Michielb.nl

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Posted by Michiel at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Twurl this!

This short lesson shows you how to create a Twitter list in Twit2d, and add tweeps to it.

Go to the 'lists' tab.

Create a new list

Just fill out the name of the list. If you click 'Private list', it will be visible only to you. Then click 'Go'.

Your list is created

Your new list is created but as you can see it has 0 members. The next step is to go to the list,and add tweeps to it. Simply click the name of the list.

Add a tweep you know

This is one way of adding someone to the list. Simply type the screen name, and click 'Add'.

Your list now has a member

You can continue adding members, simply by typing in their name and clicking 'Add'.

Or add tweeps from their user page

Whenever you click the screen name of a tweep, Twit2d will show you his user page. That page now has a menu; choose the correct list and click 'Go' to add that tweep to that list. It's as simple as that.

Posted by Michiel at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Twurl this!

Vanochtend op Twitter klaagde ik dat er de laatste tijd zo weinig echt nieuws gebeurde. Geen echte vernieuwingen zoals in 2007, toen Qik. Twitter en Ustream op de markt kwamen.
De reakties die ik kreeg waren dat er wel degelijk dingen gebeurde. Hierbij een samenvatting van de op zich toch al korte tweets.

• Mobiel. 2009 wordt het jaar van mobiel omdat iPhone + App Store heel goed werkt en zorgt voor veel vernieuwing. Mening van @erwblo en @gvenk. Zelf denk ik dat dit inderdaad klopt en dit zal zeker voor grote vooruitgang zorgen maar is op zich niet echt nieuw.
• 2009 wordt een consolidatiejaar. Wie redt het, wie niet. Wat werkt, wat niet. Een periode van rust, tussen de periodes van uitbarstingen in. Mening van @brewbart en @fackeldeyfinds.
• De meeste ontwikkelingen van nu zijn varianten op bekende dingen, zoals Friendfeed of de vele Twitter-achtige applicaties. Mening van @radavi.
• 2009 is de komst van internet (applicaties) in je televisietoestel. Nog niet algemeen verspreid maar het komt er nu echt aan. @vitamientje zegt dat.
• 2009 is het jaar van personaliseren en het combineren van social networks. Sluit beetje aan bij de consolidatiegedachte; wat kunnen we doen nu we deze nieuwe gereedschappen hebben en hoe is iedereen gewend aan de mogelijkheden en wellicht de prijs die je er voor betaalt. Mening van @martindeboer aangevuld met mijn eigen interpretatie. En steun van @kruithoph
• Volgens @tonyjansen zijn er grote stappen gezet op het gebied van Artificial Intelligence de afgelopen maanden, waar we in 2009 de vruchten van plukken. Mobile en cloud, in combinatie met slimme realtime indexes.

De tijd zal het leren. Overigens zei @erwblo ook nog "Je bent gewoon in een knorrige bui, zorg dan zelf voor wat nieuws ;-)" dus dat gaan we dan voor de zekerheid ook maar doen.

Posted by Michiel at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Twurl this!

According to Molblog and Metrixlab, this is the list of Top 10 'worst website' in Holland. Here's the list, along with the ranking of each website in the Top 20 Websites of 2008 in terms of Traffic according to Multiscope.

1. Telegraaf (19)
2. Hyves (2)
3. KPN (-)
4. MSN (7)
5. Startpagina (9)
6. Marktplaats (4)
7. Mediamarkt (-)
8. Belastingdienst (-)
9. Postbank (10)
10. Rabobank (18)

7 out of 10 of the worst websites are in the Top 20 most visited websites

• People hate all sites. The most popular ones get most hate.
• It really doesn't pay to invest in usability. Being bad may actually help.
• The most visited sites fill a basic need. Sell stuff, do banking, stay in touch. Bad site or not, you need to get this done.
• The most visited websites get visited so much because they are so bad. You can never find what you need, so you give up and come back later.
• Notably absent in the Top 10 worst sites are Google and Buienradar.nl. They serve only one purpose. People like single purpose websites.

Quite strange. Do you have another conclusion?

Posted by Michiel at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Twurl this!

Last night I made something that got Techcrunched in a matter of hours. Here are some things I learned that you may find useful.

1. Do something

It all started with me making a Top Twitter Clients list, based on number of tweets per client. I twittered about this, around 7:55pm last night.

2. Listen to feedback

One of my followers Joost de Valk responded at about 8:45 by asking if this list could also be made per unique user, and then mention the number of tweets per client. This would show something about the usage of those clients.

3. Respond to that feedback right away

I respect Joost a lot and think he's one of the smartest people I follow. So I made that list. I'm an old-fashioned 'fake programmer' so I hack everything in Perl and PHP. I made a second version of my logging script, and made a Perl script that calculated the ranking based on unique users. I believe in Perl and static files, it's very easy to add or change things quickly.

4. Show that you listened

And I twittered about this, at 9:18 so this took me about half an hour. I think it is crucial that I did this quickly. If I responded the next day, it would have been out of the mind of Joost de Valk, or he might have missed my tweet because he wasn't online. Joost sent a tweet to his 2500 followers about this new list at 9:24. He liked the fact that I made this new version so quickly, so he promoted me.

5. Be ready for a snowball effect

This promotion by Joost got me a lot of traffic via Stumbleupon, and at around 10:45 an article appeared on Techcrunch about this study. Since it linked to just a static file, my server held up fine.

6. Have a good site

And then: nothing. On the very simple list page, there is no navigation to other parts of my site. So besides the visitors, I really didn't get any value from this. The Twitstat site has very poor navigation, so this traffic is nice but pretty much lost for my 'business' of making people use the Twitstat Mobile client.

Hope this helps you. Let me know in the comments.

Posted by Michiel at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Twurl this!

When shopping with my wife this afternoon I was, not for the first time, struck by her seemingly irrational behaviour. She showed a skirt to me, asking me if I liked it. I said I thought it was very nice. So she put it back right away.

I turned to Twitter, asking "What law don't I know yet?". Here are a few tips coming from the responses to that question.

• Tip: Don't be too enthousiastic, it looks suspicious. First be critical, look at it, and then approve.
• Be sincere. Don't look at other girls while you're saying it.
• There is a law that says 'Men are never right'. Worryingly, this tip came from a woman.
• Tip: Use superlatives, like stunning, mindblowing, just perfect.
• Another law: "If he likes it right away, it is too easy."
• Another law: "If he likes it right away, it is too short."
• Tip: Ask her if she really needs it. You will be outside the shop within 2 minutes, with the garment.
• Tip: Feelings. "Reminds me of our first date." or "Looks great with your eyes."
• Tip: Ask her what she thinks of it, and go with that. It shows that you have attention. A bit weird one this, but who knows. ;-)

Posted by Michiel at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Twurl this!

Us europeans have a hard time. When we twitter amongst ourselves, between and during our lunches, our hard-working English speaking friends find it hard to understand what we're talking about. So I looked at 4 ways of changing how we twitter to bridge that gap.

1. Switching to English

Most of us speak English pretty well, and switching to twittering in English might be the easiest way. Some of our European friends may not like that though, and I've experienced severe peer pressure when switching to English for the briefest of moments during SXSW.

2. Adding a language notifier in tweets

I've built language detection into my diy twitter client at http://twitstat.com/m/. It works with the Google AJAX Language API, and it actually does a pretty good job at detecting language. So you'll get tweets that say '[nl] was even aan het lunchen' or '[en] that was a great lunch'. Some of my followers didn't appreciate the ugly brackets though, and as long as there is no standard way to filter on these tags, it's not very useful. An American reader will still be confronted with the [nl] tags. Unless of course he uses http://twitstat.com/m/, in which case he can hide all tweets that contain [nl] or [fr]. Or even the word lunch, to get rid of most European tweets altogether. ;-)

3. Tweeting English in a separate account

Another option is to use one account for your native language, and one english twitter account for your foreign relations. This turns out to be very unpractical and will lead to many mistakes. I've added the option to automatically post all my English tweets to my foreign account, but you'll get funny stuff happening like replying in English to a tweet to your native account, which will then have the wrong sender in the @replies of the receiver. Confusion.

4. Automatic translation to two accounts

The final option I tried was to see if automatic translation via the Google Translation API could be viable. A dutch tweet entered in my favourite twitter client was automatically translated to english, and posted to my english account. Unfortunately, this has several unwanted effects. A reply will be translated as well, so the recipient will get 2 replies: One in dutch from my regular account, and one in English from my translated account. The other drawback is that the Google Translation API actually is complete rubbish and will only translate the most literal of sentence correctly. It really is quite poor. Check out my auto-translated feed if you don't believe it.

Conclusion

The only good option I see is to have the twitter client do the language detection, and then either putting the [en] tags in the tweets, or in another field that can be accessed via the API. If all twitter clients would be adapted to this, anyone could choose to filter out the languages that he doesn't want to see. This only works if all Twitter clients will add this language tag, and offer language filtering.

Posted by Michiel at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Twurl this!