The Birth of ConnectTweet – Combining Your Voices on Twitter

ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet is a simple utility built under the concept [reality in my opinion] that all groups, companies or brands are just collections of many people whose passion, ideas and behavior completely shape it. Often those people’s voices are drowned out in communications by a need to feel “official” instead making it feel robotic, monochromatic and cold… this is especially evident as companies are showing up in social mediums like Twitter where forced news releases and push marketing stick out like a sore thumb.

There needs to be a better way for a company to be represented on Twitter by many passionate people on the inside versus a robot or a single voice.

Making it happen with ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet flips that equation for groups and lets the real people all across your organization to show through on Twitter and be your voice. They can have real, human conversations with customers and share their unique perspectives and passion for their work as people at the front lines of your organization. This unique transparency shows the vibrancy that networks like Twitter have is inside your organization it’s just waiting to be shown the light of day.

First, you need to find and tap the passionates… the people all over your organization many of whom may already use tools like Twitter for their own uses, ask them to be your voice, to share openly their perspectives, interesting tidbits (guarantee you will learn something too) and to answer other users questions about the company on Twitter tagging each of their company posts with #companyname.

ConnectTweet can be then setup to gather up the tweets from the approved users and post them to your organization’s Twitter account allowing your followers to clearly see the human voices on the inside and give your organization that true human interface your customer always wanted to see.

A simple example

Below ConnectTweet has posted to the Twitter account of one of my tools a message I relayed from my personal account to let the tool’s approximately 1000 followers know about something cool that just happened. I simply posted this to my account, and the below tweet appeared in @retweetradar’s stream. If ten people worked for retweetradar.com they all could do the same thing creating an organic stream of information about the site right from the people on the front lines.

connectweet retweetradar

ConnectTweet is in a limited Alpha test but I would love to hear if you’d find it useful and would be interested in trying it out.

Retweetradar.com gets a new design!

New design retweetradar.com Jason Galep

I have to admit it’s nice to have people around you that can drop a killer new web design with one hand and build in, from the beginning, an understanding of how those designs can be executed on today’s browsers with the other…

Jason Galep stopped by out of the blue and asked if he could contribute a design for retweetradar… the contemplation period was brief and something like a “heck yeah” came from my mouth… I have no delusions that I am a designer and this opportunity was perfect timing for both of us. We worked back and forth over just a couple hours and a few emails and it was executed… a rapidly built, high quality, and great looking new face for retweetradar.com!

Hearing some great feedback on the design already via Twitter… what do you think? Tweet your feedback here!

Captured http://retweetradar.com as it is today here on Flickr, since we all know the train doesn’t stop and changes will keep coming!

New design retweetradar.com Jason Galep

Thanks for all the interest in my little project!
-Ben

I’m a “Web Development Elf” cool?… Yes cool!

Didn’t want to let this pass in the night, blogger and strategist at Undercurrent Mike Arauz picked up on the apps I have been exercising my brain on lately (retweetradar.com and spy.appspot.com) out of the blue and wrote a couple great posts… I mean the titles alone are classic, but they have some prefect messages that everyone in the web industry better be hearing and understand. You are hearing it from me, now listen to Mike.

Act I: Bigger != Better

From the first installment: The Web Development Elves

These great little sites didn’t require a multi-million dollar creative agency. They didn’t require a creative brief. And they didn’t require a million dollar investment from a major corporate client. They just needed the curiosity, ingenuity, creativity, time, and effort of one clever tinkerer.

I really appreciate that Mike, dead on. Mike writes on the same vein I am about theses applications, it’s not the change in technology that’s critically important here it’s the openness and pervasiveness of the new tools… anyone can do this… it’s no longer just the game of big IT or big agencies.

Small websites, tools, and online services, built by independent developers will eventually dwarf the contributions of the major digital creative agencies.

Act II: Efforts playing outside influence the day job? – Benefits to Best Buy (my employer)

In the second installment: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Mike picks up on the excellent article in the Economist “Generation Y goes to work” that mentions some of our work at Best Buy and sees:

Another Net Gener at the company cobbled together a mobile-phone version of Best Buy’s website for fun in seven days in his spare time.

Mike got in contact with me and asked… yep, he got me again… turned it into this post: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Read the whole post, but this was his final flurry and I couldn’t agree more!

Big corporations are so used to working with big agencies on big projects that it’s difficult for them to adapt to this new way of working. Small projects. Iterative process. Limited bureaucracy. But, best of all, small budgets and limited risk.

Every corporation in the world should be seeking out this kind of embedded intelligence, and making effective use of it. Create systems for discovering these talents. Create regular rewards for employees who share these talents. And create ways for groups of employees to find each other and begin collaborating.

More and more you will find that this is how people expect to work – flexible interests, collaborative, non-hierarchical – because this is how the internet works. Adapt.

Fun stuff! …Now back to the lab…

Getting Windows 7 Beta running on Ubuntu Intrepid via VirtualBox

Windows 7 up and running on Ububtu 8.10 via VirtualBox

I’m throwing this post out there that brings together the things I learned as I worked to get the free Windows 7 Public Beta running on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex via VirtualBox. Hoping this post helps those trying to do the same, in all my Google queries on these issues information was sparse… a few hours wasted on my part will hopefully save you time. This is written in a “just the facts” style and not a full “how to” but should get you where you are going avoiding some of the pot holes.

Proof it’s possible!

Windows 7 up and running on Ububtu 8.10 via VirtualBox

Tips

Getting the Install Media – Downloading ISOs

Ok, so Microsoft is having trouble serving download demand thus I tried many paths (torrents, 3rd party links, etc.) to download these multi-gigabyte files trying to avoid the rush… Don’t! Read More »

All feedback is good feedback… especially when it’s from Tim O’Reilly! – retweetradar.com

Saturday afternoon Robert Scoble sent out a simple tweet letting people know he popped up on the retweetradar (much appreciated Robert!), we had been talking about use of interesting metadata, for instance retweeted information, possibly being used to rank quality posts on Twitter in the comments of his blog posts about a better Twitter Search.

Twitter tweet from scobleizer

Then out of the blue I see Robert received a tweet back from Tim O’Reilly with feedback on retweetradar! Read More »

retweetradar.com – One days work from concept to launch with Google App Engine… Scobleized!

retweetradar.com

So I was getting a little restless and decided to work on another Google App Engine app, this time without all the Python learning curve and with some real world experience with the Google tools under the belt from http://spy.appspot.com. The goal was to see how fast I could go from concept to useful application leveraging a few of the revolutionary tools we all have at our fingertips today. In the end with about one days work an app was released, likely with a few bugs, but some fun things happened and I believe a bit of foreshadowing of the future of building web apps.

The Concept

I had an idea that I really wanted to extract meaning from a large-ish set of social media messages in near real time and visually trend it over time, showing topics heating up in conversations even while still slightly off the conventional news radar. We’ve all seen lately the groundswell social media conversation routinely outpacing tradition broadcast media in speed and openess of accounting, this app would be yet another way to put your finger on that pulse.

The class of information that looked interesting was “retweets” in other words messages where Twitter users were quoting someone else’s post, essentially saying they liked it, or spreading the word. Tech blogger Robert Scoble called out the same last Friday saying “[Retweets] …by the way, great place to find news!

The How

mashup

So now to the how, obviously Google App Engine was my choice for delivering this application, it’s ease of access, familiar development environment, ease to scale and obvious lack of initial cost make it a winner — Paul McDonald and Tom Stocky being very great folks to talk to, among other Googlers on the App Engine team I am sure, helps as well.

Next I needed the information, Twitter’s great search API acquired with the Summize purchase makes pulling tweets in near real time a non event. Now the value add, the real magic in the idea was to pull relevant information from the tweets and trend them, for that the lesser known Yahoo Term Extraction API was chosen, it’s simple interface, reliability and quality results. So the parts were chosen… we have the ability to capture social media posts, process out key terms, save, count and display them on the web… very nice. So in the equivalent of one days work over the last two days I took these parts and pieces, shook them up with jQuery and released http://retweetradar.com to the world.

The Outcome

The outcome was astounding http://www.retweetradar.com launched publicly via a Tweet and FriendFeed posts at around 8pm CST on Saturday, given the work done on Friday and Saturday certainly no greater than one common work day from start to launch. Once Sunday came around I tweeted the news to a few folks, Dan Zarrella was one he has done work on the data behind viral messaging on Twitter another of note was Robert Scoble to close the loop on his tweet about the value of retweets… then things took and unexpected turn… an inconspicuous but cool “like” came in from Scoble on Friendfeed.

Screenshot-Ben Hedrington - FriendFeed - Mozilla Firefox

Next thing I know Robert Scoble is using me as an example in a great blog post about events the mainstream media and even Internet media miss…

Robert says:

I love developers who try new things out. Check this out. Is this on TechMeme? No. Plus using Google’s App Engine, which is another trend we’re tracking: cloud computing.

I couldn’t agree more with the topic of that blog, even if I wasn’t involved! You did read it right?

This isn’t about launching another web app…

The fact this is possible is the real star here, the ability for anyone to bring an idea to the web in a highly reliable and scalable way for little to no initial investment shows a bright light toward the future… folks used to say the same for picking up some shared hosting for $5.95 and knocking out some PHP but realistically that app tipped over the second it saw real traffic and was hard to say whether it would be up day by day based on the other people, number of whom soaring each month, who shared your hardware.

Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled… get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.

So, draw your own conclusions to the viability of my new app retweetradar – No, please do! Contact me with feedback on whether it is useful and any ideas to make it better – it’s really not a huge concern long term… but I don’t believe it is possible to argue that these tools be it social media, cloud computing or whatever you want to call them are truly leveling the playing field, flattening the world and company hierarchies and making whatever the future of the web will be possible for anyone.

’spy’ makes “15 Useful Google App Engine Applications” on LouisGray.com!

Google App Engine

My little Social Media ’spy’ application http://spy.appspot.com makes “15 Useful Google App Engine Applications” on LouisGray.com written by Mike Fruchter! I just slid in there at 15… hoping to keep plugging along adding useful features and using ’spy’ to expose more and more folks to the value of Social Media.

Google App Engine really does make it possible to kick out an idea out into the world delivering scalability, quality and efficiency right out of the gate. I hope developers continue to discover it’s power, Python and Django are nothing to be afraid of in fact I really value learning them.

Thanks again to Mike and Louis!

’spy’ing on Mumbai? Floored that my little app can help…

spy Usage

As Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Dan Farber of CNet and many others have reported Twitter and social media in general are playing a huge part in receiving accurate and timely information from the crisis in Mumbai.

While not in those leagues, in the last twenty four hours I’ve received notice of a number of posts written by bloggers looking to help people keep an eye on the events unfolding in Mumbai in real time and linking to http://spy.appspot.com/find/#Mumbai some of them written by people with family and friends too near to the events… I am flooredRead More »

Best Buy: I Spy Twitter – Social Media Efforts at Best Buy and My App ’spy’ Featured in the Pioneer Press!

Julio Ojeda-Zapata technology writer and columnist at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and author of twitter means business: how microblogging can help or hurt your company wrote a nice piece today in the Sunday Pioneer Press titled “To twit or not?” [Update: PDFs here] about three Minnesota companies finding some success on Twitter excited to see one of them was Best Buy.

Julio captures well a few of our early efforts namely @BestBuyTulsa221 and other folks in our stores Tweeting to help customers, @jbweb using Twitter to find others in the company passionate about projects she is working on crossing existing hierarchies effortlessly and @BestBuyCMO shows the power of open thinking and openness to feedback all the way at the top. Really exciting stuff, and I love the sub headline “Best Buy: I Spy Twitter” couldn’t be more perfect!

I am personally excited Julio specifically calls out the ideas behind my work on the application ’spy’ (more on why I created ’spy’ here) and how we used it to display Best Buy buzz on in the “Hub” of our headquarters, exposing everyone to the Social Media conversation and it’s relevance to our business. I believe, especially in economies like today’s, finding new ways to tune into the conversation around your company can only help you focus on the right things and solve customers problems more quickly.

Thanks to Julio and the Pioneer Press for great coverage of our early efforts hopefully there will be more fun to report as this whole space moves forward, I know I am not stopping here.

This may be a bit self promotional but capturing Julio’s ’spy’ coverage here:

Ben Hedrington, a Web developer for the company’s BestBuy.com division, is such a Twitter fanatic that he created a new way to troll the twitterverse — along with other “social media” services such as FriendFeed and Flickr — via a built-from-scratch search engine he has christened “Spy” (spy.appspot.com).

Though fashioned in Hedrington’s spare time, Spy became an instant Best Buy hit. At one point, a big screen in Best Buy’s vast main lobby had Spy displaying the latest Best Buy-related buzz on Twitter. Spy has come in handy for Best Buy-related events, too. A screen behind the speakers is typically present, displaying a rolling series of event-specific tweets so staffers not physically present are able to chime in on discussions by using their Twitter accounts.

Even Barry Judge, Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, has Spy running in his office so he’ll know what is being said about his company on Twitter. Judge, a recent Twitter convert, said the service complements his blog and is a good way to gauge customer sentiment while speaking directly to his clientele in a way that feels genuine.

When Best Buy recently botched a phased rollout of a rewards-card program (meant to initially target 1,000 folks, it was e-mailed to about 7 million instead), Judge used his “BestBuyCMO” Twitter feed as well as his blog for mea culpas.

“Full transparency was helpful for maintaining trust,” Judge said. “Twitter gave me that visibility.”

How To: Install and Browser Test Your Site With Google Android Right on Your PC

Update: Post on how to install Android 2.0 on Mac OSX is here.

This post is for Android SDK versions 1.1 and under.

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day. I wasn’t able to find a quick answer to browser testing on the new Google Android mobile platform so I blazed a trail, captured and boiled down the steps so anyone can follow and get Android up and running on their Windows PC quickly and painl.

Installing the SDK and Browser

  1. First things first visit the Android SDK download page and download the Windows version of the SDK.
  2. Create a folder under C:\Program Files called “android-sdk”
  3. Un-zip the contents of the Android SDK you downloaded into this folder.
    Read More »