Hey Bloggers, Step Away from the Twitter for a Second... and Blog

There are a few shiny things here in Vegas that have bloggers' attention. No question about it. There are shows and clothes, lookers and hookers, drinks and winks. But it could be a shiny blue bird, and the light of mobile phones that has many bloggers' attention this year, even if they are in Vegas instead of wherever they may call home. Blog World Expo, a conference dedicated to blogging, about blogging, featuring bloggers and discussing all things blogging, should see a whole lot of blogging. Right? But there's a high possibility that many will forgo full-size blogging, in exchange for everyone's favorite microblogging application, favoring hashtags over Technorati tags.


Chris Pirillo, lifecasting maven and tech geek to the masses, asked what many of us have been observing ourselves, this evening, when he said, "How many bloggers does it take to blog about Blog World Expo? None. They're all tweeting about it, instead." Now I will give bloggers the benefit of the doubt a bit for tonight only, given the show hasn't really kicked off. But as I noted at South By Southwest in the Spring, and at Blog World Expo last fall, there has come a tendency for those attending events to "live tweet" the event, 140 characters at a time, and not do the wrap-up report of what sessions they attended, ideas they encountered and people they met. And I wish this were not the case.

I don't want to be putting down any quasi-moral ultimatums about how the event is about the sessions and not about the parties, even if that's how I feel most days. I don't think it's my place to tell people to stop having so much fun and focus. But I do hope that those of us who have the privilege of calling ourselves bloggers actually blog.

Over the next few days, I will be seeing many of my peers and respected tech leaders talking shop and I look forward to learning a lot. I will be blogging as much as I can where it makes sense, following the model I discussed in March of this year, when I showed how to blog live events and publish with lightning speed. While at South by Southwest this March, I was aggressive enough to add 14 separate posts in the four day period. I can't promise the same amount this week, but I will do my best to bring the event to you.

With great tools like Lazyfeed available to help you follow blogs on specific topics, it is now easier than ever to see your posts on the week's event. As much fun as it will be to check in on Foursquare at whatever pub you are drinking at, or to quote tech luminaries with the #bwe09 hashtag all over Twitter, I am hoping I will see some great posts - lots of them - from all the bloggers who are here. I did say It's Twitter's World... but there is a big role for blogs in an age of microblogging, and I want to see all of us try to do both.

BlogWorld Expo 2009: The State of Technology & the Real Time Web

For the third time this year, I am back in Las Vegas. And per usual, I'm not here for anything resembling a vacation, as it's conference time. But instead of attending an event on behalf of a specific company, as I have done many different times, I am going on behalf of the blog, and making many of the connections I have forged online since 2006 onward more concrete - through participating in Blog World Expo. This is my second year participating after going last year, and for 2009, I have the challenging, yet exciting, opportunity to talk about what has to be one of the biggest stories in technology this year - the real-time Web.

On Friday, the second day of the conference, at 11:30 a.m., I will be speaking solo - trying to discuss the impact the Web is seeing as real-time becomes further embedded in many of our daily online activities.

The subject of the real-time Web is near and dear to me. As an information consumer and producer, anything I can do to get my data out to more places faster than ever, or the easier I can get to more data, faster than ever, reducing latency is huge. That's part of why I made the real-time Web central to my #1 prediction for the world of tech in 2009 back on New Year's Eve.

Excerpting from my post back on December 31:

"Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-timeoffer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options."

I've been well known for getting my predictions wrong, but every once in a while, I feel like I am on to something, so this is gratifying.

If you are here for BlogWorld Expo, you can expect to hear a lot more about things like PubSubHubbub, Lazyfeed, Reader2Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter Search, and more at 11:30 on Friday. Just make sure you add the session to your own custom schedule. It will all go down in real time. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Roars Back To Life After Self-Imposed Slumber

There are a select few Web 2.0 companies who have suffered such a roller coaster of peaks and valleys the way Technorati has. Once a clear industry leader for blog search, statistics, and individual site "authority", Technorati's influence withered away thanks to an aggressive push by Google into the blog search arena, statistical gaming by number-crazed bloggers, management changes, odd product launches, and inconsistent uptime. But with a major relaunch tonight, the company has tried to throw off the shackles of the old and rise again, armed with more cash in the bank, a talented editorial staff, and a new look. All of a sudden, the site looks relevant again.

Back in early 2007, Technorati was among one of the favorite topics on this blog. You could see the tumult at the company, as then-CEO David Sifry wrote on a Tuesday in a comment here that he was "very very happy at Technorati", only to announce he was looking for a new CEO that Friday, three days later. You could see debate that summer over people trying to game the then much-watched "Authority", which counted up external links to your site in a six month period. But by early 2008, we were using phrases to discuss the company that included "totally toast", and the new Twitter generation, less than two years removed from Technorati's heyday, scarcely remembers the once respected innovator.


Rising and Falling Blogs On Technorati
But as of tonight, they are back in the game. They ditched the old metrics for attributing authority, as it was considered too static, and now will aim to reward authors for posting frequency, context and linking behavior. Interestingly, they have also introduced authority by topics, meaning that technology blogs can be compared to others in their sector, as can sports blogs, music blogs, and so on. This means that aside from the overall Top 100, sites like TechCrunch don't have to measured head to head against Huffington Post, and we smaller blogs can get a better idea of who our peers are. (See:
A Totally New Technorati.com & Technorati Media Rising)


It's Nice to Be Considered a Top 100 Tech Blog
This new ranking system is looking to be more dynamic - changing along with the real-time nature of the Web. Blogs will rise and fall, and be noted on the site. Blogs and individual posts will be featured, and "hot blogosphere items" of all topics can make the front page.


An Individual Blog's Technorati Profile
Occasional louisgray.com contributor and friend to the site, Eric Berlin, is the blogging channel editor, so we wish him well and look forward to hearing more about that role. Additionally, JS-Kit's Echo will enable comments to be placed underneath all blog listings and tags, possibly adding conversation to the data.

Technorati may not be the big giant we once thought they would be, and they will need to have some consistent successes to become a blogosphere darling again, but they are back in the conversation and worth watching.

See Also:
VentureBeat: Big changes coming at Technorati — the CEO’s perspective
TechCrunch: The New Technorati

Designing the Perfect Twitter Client Is Impossible. Tweetie Is Close.

Given Twitter's prominence, it comes as no surprise that there are many different clients out there. Some are designed to give you a single place to update multiple social networks at once. Others are designed to give you easy access to multiple accounts you may have. A few are optimized for your own personal groups or subsets of followers. And depending on which client you have selected, they may display images or rich media in line, may support retweeting (or not), or they could provide advanced functionality for direct messages. But good luck finding a single application that does everything best - one you can use on your desktop, through the Web browser, and on your iPhone too, because, guess what? It doesn't exist.

The flexibility of the Twitter platform and the wide variation, even among the most popular Twitter clients, has led to most users choosing a favorite, but still having multiple clients installed. It's rare for a single user's Tweet stream to go a few days without showing more than one client used - thanks to some clients being best at one utility or another.

This week has seen a great deal of interest in version 2 of Tweetie's iPhone application. Rebooted and reloaded with a boatload of new features and enhancements, Loren Brichter's offering is being lauded as the best on the iPhone, period. But even as I may agree that it's great, the discussion has actually led me to revisit the Mac desktop client of Tweetie, and I have been using it almost exclusively (with the exception of posts that flow from FriendFeed) for the last few weeks.


My Tweetie Desktop In Action (Showing the @Mentions Window)
On September 25th, I posted a note illustrating my then-current view of the Twitter client race, saying: "TweetDeck: Best at Groups. Tweetie: Best on iPhone. Seesmic: Best at DMs. Brizzly: Best at Retweets and Images."

I stand by that comment, because I believe that each of the different applications has forged a space for itself to be best at something. TweetDeck introduced the concept of groups to Twitter (See Review), and while others, like Seesmic, have adopted it, it has maintained a usability lead. Tweetie's latest iteration on the iPhone has extended their lead over the stale Twitterific and the very busy TweetDeck. For direct messages, I have long found Seesmic's Web app to offer the best option for grouping conversations and seeing previous messages between accounts (See Review), and Brizzly makes retweeting a lot easier than Twitter's native client has.

But one major piece I left out from that comment was the use of multiple accounts. And when you think about multiple accounts, it's my opinion that two products support this capability extremely well. The first is Brizzly, which lets you operate under either account by clicking on the avatar, correctly moving over saved searches and all other relevant data. The second is Tweetie, for both the desktop (on the Mac) and the iPhone.

As I've now inherited multiple Twitter accounts for clients, and have also added my @lgshareditems account, as well as a new @privatelg account that I am using primarily for a quieter Twitter experience, a better multiple accounts client was sorely needed, and this is what has pushed Tweetie over the top for me, not just on the iPhone, where everybody is talking about it, but on the Mac too.


Browsing Updates In Tweetie on My @privatelg Account
In April, when Tweetie for Mac debuted, I called it "Clean, Simple and Robust". That's all still true, but now that I am actively managing multiple accounts, and using the product's built in capacity for retweeting, while enjoying the threaded direct message conversations I used to only enjoy in Seesmic Web, it has practically taken over my Twitter stream. I remain quite fond of Brizzly and Seesmic Web through the browser, but don't mind running Tweetie in the background, not feeling the RAM glut that some other AIR-based clients have on my computing power.

At the end of last month, Lifehacker posted a list of what it called its "Five Best Twitter Clients", including TweetDeck, Brizzly, Seesmic, Tweetie and DestroyTwitter. I haven't used DestroyTwitter and don't use Echofon or others, but know that there are some good quality products in addition to the five I chose to focus on (including the first four and the native Twitter Web interface).


No Leading Twitter App Is On Every Platform
Of the five, no single client supports the desktop, the Web and the iPhone. None! TweetDeck and Tweetie lack Web versions, while Brizzly is Web-only, Seesmic doesn't yet have an iPhone app, and Twitter has no official desktop or iPhone application. So there's clear background for the splintering.


I Believe Each Twitter App Excels Somewhere
While each application has its bells and whistles, there are really four major elements I considered when looking at the top clients: Retweets, Direct Messages, Groups and Multi-User Support.

Retweets: Brizzly (reviewed here) has a handy "retweet" option next to every single tweet. Click "retweet" and it sets up a new message from you prefaced by RT. Couldn't be simpler. Tweetie lets you "Repost" a message as well, with the same functionality. TweetDeck and Seesmic also support retweeting, but I don't perceive them as leading in this functionality.

Direct Messages: Seesmic Web does a great job of sorting conversations by author, including how many messages, in a dedicated pane. If I am on the Web and want to respond to a DM, I will do so through Seesmic. But Tweetie's grouped direct messages are visually pleasing and are easily accessible. TweetDeck lumps all direct messages in an "In box" type of column, as does Twitter's native client and Brizzly, although Brizzly can show conversations in line if the activity is live.

Groups: Twitter promises that lists are coming soon, but TweetDeck has made a name for itself with groups, so much so that people wish you could export predefined groups for importing into other services. Brizzly and Seesmic also support groups, and Brizzly promises to integrate with Twitter's Lists option when it shows up. So far, Tweetie isn't doing any groups of any kind that I know of.

Multiple Accounts: As mentioned earlier, Tweetie and Brizzly make multiple account support simple. Seesmic Desktop's mutiple account support is very good, but it hasn't yet migrated to the Web equivalent. TweetDeck's support of multiple accounts is functional, but I have seen many a slipup from people using TweetDeck who have posted to the wrong account, so it could be much more intuitive. Twitter's Web client would just ask you to log out and log in again.

Ignoring extraneous functions like the rich media and real-time definitions of trending topics (where Brizzly excels), the biggest missing aspect to Tweetie, in my opinion, is access to saved searches in the desktop app. They are already highlighted in the iPhone app, so bringing them into the Mac client would be a big benefit indeed.

Selecting your favorite Twitter client is a personal issue at this point. To each their own. There is clearly room for many players given the different permutations of each app. But Tweetie is making things real tough for anybody on the iPhone, and for those who don't need access to groups, it should have the Mac desktop space to itself. This doesn't mean I like Brizzly or Seesmic Web or even TweetDeck any less than any other time I talked about those apps, but today, my stream is full of "from Tweetie" and for good reason.