Random* Blog

Twitter Ratio in the News

The Admin — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:37:00 GMT

I noticed over the Memorial Day weekend that traffic for TwitterRatio.com picked up quite a bit. I've also seen the TFF Ratio auto-responder sending out replies to a lot of newcomers to the TFF party. I'm excited to see the site and bot getting some love. In the last couple of weeks TwitterRatio has been reviewed by and listed on the following sites: StumbleUpon, SheGeeks, KillerStartups, Blogger's Blog, Twitter Apps, and Mashable.

More information is available here:
http://danhounshell.com/blogs/dan/archive/2008/05/30/who-is-digging-tff-ratio.aspx

For Sale - Random Sites

The Admin — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:54:00 GMT

In an effort to simplify my portfolio of sites I am considering selling the domains and sites for the Random*.com sites:

RandomTweets.com
RandomTwitter.com (redirects to RandomTweets.com)
RandomTwits.com (redirects to RandomTwits.com)
RandomJaikus.com
RandomJaiku.com (redirects to RandomJaikus.com)
RandomPownce.com
RandomFlickr.com

Why sell them? I am a software developer, a web developer, and I love building web sites, web applications, mashups, widgets, etc. But I've realized over the last couple of months that while I love building them, I don't really like running and maintaining them. I'd rather spend what little spare time I have on to the next idea.

The domains, the sites, all source code, etc. will be included and I do not plan on splitting them up unless someone makes me an offer I cannot refuse.

If you're interested please contact me for further information via email: webmaster [AT] randomtweets.com

TFF Ratio Site Adds Web Services

The Admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:51:00 GMT

I've added some interesting web services to the TFF Ratio site the last couple of days. Again, I am going to refer to a post on my blog for the details so I don't have to repeat them here:

Finally Web Services for TFF Ratio

If you have any questions let me know at [dan AT tffratio.com].

Updates to TFF Ratio

The Admin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:11:00 GMT

I explained some of the recent updates to the TFF Ratio site in a post on my primary blog. Rather than duplicate the explanation here, I'll just give you this link to see it for yourself.

What is TFFRatio.com?

The Admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:58:00 GMT

By now you may have seen a link to TFFRatio on this blog or in the footer of one of the Random* sites. If you've already checked out the site then you know what it's about. If you haven't then here's a little primer.

The idea for the site started with a blog post by a co-worker and friend, Dave Donaldson. Dave stated that a Twitter member's coolness can be determined using a measurement that he came up with (trademarked, copyrighted, patent pending, etc) that is nothing more than a ratio of the people that follow that member to the people that they follow. Someone who follows hundreds of people but only has a few who follow them would have a very low TFF Ratio and thus is not very Twitter-Popular. Someone who has hundreds of followers but only follows (or friends) a few would have a very high TFF Ratio and thus is uber Twitter-Cool.

As part of that post Dave wrote "How long do you think it'll be before someone actually builds a web site/web service that uses the Twitter API to take in a username and returns the TFF Ratio?" Well I considered that to be a personal challenge and within a few minutes I acquired the domain name and posted this parody on the home page. Over the course of the next couple of days I spent a few hours each evening to build out a working site to retrieve a Twitter member's info and calculate the TFF Ratio. Tonight I added a little more polish in the form of pithy comments to go along with the ratings.

While the site started out as a practical joke, I may just run with it. My next step is to build a web service that people can use to retrieve their TFF Ratio. The web service will allow for things like Graffiti Widgets and Community Server add-ons to be written to retrieve and display the TFF Ratio on your blog or profile pages. I may also implement functionality to deliver a full-fledged "official" TFF Ratio badge. I'll keep you updated as the pieces fall into place.

Random* in the News

The Admin — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 07:57:00 GMT

A large percentage of traffic that the Random* sites get is from people on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce saying "hey my post was on randomtweets.com" (or Random Pownce or Random Jaikus).However, occasionally we (me and the sites) get links and reviews from other sources.

WebAware recently did a good review of PownceMeme.com and RandomPownce.com got a "See Also". I'll take a back seat to Bryan's Powce Meme any day.

A few weeks ago the OpenGiga and Snibbles blogs made posts about Random* sites. The Snibbles post was about RandomTweets.com and the OpenGiga post talked about all four sites.

Some small usability additions

The Admin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 07:30:00 GMT

Tonight I made a couple of small additions to the RandomTweets, RandomJaikus, RandomPownce and RandomFlickr sites. Most of the changes revolve around usability and SEO.

The first change that I made was to break up the listings in the archives modal popup by adding a Month/Year heading to separate the months. This made it a little easier to review the list of archives. They weren't too bad yet since there was only a couple months worth of archives, but I imagine that list would have been a pain to browse in a couple of months. My next step will be to add some kind of hiding/display navigation to the archive list, probably in the form of a tree view or something similar.

I also changed the formatting of the dates in the headlines of the pages from "Random Tweets for 12/17/2007" to "Random Tweets for Tuesday, December 17, 2007". That should please my friends from the UK and Europe who for some reason represent their dates in short form a little differently than we do :)

For SEO purposes, so that the Meta description tag is not the same on every page, I added the date. I don't know that duplicate meta description tags were really hurting the sites SEO-wise, but Google Webmaster tools told me it was a "problem" with the sites.

Finally, I did add a Google Adsense banner to the bottom of the pages. Hopefully it is out of the way as much as possible, but I gotta pay the bills somehow!

New Random Site - RandomFlickr.com

The Admin — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 06:31:00 GMT

I've been thinking about adding a RandomFlickr.com site for quite a while. I mentioned it in a blog post before. About a week ago I took a look at the Flickr API and wrote the necessary code to being randomly grabbing pics, rating them and storing them just like I do with the rest of the sites. Luckily the proper domain name was available still.

After everything running okay for a week I decided today would be the day to go ahead and take it live. Go ahead and check it out at RandomFlickr.com.

Being image-based content rather than text it is a bit different from the other three, but fundamentally things work exactly the same. I changed the layout a bit for the RandomFlickr site, though, as I like the 3 wide grid better for the display of the images. Otherwise there would have just been too much white space (or black space, rather) for my taste.

Let me know what you think.

Why 3 different Microblogging Communities?

The Admin — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:30:00 GMT

I've used Twitter for quite some time. I was turned on to it earlier this year by some coworkers. I didn't get it before that. Once several of us started using it was when I thought I started getting it. But I really didn't get it until a bunch of other people from my extended community started using it.

I jumped on the Jaiku wagon once the Google announcement was made. You can't go wrong betting on Google.

I joined Pownce about a month ago.

I like and use all three of the sites/applications. They are all basically the same thing, so why do I use all three of them? One of the previous versions of the title of this post was "Why 3 different Microblogs?" Do you see the difference between the previous version and what is there now (not counting spelling, capitalization and punctuation differences)? The difference is the word "Communities". And to me that's the big difference between the three - each has its own type of community. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each has its own feel.

Twitter is the current standard. When I want to see what 60 of my closest friends are doing I check out Twitter. The site is renowned for being down quite a bit and the performance sucks sometimes. It doesn't have the features that Jaiku or Pownce have, but it has the user base. Approximately 20 of my friends and I made the jump from Twitter to Jaiku a couple of months ago. That's great. But the other 40 stuck with Twitter. I can't strand them.

Feature-wise Jaiku is better than Twitter. It works better. I feel like Jaiku is the grown-ups version of the three. It is LinkedIn vs. MySpace and Friendster. But it lacks the most important thing for me - most of my friends are still on Twitter. I'll keep using it, though, because in the end I'm sure Jaiku and Google will be the winner. Until then I'll keep cross-posting my updates to Twitter, too.

Personally, I like Pownce the best. I think it's the most feature-rich. The community there feels smaller, smarter, and more hip. There seems to be more conversations on Pownce than the other two. Pownce seems to be the place where the young Web 2.0 elite assemble. If you want to get the pulse of the Web, Pownce is the one to be on.

Random* creates side conversations

The Admin — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 05:31:00 GMT

When I first set out to create the RandomTweets.com site a couple of months ago, I knew it would be fun for me, but I didn't know how well the internet audience in general would perceive it. It has of course been a blast for me and while the jury is still out on the rest of the world, there are at least a few people who are enjoying the site and talking about it.

One of the things that I overlooked when analyzing the potential popularity of the site was the recursive nature of links that featuring a post in the top ten would provide. It has created some pretty good buzz much faster than I anticipated. When someone finds that one of their posts has been listed on the site they tend to create a new post or blog entry saying something like, "Cool. I had a post listed on RandomTweets.com - check it out." This in turn brings more people to the site and triggers side conversations about the site on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and blogs.

Following is a quick list of some posts made on Twitter and Jaiku when users have found a previous post on RandomTweets or RandomJaikus:

Here are a couple of blog that do the same:

I'd like to think all the people who made the posts above for supporting RandomTweets, RandomJaikus, and RandomPownce. I hope you continue to get enjoyment from the sites and I hope you continue to see some of your posts highlighted in the future. Keep posting funny, interesting, and newsworthy comments and I'm sure you'll see yourself listed here again.