• 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.

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?

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.

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. ;-)

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.

De Movable Type template code is als volgt

<a href=" javascript:var tweetlet = window.open('http://tweetburner.com/links/create?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>','Tweetburner post','width=500,height=300,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,status=yes,toolbar=no,location=no'); tweetlet.focus();" >Twurl this!</a></p>

Simpel.

• Hij is heerlijk licht, mijn tas is dus ook lekker licht, dat maakt hem ideaal om mee te nemen. Ook in buitenland, en op confereties e.d.. Je pakt hem makkelijk met 1 hand vast.
  
• Het feit dat hij maar 1 USB aansluiting heeft is nog *nooit* een probleem geweest. Ik heb er altijd hoogstens 1 ding inzitten: iPod, Garmin GPS, KPN HSDPA modem. Dat is dus geen probleem.
  
• Hij is snel zat. Het lijkt me niet handig om Final Cut Pro of Photoshop te gaan draaien, dat moet je op een ander apparaat doen. Hij start ook erg snel op, heeft heel snel wifi.
  
• Schijfruimte is niet royaal maar daar kan je wel mee leven. Ik zet nu meer online; mijn mail staat nu allemaal via IMAP op de server, muziek gebruik ik nu altijd van mp3tunes.com dus heb dat niet meer lokaal staan. En ik zet nu ook via Jungledisk bestanden op Amazon S3, die ik tot nu toe alleen als backup gebruikte.
  
• Batterijleven is ook niet enorm maar ook daar kan je mee leven. Laden als je kan. Je kan hem zonder stroom 2.5 uur gebruiken, hij is bij mij nog nooit helemaal leeg gelopen toen ik hem nodig had. Geen echt probleem dus.
  

Menno maakt een vet doolhof, originally uploaded by MichielB.

Vooral een testje van Picnik, de edit tool van Flickr. Contrast verhoogd, schaduwen donkerder gemaakt. Easy.