Uba Kontrovasie

Tweet with caution!

I was out partying not to so long ago and having access to twitter via mobile, whilst you’re drunk is not a good idea.

I must have tweeted about how drunk I was, why? I don’t quite know, I suppose using twitter has become akin to using the phone. You often call people whilst you’re drunk and I suppose tweeting whilst you’re drunk is the next step after using twitter becomes second nature.

Anyway a friend of mine Googled my name and guess what got indexed? My drunken tweet! Not a very good example of “personal reputation management”.

I found the whole thing quite hilarious, hope you guys do too.

Tags: faux pas, funny, Lifestreaming, Micro Blogging, Twitter

Development Frameworks

With so many new web-applications and social websites on the web, I decided to take a step away from the websites themselves and instead deconstruct and analyse the technologies which power them.

Most developers currently seem to use MVC architecture based frameworks (MVC stands for Model View Controller), the most talked about MVC based framework at the moment has to be Ruby on Rails as it “powers” Twitter.

Frameworks essentially make the process of building web applications simpler and applications designed around MVC are easier to manage because they are split into segments, which facilitate independent development. In addition to MVC architecture Rails also works on the principle of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). DRY insures that code in applications is expressed only in one place, without duplication and this approach minimises bugs and inconsistencies.

It is important at this stage to understand that Rails is a framework in its own right and it is based on an MVC architecture, in order to use Rails developers have to code in Ruby.

In reality not all developers or development teams have the resource or the skills in-house to use ROR and most webmasters and web developers are commonly skilled in PHP, Java or [dot]NET. This has spawned an evolution of PHP, Java and [dot]NET based MVC frameworks, which provide the benefits of using MVC frameworks whist levering existing coding skills. 

So what are some of the alternatives:
- PHP: Cake & Symfony 
- ASP.NET MVC 
- Java: Struts
- Python: Django

There are various arguments for and against different frameworks, some say Rails is the fastest others will say it is Django. Some important things to consider when selecting a framework are:
- Skills of your developers?
- Application requirements?
- Client requirements and constraints?
- Demands of the applications?
- Scalability - Will the framework accommodate and support a growth in users, or be extended in some way to do so?  

To be honest I got quite engrossed in Frameworks and I started reading deeper into ActiveRecord, ORM, CRUD, KISS and Webrick servers. All this framework terminology was far too much detail for a blog post, however, feel free to read further into it all by punching the abbreviations into Wikipedia or Google.  

Tags: asp.net, cake, django, frameworks, Java, php, python, rails, struts, symfony, Twitter, web applications

Twedit Twunch

I’ve just been messing about with some of the twitter analytics tools available on the web in order to gain an idea of how people are reacting towards the credit crunch. All the tools show a recent uplift in tweets during this month and twitter spectrum shows associative phrases around the term.

Twist:

Twitter Spectrum:

TwitStat:

Sorry about the doom and gloom but each of tools provide interesting findings and different ways to analyse the “twitosphere” (sorry I had to get that one in).

Here comes another buzz word “Halo effect”, it is clear in the tables above that over the last few months tweets have increased as result of heightened media coverage (and banks collapsing).

The main point to take away from my experiment is that these tools should be used as part of social media measurement tool kits, overlaying trend lines from other tools and charts could help to paint more complete and comprehensive picture of social media activity as a whole.

Tags: analysis, analytics, Measurement, social media, social media measurement, Twitter

Geek Meet

So I attented twestival earlier during the week, a sort of social media, web2 and netrentrepreneur gathering all organised via twitter.

This was definitely the first media event I had attended, which had been organised through twitter. Some people were shocked about how many agency bods had attended but then what did they expect? A web2 gathering in the middle of the west end, I’ll say no more.

Amongst all free booze and food, there was talk of xmpp, cisco systems delivering the next big thing and apparently twitter being dead in the next year or so, oh well you can’t please them all.

I had a laugh catching up with a few familiar faces and I look forward to next twitter co-ordinated bash.

Tags: geeks, Micro Blogging, social media, twestival, Twitter, web2

Benefits of Microblogging - A real world example

Microblogging has so many versatile marketing uses, however, clients question why they should use microblogs and what are the real benefits?

I could probably sit here and write 10 or more obvious reasons, however, one of the most important reasons has to be search engine visibility…I will lend you my real world example:

I bought a lovely pair of Nike Vomero 3 running shoes two weeks ago and ever since I have been busy putting them through their paces. As I have been so happy with them I decided to do a few searches in order to see what other people had to say about them.

As soon as I queried “Nike Vomero3” a twitter tweet ranked No.2 (Google UK & No.1 Google UK (UK)) providing a good review of the shoe. So there we are, there’s the head smacker…search engine visibility!

Not only are microblogs social media platforms which syndicate information, facilitate conversation and enable community building; they are also capable of providing good search engine visibility over time. This is something that many DR centric brands will value.

Tags: DR, Micro Blogging, microblog, social media, tweet, Twitter

Dawdlr - Lifestreaming for the trendies

dawdlr is a I service that I stumbled upon a little while ago; however, I had my interest rekindled by a mention of it in DotNet. I like this app it’s realistic…its lifestreaming at a slower pace, a kind of twitter for those that don’t really care that much.

It’s powered by Tumblr family hence the dawdlr.tumblr.com URL and is a piss take of twitter, a of sort tell us what you’re doing on post card and we’ll update it when we can be bothered.

You have to love the originality and it probably won’t surprise you that Russell Davies is behind it all.

Tags: dawdlr, Lifestreaming, russell davies, SMM, SMO, social media, Twitter