I'm going to be giving a presentation at the WebMapSocial meetup on Tuesday, Nov. 17. Want to come?  Find out all the info right here.  It's at the Google campus in Mountain View - I'm excited for an excuse to go visit!

I think I'll be talking about iTweet.net and the upcoming Local Trends API that Twitter is going to be releasing soon.  I also may be talking about the SaaS product I've been building, NetConference.tv.  It's only kinda-sorta map-related, but it IS shiny and new, so I'm excited to show it off.

Thanks to my friend Catherine Burton, host of this group, for the invite. She is an avid mapster and innovator - check out her unique company Endpoint Environmental.

I just noticed in my web app iTweet that Twitter is reporting a maximum of 150 API requests per hour now! Hurray!  This is great news for Twitter clients, as the API limit is a constant challenge in user interaction.

Twitter had mentioned that this was in the works, but so far I haven't heard mention of them actually launching this upgrade.  I hope it is here to stay!

They have also recently fixed a long-standing bug that caused followers/following methods to report incorrect data. Along with this fix came some new API methods for managing follow relationships - I will be updating iTweet with a new follow/unfollow UI just as soon as I can get to it!

There are some really great improvements coming soon to iTweet.net - stay tuned for much much more.

For one long year, my fiancée and I lived in different states (before we were engaged and parents and stuff). I don't recommend the long-distance relationship to anybody who likes the person they are with, but sometimes it's unavoidable. We found that it took a LOT of telephone time, and we also explored some creative solutions to spend time together as well. One of our favorites was the long-distance movie date - while talking on the phone we would rent the same movie and watch it together while we talked on the phone. The trick to it was starting the movie at the exact same time, so we could share the laughs and surprises without annoying each other. You can picture how this went:

"One... two... three... press play!"
"Did you start it?"
"Yeah. How close did we get?"
"Umm... OK the credits are starting..."

And so on. If we had done it correctly, we could comfortably watch the movie together while talking on the phone. If we had done it incorrectly, we started over. It was kind of fun, if you looked past the hassle of trying to sync the movie.

Enter nxtgen.tv: Shared Video on Demand. This video sharing site allows you to share video with people, in realtime, online. The syncing of the video is handled automagically, and you can actually discuss the action live, via webcams and/or group text chat.

Sign up and send your personalized channel URL to your friends along with a time to meet there. Then you control the action: when you start a video, or pause it, your friends see the same thing in real time!

The patented core technology of the app was invented by a couple sharp individuals who brought it to The Illusion Factory along with a Facebook app and their great idea. Since then we have hammered it into a working demo app and started to show it off a little bit. Enough interest has been raised that I've recently been given the OK to "go nuts" with the project, wheeeee!

A "movie date" between two people is just one application of this technology; I am also working on some different configurations, for giving presentations, providing unique customer service, and collaborating on video editing. I am also building out the social aspects of the site. Soon I hope to launch a new version with full-fledged social and sharing features! So stay tuned for lots more from nxtgen.tv ... but until then I would invite anyone who is interested to sign up for our demo site and give it a try! We are always interested in user feedback, especially from you, web-savvy individual that you are.

This technology is available for license in any custom format, be it entertainment, service, media, or enterprise. We think nxtgen.tv is a lot of fun and there are many possibilities for the technology... if you can imagine shared video having any synergy with your product or service, drop me a line!

The "tracking" feature in Twitter had become a staple of my communication. I used it to catch @colbypalmer, @itweet or @colbyworld replies, and to find out what people were saying about iTweet, my Twitter client, or my other projects. It's also a great way of monitoring your competition! It was recently disabled as a part of the Twitter downgrades, and I found that I was missing replies (checking the Replies tab for all three of my accounts is something I just can't keep up with) and feeling "out of the loop" as far as my product's relationship to its users.

Enter Tweetbeep.com: "Like Google Alerts for Twitter". This tool was created by Michael Jensen, @mdjensen on Twitter. Tweetbeep scans Twitter for terms or usernames (they use the excellent Summize for this) and emails you with your results.

It's not as real-time as the original tracking, but that's kind of a nice thing as you can opt to check for your updates hourly or daily, and you don't get a million text messages all day long. You can also add links to your search, which are gathered in real-time; Tweetbeep will even find links that have been masked via a TinyURL-type service, which is awesome since most links on Twitter are TinyURLs.

The part that I really like is that it's archivable, both in your email and aggregated in tweetbeep.com itself, which is a huge plus! Now I don't have to feel like I'm missing out by not following everybody on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tracking, tweetbeep

I started experimenting with the Terraminds Twitter search API last night and wired it into iTweet, my Twitter UI.  Originally my intent had been to add the capability of searching #hashtags, as a way of better indexing my own tweets.  After I spent a while with it and I was happy with the tagging implementation, I realized that I could also add a simple search box to the interface and it would be useful on a different level.

Now you can do a quick search to mine the Twitterverse for anything you want, in the same place you do your Twittering from.  Enjoy.

You can also embed groupings into your Twitterstream by employing the use of #hashtags.  These links will appear in green, and clicking them will lead you to a search page for that term.  iTweet also "cleans" the pound sign from your search tag to make a nicer-looking, easier to read Tweet.  (But yes, it still counts in your allotted total of 140 characters.) Easy, right?

What's the big difference between the two methods (tagging and searching)?  The system of tagging is a more specific way of tracking and contextualizing conversations on Twitter; people are embedding the tags purposefully, to create ad hoc channels or groupings. What TerraMinds does is different, it's a generalized search engine for the Twitter service.  You can read more about #hashtags in my blog and at the Twitter Fan Wiki.  Stowe Boyd and Chris Messina were early proponents of the idea and they have written about it at length as well.

Hashtags.org also has a great service for employing hashtags.  Why am I using Terraminds for #hashtags then?  Users must be following the @hashtags Twitter user in order to have their tweets scanned and registered by the hashtags.org service.  At the time of this writing there are only about 620 users following @hashtags, so IMO this service doesn't really permeate the Twitterverse enough to establish ubiquity (yet).  For this reason, I recommend following @hashtags on Twitter.  I would prefer to use the hashtags.org service until Twitter adds this feature natively; unfortunately at this time I don't feel like hashtags.org is widespread enough to add it to iTweet without confusing a ton of people.  (I also do not know if they support 3rd-party services via an API.)

The development of iTweet has been very fun due to feedback from you, the users...so let me know what you think.  Get in there and try to break that sucker, as I know you will. 

Leave comments on this blog, or let's talk on Twitter or Facebook.

Cross-pollinate social networks?  Sure!  Join the iTweet Facebook group.

Note: iTweet.net's browser interface currently works great in Firefox and Safari. I will debug it for the evil Internet Explorer as soon as possible.  I will also be adding the search and tagging functions to the iPhone version as soon as possible.

Tags: iTweet, twitter, hashtags, search, terraminds, tagging, webdev, social+media