To name a pattern, I thought a few things would need to be true.  It needs to be observable, predictable given some knowledge of the item trending and repeatable - other trends can show this pattern. I’ve identified six common patterns — I’m sure there are more out there.  I’ve named each of them after birds in true twitter fashion.  They are:

1. The Woodpecker
2. The Peacock
3. The Dodo
4. The Albatross
5. The Rooster
6. and The Swallow

Each name had to match the “personality”of the trend, and I’ve tried to be globally relevant (I could of named something the Lyre Bird or the Kookaburra but I’m not sure everyone knows exactly what these are).

1. The Woodpecker

The Woodpecker

This one is obvious.  It repeats regularly and loudly although the intervals might change.

2. The peacock

The Peacock

The peacock is the trend of the celebrity, flashy, showy and loud it bursts on to the scene and dominates conversation then just as quickly disappears.

3. The Dodo

The Dodo

The dodo is extinct.  Here today, gone tomorrow, it never really flew and was more than likely just a little bit silly. Differs from the peacock in that it never dominated the trend completely.

4. The albatross

The Albatross

This one is a little more subtle, is it a dodo or a woodpecker with a really long interval?  It’s neither - it’s the albatross. It has a strong signal, but it’s out there circling around the globe, you know it will come back, you’re just not sure when.  Viewed over weeks (I haven’t programmed that yet which is why you the seven day view above) you’ll see it come in and out regularly.

5. The Rooster

The Rooster

The Rooster struts around like it owns the place, poops over everything else and is generally loud and noisy, it’s hard to be heard when this trend is crowing.

6. The swallow

The Swallow

This trend is always buzzing around, flitting in and out depending on the weather, product releases or any other numerous reasons.  It just won’t go away and when it does, it always comes back.

Two small tips that will help with the tutorials:

1. On windows, I found that AppEngine assumes you have put your application under the AppEngine directory (C:\Program Files\Google\App_Engine).  If you create it anywhere else (e.g. C:\myapp) then the correct command to start the local AppEngine is dev_appserver.py c:\myapp
2. To make starting the server easier, just create a .bat file and put that command in it.  Then put a shortcut to the .bat file on your desktop.  I also did the same for the application upload command as well appcfg.py update c:\myapp

It’s trivial, but it will save you a lot of time remembering commands and looking for a DOS / CMD prompt in Windows.

OK, so you’ve now successfully created you first application in AppEngine and want to do something useful.  Well here’s a full Python script, incorporating Django templates on how to create a basic Twitter Bot.

from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from google.appengine.ext.webapp.util import run_wsgi_app

from google.appengine.api import urlfetch

_DEBUG = True # When this is true, some things go to the screen as text and templates aren't always generated. Error message are more verbose.
_DEBUG_TWITTERBOT = True # When in debug mode I post to a private twitter account instead of my bot

## User name constants
_TWITTERBOT_USER = "mytwitterbot" # The username you use in twitter to login to http://twitter.com/mytwitterbot
_TWITTERBOTDEV_USER = "mydevtwitterbot" # # The username you use in twitter to login to your "dev" twitter account http://twitter.com/mydevtwitterbot
_TWITTERBOT_PWD = "mytwitterbotpwd" # I'm lazy, I use the same password for both accounts, you probably shouldn't do this!

## URLS used for Twitter API calls - stored as constants for easy update later.
_TWIT_UPDATE = "https://twitter.com/statuses/update.json"

# I use a base handler and put my Twitter post agent in here so I can call it from any classes that derive this.
class BaseRequestHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):

  def generate(self, template_name, template_values={}):

    # You'll see we are using Django
    directory = os.path.dirname(__file__)
    path = os.path.join(directory, 'templates', template_name)
    self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values, debug=_DEBUG))

  def TwitterPost(self, msg, username):

      password = _TWITTERBOT_PWD

      form_fields = {
        "status": msg,
        "source": "twendly"  # If you register your bot with Twitter, this is how posts know to show "from Twendly" with a link back to the Twendly site.
        }

      authheader =  "Basic %s" % base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password))

      base64string = base64.encodestring('%s:%s' % (username, password))[:-1]
      authheader =  "Basic %s" % base64string

      payload = urllib.urlencode(form_fields)

      # Note the URL is using HTTPS which is supported by AppEngine so the call should be secured.
      url = _TWIT_UPDATE

      result = urlfetch.fetch(url=url,payload=payload,method=urlfetch.POST, headers={"Authorization": authheader})

      if int(result.status_code) != 200:
        # You could get fancy and put some error handling in here if you're inclined.
        return int(result.status_code)

      return 200

class MainPage(BaseRequestHandler):

  def get(self):

    title = 'Welcome page of your App'

    self.generate('index.html', template_values={'title': title})

class TwitterBot(BaseRequestHandler):

    def get(self):

        # Do some stuff - what ever it is you want to tweet about!
        msg = "My cool tweet"

        If _DEBUG_TWITTER_BOT == true:
            username = _TWITTERBOTDEV_USER
        else:
            username = _TWITTERBOT_USER

        response = self.TwitterPost(msg, username)

        if response != 200:
            status = "Whoops. Twitter was down or your code stuffed up"
        else:
            status = "Hooray! Tweeted: %s " % msg

        self.generate('bot.html', template_values={'status': status})

application = webapp.WSGIApplication(
                                     [('/', MainPage),
                                      ('/twitterbot', twitterbot)],
                                     debug=True)

def main():
  run_wsgi_app(application)

if __name__ == "__main__":
  main()

You should be able to simply copy the above code and complete the following:

1. Create the new application ID in Google AppEngine (original in tutorials was “greeting” from memory - make a more meaningful one).
2. Setup the twitter accounts you need (you’ll need separate mail accounts for each). I always keep my dev one locked so it’s not on public timeline.
3. Create the basic Django templates, index.html and bot.html - they don’t need to be fancy.  They need to be in a sub-directory of your main app called templates. (e.g. C:\myapp\templates).
4. Update your app.yaml file with the ID name and version number (probably 1).
5. Make the bot do something useful for you - pass messages as parameters or something similar, open a URL and fetch a value (the weather?), you name it, your own Twitter bot to follow.

That should be it, you’ll be able to test it locally and then once you’re happy - push it up to AppEngine and test it out.

NB - Remember Twitter won’t let you post exactly the same message twice, so make sure that you change the message each time you test it.

In the next post I will talk about ways and means of automating the bot you’ve now created (AppEngine doesn’t have a scheduler), and a couple of pitfalls I discovered along the way.

The ubiquitous nature of social software, the number of people using it and the degree to with which we become “Linked In” gives us a real time handle on the crowds and what they are doing.

Systems like Twitter target this kind of behaviour directly; a pure aggregate of a stream of consciousness, while other systems like Linked In address it tangentially through behaviour.

I posted the following on Twitter back on the 30th of Jan.

A good layoff indicator is LinkedIn, my network activity is way up - 1st action when laid off is to connect and seek recommendations.

This was just based on patterns I’d observed through my own network of both internal and external colleagues responding to the unfortunate events surrounding the economic times.

It was with interest today that I saw this article on TechCrunch which shows that LinkedIn grew 22% in January (over December) and minutes on the site doubled in the same month.  I may have contributed to some of those minutes myself.

Most of us are already well aware that we leave a footprint on any social networking site, and in some instances, may come to regret that photo we posted on facebook.  What I find more fascinating however is how these sites are generating new signals and measures that over time could be used to perhaps supplement or replace existing messages.

One person updating there resume is not newsworthy - everyone updating it sends a strong message about job security.

Good systems are those which can make visible these hidden messages and signals.  What hidden signals are you observing in other systems which provide insight (of any kind)?

I found a lot of great posts about Connections summarising that “it now integrates with Feature / Product X”, but nothing in the one place I could refer to.

Hopefully you find this useful and of course if anyone has feedback on integration points for Lotus Connections that I’ve missed then please feel free to add them in the comments.

The browser market has never been hotter and Web 2.0 is the reason why. More than ever the browser is now the delivery platform for applications rather than just static HTML. In the “old days” the browser didn’t matter - IE6 had a killer market share and most of your processing happened on the server anyway, so the browsers performance was less of an issue.

That’s changed. I actually posted on this here back in May  talking about the need for companies and individuals to actually start thinking about which browser they use and why.

Without getting to technical, one of the core elements of most web sites and what we know as a web 2.0 experience these days is JavaScript. All this means is that much of the processing on what an application does, the popups, the validation, the lookups etc. have been moved to the browser and run within the browser instead of the server. Logically then, the place to start in understanding how well a browser performs is understanding how fast it executes JavaScript.

So for those left-brained thinkers, here is some figures for comparison. They show the average speed each browser takes to execute a standard series of benchmark tests from http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider-driver.html over 10 iterations. They’ve all been tested on the same PC (mine) so they should be relative, your own mileage may vary but the relationship between the performance should stay the same.

Browser (Speed)
IE8 Beta 2 (12,318ms)
FF3 (4,473ms)
Chrome (2,293ms).

Clearly Chrome is fastest (2X the speed of FF3) so I should just use Chrome, right?

Wrong. There is a lot more to it than that. To put some perspective on this, IE6 which is what many corporates still use benchmarks at around 60,000ms, so even IE8 Beta 2 is quite a bit faster.

The problem is that when your using a browser internally it’s probably controlled by IT, so you may not be able to change it. Even if you can, browser standards actually tend to cause lazy developers (why develop a site to support different browsers when you know that everyone uses IE6 and you can control that) which means lots of internal sites break with FF3 and Chrome.

IE6 was such a bad browser and broke so many standards that even Microsofts early official name for the IE8 backwards compatibility mode is “Quirks mode”!

So here’s where the difference comes in; all modern browsers (IE8, Chrome and FF3) now support the same standards and HTML to a much stricter degree than ever before so moving forwards, it’s highly likely that sites will work whichever browser you use, but in the internal world, you’ll undoubtably have sites that require older compatibility modes.

My solution to this is to use IE8 beta 2 for internal websites in general because of its excellent support for older style sites and its general robust compatibility. If you’re an average internet user and like low fuss options, IE8 has a lot going for it. Just be warned that you’ll likely run into internal IT support issues if you try deploy it inside the corporate firewall (for example, it wants to update Service Packs on Windows XP and some companies won’t be on SP3 yet).

For external sites I’m opting for Chrome - the raw speed and excitement, the new take on what a browser should behave and look like, and (the killer for me) the process seperation (each browser tab runs as a seperate process using seperate memory) means that bad applications in one tab won’t kill my performance. Ignoring the process bit, that’s my right-brain talking; it’s all about the look and feel and the internet looks and feels more exciting in Chrome

As far as FF3 is concerned, it’s still a great browser but I’ve had shocking stability issues with it. Where FF3 wins hands down is in it’s Add-In market. If you’re a die hard browser and like lots of nifty productivity enhancements, then for now at least, FF3 is a better browser than Chrome.

Chrome adds a really interesting new dimension to the browser wars and I’m really interested to see where this goes. Hope this is of interest to you, happy browsing!

Recently another examples of the power of Twitter occured that I thought I’d share.

There are many uses for Twitter (surprisingly many for something that only supports 140 characters), but one of them is kind of like the office water cooler – it’s for that off-the-cuff comment that you don’t neccessarily expect anyone to reply to, but you’re happy when they do.

Recently, I tweeted “Is it just me, or is FF3 really unstable?” FireFox (FF) 3 is currently my preferred browser and I use it for anything I can, only falling back to IE when some internal sites won’t support FF but it’s been very unstable and driving me nuts!

When I got up the following morning, I had the following answer from Ricardo Sueiras (who follows me) “yup, FF3 crashes for me on a daily basis.”

Now this isn’t THAT amazing, I mean Ricardo follows me, knows me in RL (Real Life) and also uses FF. However when I re-connected I received a Tweet direct from @Firefox_Answers “Firefox crashes can be from add-ons Try Safe Mode http://is.gd/PCw If fixed, disable add-ons one by one to find the culprit”

When did you last feel that you were being listened to by a technology company (without paying huge support), and wouldn’t you love as a corporation in any industry to be able to turn the negative vibe of the water cooler into a positive experience for your brand? I’m impressed.

How do they do it? Well Twitter search (formally summize) lets you search key words across all public conversations. It’s how I keep track of Lotus Connections and what’s happening out there and have made lots of useful contacts in IBM.

Unfortunately despite following all the advice, completely de-installing and re-installing, FF3 crashes multiple times a day and remains highly unstable for me personally, although many others don’t have my experience so I wouldn’t let it stop you trying it if you haven’t yet.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962)

It’s been a little while since I’ve returned to this series, but with a few minutes to spare I thought I’d continue on refactoring your digital life.  To recap, the steps so far are:

Step 1: Get a better browser

Step 2: Explore your mail hosts options and consolidate your mail into fewer accounts

Step 3: Update your blog software and template

Step 4: Be consistent and be you!

Step 5: Evolve your digital life

Step 6: Interoperate and connect

What does all this mean? Well if you can’t be bothered re-reading all the posts, my steps towards digital re-factoring are essentially around updating your tools and your on-line identity.  Put yourself out there with your best foot forward and don’t be afraid to be you and use the best available tools to make your life easy.

At this point, much of what I’ve been suggesting has been internally focussed on streamlining your own identity and resources.  With this in place, you’re now ready for step 7; reach out and connect to new people.

There is no easy answer to the question “How do I build my online network?”.  Ultimately you need to figure out what works for you; still I have a few tips that you can explore.

1. Join Twitter, then use Twitter search.  Twitter is an micr-blogging service which is a little confusing until you get the hang of it.  If you’re new to Twitter, I recommend that you set-up your account, download Twhirl (a good Twitter client that makes it a bit easier for a newbie user to get their head around Twitter) and start following people.  If you don’t know who to follow, then use the twitter search to look for things your interested in, then start joining the conversation; before you know it you’re part of a bigger community and participating in ongoing conversations.
2. Use a service like Technorati to find other bloggers who are writing about things you’re interested in.  This can be a challenge (because you’ll be hit by a flood of content) but find a few interesting bloggers and again, join in the conversation by commenting on their blog and providing links back to your own.

Let me know how you’re steps towards re-factoring your own digitial life are going and if there is anything in here of interest.

As a Twitter user, I’ve been tracking the usage of Lotus Connections and the buzz around it as approached its version 2.0 launch using Summize, (now Twitter Search). I set up a custom filter search which I shared with the community (through Twitter again) which let me monitor various tweets.

A couple of things came together. I tweeted about the fact I was working on the principles for Social Software adoption for my employer, and @Idonotes asked if I’d share which I was happy to do.

Through monitoring Twitter I also came to “know” at @lbenitez , a passionate evangelist for Lotus Connections. He tweeted about discussing principles for Lotus Connections and I shared the post I’d made on my blog here. Luis provided some feedback and so I took this on board and then we moved our collaboration into the real world, setting up a phone call and a discussion.

Luis took on the “job” of road testing these with his clients, while I shopped them around internally and on the blog. As a result of this collaboration I think we’ve acheived a great outcome and one that demonstrates how social networking can help you produce an outcome. I believe the new principles are now more sound than anything I’d of produced individually, my employer benefits, Luis has benefited and hopefully the community also benefits.

A combination of facts, including holidays, lots of house priorities and a lack of broadband at home for a couple of weeks has prevented me from blogging for a while.  Things are starting to settle and I think I’ll be back in business soon.

I have continued to participate in the community however and am taking a bigger interest in the Australian Web 2.0 community which is very active and has really matured in the 10 months I’ve been away. Either that, or maybe I’m just more in tune with it, I’m not sure.  In doing so I’ve engaged in some debates through comments on a couple of blogs, something which led to me being quoted on one blog as “Tim Bull from my employer“.

I’m not ashamed of my employer at all, I’m proud to work for them and if you want to check out my LinkedIn profile, they feature prominately.  However I have always had an implicit editorial policy that I never mention them, not least in part because ultimately the ideas expressed here are mine and don’t represent those of my employer.  Actually if I was found to be representing the view of my employer, that could be cause for an issue given what we do, so I’ve always kept the two things separate — my personal blog where I expound my own ideas and theories on things and participate in the community, and my professional profile which is me at work.

Consequently, I decided an implicit policy was not enough, so I’ve now written one which you can find here.

It’s nothing special, but the time has come to make explicit the distinction between my professional opinion (although it may draw on my personal experience) and my personal opinion (although it may be shaped by my professional experience).