted yesterday about what Twitter lists are doing, it clicked. This is EXACTLY what is happening. Fueled by our desire to organise, we are actually defining people.

We are tagging each other, creating matterdata.

I’m currently in 11 lists and all them are lists that clearly define who I am: Stellenbosch, Music, Web-services, South Africa, techies, etc. Yes, these keywords clearly define who I am. I am all of the above.

If I look at my @tweeklyfm, half of the lists are in “music” and some if it “apps”. This is what it is. Brilliant.

I end with another tweet by Kevin Rose. Once these lists are established, several prominent figures will come to the front. Those that are tagged in countless “tech” lists for example, are experts or knowledgeable people in this field. This way, twitter can rank the importance of the social data. They are in essence ranking individual’s in relevance to search.

It’s becoming a totally new ball game. Something which will be incredibly exciting to watch. I wonder if Twitter realizes their own potential or if they just wanted to people to organize their streams.

It has been growing way too fast to keep it contained. It now has 13 000 users. My hosting company has been on my back for quite some time now, because I’m overloading the servers each time the tweets send. Thanks to the helpful @igitur, I have a pretty solid way of optimising the code/script. Unfortunately, as it is primarily the process of fetching data from last.fm that is slow, it is a losing battle. Inevitable down the line, I’ll keep running into optimisation problems.

I am not entirely sure where to go with Tweekly.fm at the moment. If I continue the service, I’ll have to upgrade, get its own server, get advertisers, et al in order to keep it running as it is running now. The problem with this method is that 1) I’m a full-time student. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on Tweekly.fm (which is why I haven’t actually optimised the script at all) and 2) Tweekly.fm is a mashup after all. I didn’t start it in the beginning to make money from it. It was purely a service I wanted, and thought other people would maybe enjoy. Monetising a mashup is a very iffy thing. I’m totally at mercy of Twitter and Last.fm (especially last.fm).

At the end of the day, I’m providing a service based off of last.fm. They could easily implement the Tweekly.fm feature and then I have to shut down everything. I don’t own any of the data, etc. I also don’t really have any right to this “IP” if you understand what I mean. I merely provide the conduit for the flow of data.

Which brings me to the question: do I want this? I don’t want to make a full fledged enterprise mashup. Should I go ahead with monetising and upgrading everything? Is there a way I can keep it “small” without incurring too much server problems?

Should I change the way Tweekly.fm works (less bandwidth)? There are still more social-twitter side features I can add (which I want to). Should I perhaps move it to manual tweeting? and then pay for automatic tweeting? Or spread it out across the week (user can choose when to send it)?

All these questions are plaguing me, and I don’t know where to go. After my university exams (starting next week), I’ll probably have to switch Tweekly.fm temporarily off, think about what I want to do with it, fix whatever needs fixing and take it from there.

What do you say?

The problem with Tweekly.fm at the moment is that it has become slightly too big for what it was in the beginning. It has almost 11 000 users now and the script is taking about 5 hours to send. That means that tweets are spread out, by the order in which you signed up, over 5 hours. So you might think that your Tweekly.fm isn’t working, but you should just be patient… for now.

I’m currently in the process of speeding up the script. If push comes to shove, I can always optimise the script, parallelize it, add more computing power, but in the end, it’s actually a “broken” system. Down the line, it will eventually become too much. If I went all “start-up” on this, I could perhaps do it, but Tweekly.fm is a hobby project that I must manage.

So, I’m thinking of ways of changing the way Tweekly.fm works. With the new redesign, it should work perfectly. My main idea is making Tweekly.fm “manual”. Click a button and a tweet will be sent, just as it is now. If you want to auto-tweet, you must make a donation and then be able stipulate at what time your tweekly.fm tweet should run. This way, I can spread out the tweets and gather more money to pay for faster servers.

For now, I think it is a win-win situation.

Tell me what you think.

P.S. Advertising could also pay for the servers. 400k pageviews. 22k unique visitors. 400k alexa. You know you want to.