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!

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

I made my first Facebook product page today, for my project iTweet.net. The process was quite simple, and I can see some useful possibilities already in using the Discussion Boards as a place to handle feature requests and bug reports.

I'll be making another FB product page for The Illusion Factory soon as well, and perhaps I'll dig into the paid-push types of advertising they have available.

Stay tuned...and meanwhile, please add my iTweet Facebook page to your Products list!

My use of Twitter has changed over time, as has my enjoyment of it. I had idly been making some notes about it, inspired by a thoughtful post from A Bite Of Sanity, and then today a Twitter question from Chris Brogan made me decide to post it. Examples here are real tweets from my timeline:

1. Newbie - figuring out if it's OK to jump in and follow people I don't know. Will they yell at me?

2. Stalker - You mean I can hear what John Gruber and Eric Meyer are saying? And I don't have to come up with something intelligent to say back? Sweet! In this stage I didn't make many tweets, just followed a ton of people and watched the tweets roll by.

3. Shy Kid At The Party - making awkward observational statements, hoping someone will start a conversation. It didn't work, as I wasn't really offering much of real value. Example: "Going to see Spiderman 3"

4. Self-Promoter - talking endlessly about the projects I'm working on, attempt at self-marketing I guess ... But this doesn't invite 2-way communication, and it didn't improve my Twitter experience at all. Example: "Back to work on playermadness.com"

5. Twitter Software Developer - as a developer of a Twitter-based web app, I use Twitter to field feature requests, or even to REQUEST feature requests. I find that there are so many different types of Twitter users that it's entirely possible I overlook aspects of my product that I don't consider important because I personally don't use it. So being in close contact with the community of my users is invaluable - and kind of fascinating as the users have helped me refine the product so much throughout its own life cycles. For example, this weekend I found myself with some extra time to work on iTweet, and posted a question about what could be improved. I received some very helpful notes from a couple users; their requests are answered now, the product is better...and everybody is happy. Fantastic. Example: "Planning some feature adds to iTweet. Any users out there with feature requests?"

6. Twitter Community Participant - This is a stage I only recently entered. I started to find a groove of which people were worth following, which were spam or garbage etc...and which people were interested in conversation, which ones I had things in common with, etc. Conversations begin at this point.

This is the stage where I started to really love Twitter. @username replies pepper my timeline more and more from this point, about two months from the beginning. I started having conversations with people and getting to know them from the experience of reading their short posts over a long period of time. (This concept is worthy of another post at another time.) I was getting the in-jokes and the lingo, and feeling comfortable speaking my mind. I also occasionally ask questions to design riddles, or ask for input on iTweet, or ask a general life question...and I get answers from people, and usually I am pointed in the right direction or get helpful advice. It's awesome.

There have been a couple times where I felt like I put my foot in my mouth, but these are growing pains of any social media learning curve. At this point I feel like I have some new pals, some people to bounce ideas off of, and this is neat; I don't have many friends that speak geek, so it's nice to be able to have these kind of conversations.

I think there are other stages of Twitter use; the medium is so flexible that people use it in many different ways. Some users pound out the tweets faster than I can follow sometimes, whether they are single thoughts or questions (Chris Brogan) or longer philosophical commentary (Eric Rice). Some wire their blog or tumblelog feeds into their Twitterstream (this is kinda annoying, I won't name anyone but you know who you are). Some wait until they have something really funny or poignant or useful to say and only tweet once or twice a day (Merlin Mann).

Does a different kind of Twitterer come to your mind? Let's start a list. Leave your Twitter personality type in the comments!