Robert Scoble posted a tweet today calling out an interesting visualization of Twitter client usage up on Neoformix. Being a big fan of data visualization and of course the methods of Edward Tufte, I took a look. Unfortunately the graphs aren’t exactly of the same caliber as the work Tufte promotes - they were non the less interesting. There’s also another interesting visualization of usage patterns for the top Twitter users and how much they use twitter. It’s clear it’s increasing for all of them.

Despite my initial reaction to the contract, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase a laptop connect card from AT&T. The modem arrived early this morning via DHL express thanks to the complementary 2 day shipping that came with this modem. I opted for the Option GT Ultra Express 3G device which of course comes with limited Apple OS X support. I read the reviews on AT&T’s site about how the card stuck out 2 inches from the side of the computer. I found it to be slightly less, but it’s flush with the top surface of the 15″ MacBook Pro, so I was happy. With the antenna all the way out it extends just over 2 1/2″ but your milage may vary for the most accurate placement of the antenna. There’s also a port for an external antenna should you happen to have one. The other negative I had read about the modem was the blinking light was so bright they needed to put tape over it. While it is slightly distracting, it’s hardly blinding and I find it reassuring to know I’m connected - again YMMV.

For folks using a Mac, you’ll need to download the correct version of your software from Option. It’s a small file (1.1Mb) and downloads quickly - but don’t forget to do it before you head off into the land of non-access. You’ll get little help from the paper that comes in the box with the modem. Download the installation manual from Option as well. It’s not linked from the 10.4.11 and 10.5.x download page. Apple has the device listed in it’s configuration files so I’ll be spending some time looking for connection scripts to see if I can bypass the GlobeTrotter Connect software all together.

I was unsatisfied with the SIM card insertion - there’s nothing but friction holding it in. I have a feeling over time it will fall out. The other connection that felt weak is the actual slot in the Mac. I’m not sure if this is a issue with the card or the laptop’s ExpressCard/34 slot. The old style PC Cards seemed to have a more solid connection and the handy eject button that popped out let you know if it was in all the way or not.

I found it frustrating to have to create a new Network location instead of having it inserted in with my Airport/Ethernet etc settings. This also means I’m going to have to create all of my Parallels configuration again so I can use the network with Windows and WiFi and Ethernet so I can share the connection on vacation. I followed the instructions and set the APN value to isp.cingular as instructed in the 3G/EDGE/GPRS tab in settings. It never did connect although it may have been my lack of patience with the device’s initial network registration process. After removing that value it connected just fine - so it may be ignored anyway.

From my home office I had pretty dismal download numbers for the portion of the test that was able to complete. I tested via Speedtest using their recommended connection in Kansas City, MO. With the default configuration set to prefer 3G but use what was available. I was able to achieve a peak of 17kbps and then it slowed to 6kbps and then stopped 17% of the way into the test. The ping test yeilded 349ms which I feel was reasonable. I’d read that setting the device to only use 3G and not switch to EDGE as needed can improve this performance. I reconnected and sure enough I was able to hit 700kbps but averaged 650kbps download before the test failed at 76% completed. I ran one last test to my closest physical location, the Twin Cities and hit 900kbps before the test failed at 56% I’m unclear why the tests continue to fail before completion - but that’s for another day.

My last test was to upload a few photos (in fact the ones I took for this post) just to see how that all performed. My expectations were pretty low given the issues with the download test. I was able to upload all of these photos (~204Kb) in about 10 seconds which I actually found reasonable. The larger screenshot above (~188Kb) uploaded in about 4 seconds which was even faster. My conclusion is that this certainly won’t be replacing my broadband cable modem for daily internet access (not to mention there’s a data cap on the service) but it’s a viable alternative to going without and for those who travel sufficiently, it’s a cheaper alternative to pay as you go WiFi in airports and hotels.

Panoramio beat Microsoft to the punch. Techcrunch has an article on the software so I won’t steam their thunder. Executive version; they’ve launched a new featured called “Look Around” which gives users the ability to scan through popular locations and see the area from different angles etc. Does this sound like Photosynth? That’s because it’s the same idea. This example from the top of the Empire State Building in NY is really cool. It’s way cool because it works now - and it works on a Mac.

OpenSocial, a group effort to create a widget platform spear headed by Google, has a few glitches that I’d love to see fixed. They are largely comparison items from Facebook, who has recently announced that it will open source it’s own platform. Regardless of the motivation, there are a couple of items I’d like to see ported from Facebook to OpenSocial.

1. Support for FBML like syntax: “Hold on a second! Standard HTML is the benefit of OpenSocial over Facebook” folks are probably thinking. While that’s true, without an effective way to capture and store user information for more than 24 hours (pesky terms of service documentation) developers are left querying for friends pictures etc over and over and over again. While this isn’t inherently a problem, if you wanted to display a 1,000 profile pictures for some unknown reason, you need to call the API a large number of times. Then generate the HTML and pass it to the client. This makes applications painfully slow. It’s great to store the numeric id (12345678) and be able to pass it back to the pre-client for parsing. The best examples are and . These really are very handy.
2. Support for FQL like syntax: OpenSocial does a great job of providing methods for gathering most of the information you would want from the social graph, but it’s lacking in the ability to remix the data in new and interesting ways (easily). OpenSocial requires all of the heavy lifting to be done on the client (or the application backend if their API allows it). Most clients have a reasonable limit as to how big data structures can effectively be and have the application still function. Processing on the applications infrastructure negates another advantage of OpenSocial which is requiring very little in the way of hardware to operate.

There are also some learnings here for Facebook. I’d like to see a few OpenSocial conventions ported from OpenSocial to Facebook.

1. OAuth Signature: To be fair, Facebook does provide signed requests, but it would be great if they’d use a standards based signature instead of their own homegrown version.
2. External JavaScript Libraries: Facebook’s FBJS is powerful and provides most functionality that developers need. It’s even been open sourced so it can be used outside of the Facebook universe. However, developers who’ve been working with jQuery, ProtoType or any of the other numerous javascript libraries have to start at the beginning again. Additionally, they may be missing the functionality in the FBJS library that they need.

Both platforms still have a ways to go in terms of making developers life’s easier and users application experiences more robust. I think it’s great news that Facebook is opening their platform more. It’s really more symbolic than anything, because they still ultimately control what they do or do not implement on their platform. Bebo is the only other social network using Facebook’s model and it still requires some re-writing for developers because of syntax difference and lack of some features.

Curious how big the extended twitter universe (twitterverse) is, I decided I’d do my own investigation and provide results I found as a list of tools. Basically, it’s BIG. Google returns ~69.3 million hits for “Twitter.” Below is what I found relevant in the cream. You’ll notice I skipped Mac/PC clients. There are lots of great clients that people use for platform specific updates (perhaps a future blog post worth).

Websites:

• FriendFeed: Leverages Twitter Feed
• Quotably: Leverages Twitter Feed
• Twitter: The original site that started it all. Unfortunately it’s been highly unreliable over the last few weeks.
• Twitter Digest
• Twitter Mobile: Twitter’s official mobile website.

Spotting Trends (Techcrunch tweeted an even better one than these but I can’t for the life of me find it):

• PicoBuzz
• TweetVolume
• Twends
• Twitscoop
• TwitterBuzz: Tracks URL usage on Twitter (lots-o-TinyURL here)
• Twitt(url)y: Realtime tracking of “hot” URL’s

Tracking, Leaderboard, Ranking and Visualization:

• 5K Twitter Browser
• Tweeterboard
• Tweetmeme
• TweetWheel
• Twerp Scan: Users spewing SPAM
• Twist
• Twistori
• TwitDir
• Twitstat
• Twitter Blacklist: Users spewing SPAM
• Twitter Quotient: Brutally honest!
• Twitter Spectrum
• Twitterholic
• Twitter Stats
• Twubble
• Visual Twitter
• Who Should I Folow?: Find new folks to follow on Twitter

Voice Tools:

• TwitterFone: Private Beta Only
• TwitterGram

iPhone Specific:

• Hahlo
• iTweet
• MobileTwitter
• PocketTweets
• Twinkle: Requires Jailbreak
• Twitter for iPhone

Web Browser Plugins (a very short list):

• TwitBin: Firefox
• TwitterBar: Firefox

Social Networking Sites:

• Grazr Twitter Reader: Facebook
• Twitter: Facebook
• Twitter SyncMySpace
• Twitter Box: Second Life

Mobile Applications:

• Fring
• Jargong
• jTwitter
• Mobio
• MoTwit: En espanol (Spanish)
• Slandr: WAP site
• Tiny Twitter
• Twibble
• TwitterBerry: BlackBerry client
• WidSets - Twitter: Java client

Desktop Apps (Adobe AIR):

• Snitter
• Spaz
• Tweetr
• Twhirl: “a twitter client” is understated. Definite must have

Search:

• Flaptor Twitter Search
• Hashtags
• Summize: Amazing results
• Terraminds
• TweetScan
• TwitterSearch

Photos & Images:

• Mobypicture
• TwitPic
• TwitterGram: FlickrToTwitter

Mashups/Geolocation:

• TrackThis: UPS/FedEx/DHL etc package tracking
• TwitterLocal
• TwitterVision
• TwitterPoster

Blogging Tools (a very short list):

• Twitter Feed
• Twitter Tools: WordPress Plugin
• TwitThis

News & Politics:

• Alltop
• Politweets
• TweetWire

Survey Tools:

• Poll Daddy
• StrawPoll
• Twitter Census
• Twitter Answers
• Tweetburner URL tracking

Special thanks to franticindustries, Mashable and all of the assorted the commenters for the initial inspiration for this list. Also see Twitter Fan Wiki for a comprehensive list of apps. There are some big ones missing I’m sure, so YMMV with that list as with this one over time. All links/sites were active as of May 27, 2008.

Doing some reading this morning lead me to this site which has a collection of 10 bits of code that you can tweet. Reading this reminded me of the 5Kb website challenge. The premise was to create a functional website in 5Kb of code. That included all images, javascript, css, html… EVERYTHING! I recall there were a number of very complex graphic manipulation tools and even a shopping cart. Today I’m building out a new design for a client and my CSS include alone is already 3,197 bytes. This got me to thinking, we need a new 5Kb website challenge.

So here it is! What can you make in 5Kb?

Rules:

• All HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Images and any initial httpRequest() content loaded at startup must be less than 5Kb
• Content loaded via AJAX (if used) must be less than 5Kb per load request. In other words, it it loads a json object that references an image, the image + json must be less than 5Kb in size.
• The site must “do” something.

Prizes

I’ll give the three (3) best entries a 512Mb Memorex Mini USB Thumb Drive. Entries must be submitted by June 16, 2008 to be eligible for a prize. Submit your site and description in the comments below.

Judging and all that good stuff is subject to participation. If we have enough entries, I’ll open it to the community - otherwise, I’ll be the judge. I’m off to get started on my (non-eligible) project.

It’s not for everyone, but the Google Image Labeler is the best tagging application I’ve ever seen. It does a great job of filtering out spam by matching you with another human being to concurrently tag items. This avoids any sort of oddities with linguistic issues such as car vs. auto because both people have to use the same lexicon. This is crowd sourcing at it’s best.

A similar system could be implemented using caching to hold submissions for sites with significantly lower traffic than Google (that’s pretty much all sites right?) Once an image is tagged by 2-3 individuals, it could be “accepted.” Determining who’s who of course becomes the challenge, but a mixture of IP, user names, session information or any other number of “fingerprint” type technologies could help narrow it down to a reasonably accurate representation. Additionally, you could expire words after a predetermined time. Additionally, the concerns of spam may be trivial since 20 character tags are hardly helpful for spammers promoting products. Of course Google’s method avoids all caching all together by only letting live posts associate with the image.

The other thing Google does is make tagging a game. While this is hardly sufficient to help people get motivated to actually use the application for long periods of time, it’s a good effort and it can be addictive. Points are awarded to folks as the complete matches, giving them little actual value beyond seeing their names on a Google top 5 leader board (if they make the cut).

Last night I downloaded the full release of Opera Mini 4.1 and so far I have to say I am impressed. The new URL location bar works like a typical browser which is great! The new integrated download is fantastic too. The application feels faster, but I’m lacking in any data to support that claim. I was able to upload a small image to Flickr so it all seems as advertised.

There are some things that still don’t work though. You still can’t select a page URL within the application and say mail it to a friend. Also, WordPress 2.5.1 doesn’t seem to work fully because of AJAX issues. Generally, if the site/app your accessing is AJAX based, it won’t work. The input fields in forms still require clicking on them to bring up the input interface. JQuery library doesn’t seem to work correctly either, in fact support under 4.0 seemed better.

I also found the constant permissions nagging about accessing the local device content frustrating. That’s no fault of the software, but rather the applications permissions. However, the dialog from the phone often was unreadable due to a UI glitch. Blindly selecting “Yes” seemed to power through it. Opera should provide a guide to users installing the application so they can get assistance navigating the sea of permissions when installing. If you’re like me, still without a full browser bundled with your phone, I strongly recommend taking a look at Opera Mini.

Brian Nadel recently wrote a nice article comparing broadband service from the big three wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon and Nextel. Normally I have good connectivity within my house through my local cable carrier and don’t mind paying for airport WiFi once in a while. I’ll be traveling to the Northern Virginia area in the next month and want to have a broadband connect card as an option for connecting wirelessly. The $300/night hotel I’m staying in doesn’t offer free WiFi, instead it’s a $10/day T-Mobile hotspot. Add that together with the fees from the airport (Boingo) it comes up to a hefty $80 for internet service while away from home for a single week!

In Brian’s article he mentioned that AT&T had an $80 option for those adverse to a 1 or 2 year commitment. Intrigued I stopped by my local AT&T store and was given a bunch of misinformation that differed even from the information I was able to read on the AT&T site. 2 calls to AT&T later I was still unable to get the $80/month plan mentioned. I asked my sales consultant if there was an option to add it onto an existing line of service which could be upgraded and downgraded as needed based on my travel patterns and still no luck. At least a 1 year commitment is required. I was able to get an offer of a month to month with no discount on the card plan (which is to be expected) for $29.95/month with a 10Mb data allowance. Unfortunately the overage charges are outrageous ($0.06/kb). A single webpage might end up costing $2 to $3 to view!

There are companies that are catering to my more specific needs - a short term “rental” but they’re making a hefty profit on the service. I found two services, one which I wouldn’t even think about giving my credit card information to. The other, Rovair, seems to have a nice product offering, comparable with purchasing WiFi cost wise - but of course with the added convenience of your own dedicated connection.

Verizon and Nextel only offer plans with contracts as well. Verizon does have a 1 year options and Nextel locks you in for 2. So now I’m back to considering my options with pay as you go WiFi and spotty EDGE connectivity through my paired Blackberry and probably the most economical - going without <shudder />.

I was very impressed with the Photosynth technology when I first saw the TED video online late last year and recently was discussing this with some folks who hadn’t seen it. I wanted to capture this and to see where the technology has progressed to now that it’s owned by Microsoft.

One thing I noticed was the similarity of the image effects engine in Silverlight and Photosynth. The Hard Rock Cafe demoed their implementation of a massive graphic presentation during Mixx (I think) and launched their own 257 image memorabilia exploration tool tool which looks VERY MUCH like the Photosynth tool demoed at TED. I’ve found the performance of the application to be sluggish even over broadband, but it is a nice way to explore such a large dataset.

Microsoft’s Labs site has the Photosynth demo online for XP/Vista users only. I am really more interested in seeing the impact of the 3D modeling software that was demoed in the second half of the video. Unfortunately my 1st generation MacBook Pro and Vista install wouldn’t cooperate and run the demo.

Silverlight is fully supported on the Mac (even using Safari). For now I’ll have to be patient and hopeful. The visual effects engine and massive image set pieces have been integrated with Silverlight. Perhaps Silverlight 3 or some other future version will bring in the 3D visualization components.