Twitter Follower Email Notices – New Feature Request

Recently on Twitter, I wrote a very confusingly-worded feature request. I later realized the idea made no sense after being compressed into 140 characters, and I figured I should probably just write about it here. I think it would be really useful, and I hope they implement it.

When a person follows you on Twitter, they’re telling you that they’re interested in what you have to say. When you follow them back, you’re sending them the same message. The difficulty is, it’s hard to know who is worth following. Twitter tries to help a little by sending an email with some information about your new follower, but it’s not enough information to be very helpful.

Let’s say Steph (@stephlewis on Twitter) decided to follow me. Before sending me the email notification Twitter sends, it could compare the list of people I follow with the list of people following Steph, and just show me the number of people in both lists. Because of the inherent meaning behind following a person, having more people in that special shared list tells me that some of the people that I find to be interesting also find @stephlewis to be interesting. It’s a built-in recommendation of @stephlewis. Showing the list of all their Twitter names would be even better than a number, but a number would be a good start.

To clarify, I wouldn’t care if @stephlewis followed the same people I followed. She might be interested in the same people, and that might be useful to know. But she might also be a spammer who is following thousands of people in order to artificially pump up that common number. It’s easy to fake. But being followed by people I follow isn’t easy to fake. It’s trustworthy and meaningful. Facebook does something similar by showing “mutual friends” with new friend requests, and we all use it all the time to make decisions on names we don’t quite recognize or remember.

I hope the folks at Twitter might consider adding this one tiny bit of extra processing to the emails they send. I’d be happy to get the emails a couple minutes later if it made them this much more useful.

The Genius of Pogo – New Creations from Old Creations

I recently stumbled upon an amazing new artist called Pogo, and I want to share a couple samples of his work with you. His mood and insight take my breath away.

Pogo makes music by reusing pre-existing material. He samples and loops and clips and layers. Sometimes he adds his own drums or an original bass line, but in general, what you’re hearing in his music is a collection of sounds from other music. Occasionally he’ll even find music in something that was never intended to be melodic. He takes it a step further, though, by taking each song’s collection of samples from another single work. For instance, one song’s clips might be taken from one particular movie.

Without further ado. I present to you his take on Alice in Wonderland, and Mary Poppins. Take a deep breath, sit back, tune in, and discover beauty you never knew was there.

Saving Money on Amazon with CamelCamelCamel

Occasionally, I’ll see a price on Amazon and wonder whether it’s really a fair price or not. Did Amazon recently hike it up? What about the 3rd-party vendor prices for new and used versions of that product? It’s hard to tell.

I found a site today called CamelCamelCamel that does exactly that, and it really impresses me. For those of you who are savvy to JavaScript bookmarklets, you’ll know what to do with this little puppy I hacked together tonight: View Amazon Price History. If you’re not familiar with bookmarklets, don’t click that link yet. Just add it to your bookmarks and I’ll show you how to use it in a minute.

The idea behind CamelCamelCamel (whose obvious logo I love like a guilty pleasure) is fairly simple. If you wonder whether the Amazon price or the 3rd-party vendor price of any product on Amazon’s site is a little fishy, you can look at the item’s price over time, in a handy graph, and find out whether now is a good time to make your purchase. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed and watch the price change, or get an email alert when the price drops below a certain level. Useful! They also have lists of popular products and products with the biggest price drops in the last few days.

OK, let’s try it! If you’ve saved the View Amazon Price History link as a bookmark, you’re ready to go.

Let’s say you’re shopping for a good Digital SLR camera and you come across the Canon Digital Rebel XSi. Once you’re on that page (or any product page) you can click the bookmarklet you’ve just saved and you’ll be automatically transported to the corresponding page on CamelCamelCamel. The graphs will tell you that Amazon’s price is just below average right now, but it was a lot lower in early April. (I found it surprising that Amazon changes its price as often and as much as it does, both up and down, on brand-new products.) The 3rd-party new cameras are also below average, and certainly below the recent highest price. The used version, however, is near the peak of the highest price, so if you’re buying used, it’s probably best to wait a week or two and save $30 or more.

It’s a great little web application with a solid business model (kickbacks from purchases you make via their links). I just couldn’t help but share. Enjoy!

(Footnote: I know that CamelCamelCamel is supposed to be spelled with all lowercase letters, but how could I resist using camel case?)

How Twitter Will Make Money

The topic of how Twitter might make money is so popular these days that people are writing Onion-like parodies of news stories announcing Twitter’s plans. That particular story was a really popular link on Twitter today.

But the question remains: how will Twitter make money? I think I know at least one of the ways they’ll do it, and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this.

I discovered a service called I Want Sandy a year or two ago and became a user almost immediately. The gist of the idea: Sandy is your virtual assistant, reminding you of tasks and appointments as you like. The interesting part wasn’t just that Sandy kept your calendars and to-do lists organized, but that she did it all through a human-readable text-based interface. I could send Sandy an email saying something to the effect of, “Remind me to buy milk tomorrow at 5pm” right in the subject line of the email. (I believe she also had an IM interface, and of course a web interface.) And sure enough, tomorrow at 5pm I would get an SMS message (if that was my preferred method of communication) that reminded me to buy milk. Simple. Human. Useful! I found myself being confident to take on tasks and make promises knowing that I wouldn’t forget things. Sure, I’ll ping you next Tuesday about that. (Send message to Sandy.) Oh, your birthday is when? (Send message to Sandy.) You get the idea.

When Twitter came around, the folks at I Want Sandy were smart enough to register the ultra-short @s Twitter name and allow people to send messages to Sandy through that interface. I was already on Twitter and it was a convenient way to augment the service. I could be reminded of events and to-dos through Twitter direct messages too, instead of just SMS and email.

Fast-forward to November 2008. The company who runs I Want Sandy, Values of n, announced that they were purchased by Twitter. And the CEO, Rael Dornfest, became a Twitter User Experience engineer. Aha! I Want Sandy went offline in December 2008 and is no longer functional.

It seems nearly a sure thing to me that if Twitter has acquired all the intellectual property behind I Want Sandy that they’ll be integrating it with the service. It seemed to work so well that I’m not sure how they’d improve it besides tightening and deepening the service’s integration with twitter.com, but we’ll see. I’d love it if they offered it for free to make Twitter more palatable and useful to more people, but I could easily see paying $1 / month to get reminders from Twitter over SMS (or whatever) because I personally know how useful they were to me, and I know the gaping hole their absence has left. Twitter has stated that they won’t be reducing the value of their service by charging for Twitter features that are currently free. This would certainly be something over and above what is built into Twitter, and offering it as a premium, for-pay service wouldn’t reduce the value of Twitter in anyone’s mind.

So that’s my guess on at least one way they’ll make money. We’ll see if I’m right!

iPhone OS 3.0 – Accessory Ideas

The iPhone OS 3.0 presentation that happened on Tuesday really got me thinking. There were a lot of exciting announcements that are being loudly touted by the press: the arrival of a rather elegantly designed Copy and Paste to the OS, Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) support, CalDAV support, new application payment models, and device-to-device interactivity are a few favorites. These are all pretty big announcements. But the biggest announcement of the show wasn’t the addition of Copy and Paste, but something Apple is just calling “Accessories.”

Let me explain briefly what “Accessories” means for those who don’t know, and then I’ll tell you what I see in this idea’s future.

Up until now, the iPhone has had only a short list of ways in which it could interact with other devices. You could sync it with iTunes, pair it with a Bluetooth headset for hands-free phone conversations, or plug it into a music speaker system with a dock connector. It’s a simple, highly-focused list.

But what if the iPhone could talk to other kinds of hardware? Any kind of hardware? Apple gave a very safe example for starters: a custom application that would allow the iPhone to control a hardware equalizer built into a particular iPhone-compatible music speaker system. But later in the presentation, Apple showed the idea is much bigger than that. The iPhone could soon connect to things that aren’t necessarily music-related or phone-related at all. They asked us to imagine medical devices being assisted by the iPhone. Like a blood pressure cuff wherein the traditional display (which sometimes requires its own cart and custom computers) is replaced with just a cord and a dock connector. Custom software on the iPhone would display all the relevant readings from the cuff (on a large, high-resolution color screen no less), just like the current stuff does. But since the iPhone platform is so powerful, why stop there? Record the readings over time, advise the patient based on trends, and wirelessly send the collection of reports to a doctor from anywhere in the world with a click of a button. Now we’re talking. None of the blood pressure monitors I’ve ever seen could do that.

Keep in mind, also, that these new accessory connections work with both the dock connector or a Bluetooth connection, depending (I assume) on your application’s bandwidth and latency considerations. The cord doesn’t necessarily have to be there.

So what else could be done with this? I’ve come up with a few ideas. I’d love to hear yours.

Mobile Magnetic Strip Reader

It’s not easy to process credit cards wirelessly. If you want to sell something to people without a big Point of Sale cash register system and store walls around you (like, say, at a garage sale) it would seem you’re limited to taking cash. Not anymore. Hook a magnetic stripe reader up to the iPhone, write some software, and take credit card payments wirelessly from anywhere. I would be shocked if Apple wasn’t using these by November of this year in their stores to increase the number of points of sale and mitigate holiday shopping congestion. I think they’ve previously (embarrassingly) had to use Windows Mobile to do this.

Device Firmware Updates

Ever had a device whose software could be updated, but you never bothered to do it? My TV has an update to its software right now that I haven’t applied. The instructions require you to hook your PC’s serial port up to the thing with a custom cable (note: it’s not Mac compatible), run some software, etc, and you just don’t want to lug your machine downstairs, get out the cable, and go through the whole thing. What if you could just deliver the device firmware over Bluetooth through the iPhone? No portability problems, no cable, and a nice multi-touch experience that trounces whatever they created for the PC. Suddenly, all your devices can add features and fix problems by using the iPhone as the conduit to the Internet. Devices of tomorrow might come with some minimal additional hardware (Bluetooth, a dock connector cable, whatever) that leaves their future functionality a bit more open and flexible, just like the current flexibility of your computer or iPhone. They don’t now, but they will. And when they do, we’ll really start to see how things can change quickly. There’s no reason you can’t update your coffee maker or your toaster.

I understand these things were functionally possible before. But no one does them because it’s a pain and it’s hard. When Apple steps into these kinds of areas, industries change. Why do you think Congress only started to have opinions about locking cellphones to certain networks when the iPhone came out, when it was a practice that was many years old? Buzz is worth a lot, and the iPhone has it by the truckload.

Internet-connected, Highly-portable Barcode Scanner

Remember my old idea about using the iPhone to price compare? Well, the iPhone’s camera isn’t good enough to scan an average barcode in a store. Android has several apps out that do this now, but the iPhone requires that you enter the barcode digits in manually in order to provide similar functionality. Yuck. But that’s over now. Someone will definitely be making a barcode scanner that connects to the iPhone and talks to a specialized piece of software. If it’s cheap and small, it’ll be very interesting. Not because it hasn’t been done, but in part because it’s on a popular device.

Augmenting Standalone Devices

The Canon digital camera we use most around our house doesn’t have GPS built-in. It’s a bummer, because knowing where photos were taken is a powerful and useful feature (supported by iPhoto ’09, no less), but to me, it’s just not worth paying thousands of dollars for a new camera that has built-in GPS. So why not write the camera’s software to tether to the iPhone (wirelessly or not) and get that data from the phone while pictures are taken? I get GPS data on my photos without having to build the cost of GPS into the camera. Everybody wins! Except people who own cameras today. OK, no plan is perfect.