You are currently browsing the Michael Kimsal’s weblog posts tagged: twitter

Why don’t ecommerce companies offer tinyurl-like services?

June 12, 2008 Ecommerce / Web
9 comments

I just saw someone tweet that they’d received something in the post, and linked to a URL shortener service.  It redirected to Amazon.  Now I realize that Twitter is a pretty new service, but with mobile rising, I think we’ll see a need for short URLs more and more.  Couple that with the slightly extra privacy you get with a shorter URL (someone needs to actually visit the link to know you’re pointing to furry handcuffs, for example), and the mindshare Amazon would keep by having “amazon.com/6hjw89eh9e7hds”, and the extra metrics they’d be able to capture with that (add a user key in the short URL) and this makes sense to me.  The top of every Amazon product page would have a “Short URL” property available to cut/paste/whatever.

Someone should embed this in their ecommerce system to acknowledge and emrace Twitter, Plurk and the coming wave of microblogging platforms.

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Why is Twitter using XMPP/Jabber protocols?

May 21, 2008 Design / Development / Software / Web
3 comments

This is probably going to make me look dumb, but that’s never stopped me from posting before.  Was reading another article this morning about how Twitter’s been down *again*, which got me to thinking about other options, then to think more about the technical hurdles facing Twitter.  One thing I’ve read a few places is that Twitter uses XMPP (Jabber’s protocol) for pushing data around.  I’m over simplifying here, partially because that’s about as much as I know :)   I was able to get Twitter to send me an XMPP subscription to their full feed, and I set up a jabber server to listen and collect the data for awhile.  Interesting concept, and perhaps that’s why they did it that way – to allow for a truer ‘publishing’ model.  However, it seems that the overhead of that process might be causing them problems.

Am I too naive in thinking that straight polling would be easier, more scalable and perhaps more efficient?  Publishing involves having to keep track of listeners and sending information (writing) multiple times.  A straight polling approach would convert the app to more of a ‘read’-heavy app – something which most databases are very good at.  Why is XMPP in the mix at all at Twitter?

Again, yes, there’s probably a perfectly good technical rationale for this, but since the technical infrastructure has seemd to remain largely a secret (yes we know they use Ruby on Rails and that couldn’t possibly have any bearing on their scaling issues because they’ve solved that scaling issue over and over…) I’m just guessing here.  Can someone more informed than me shed more light on this?  Thanks.  :)

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Social filters on your inbox

March 23, 2008 Design / Ideas / Social / Society / Software / Web
6 comments

Michael Arrington posted a fresh lament about the state of his inbox. He’s got 2400+ emails in his inbox right now, and he will likely nuke them all and start over (yet again) shortly. This got me to thinking (yet again!) about email/spam/inboxes. The article rightly pointed out that right now we only have ‘spam’ and ‘not spam’ in most email filters. Perhaps some systems like I’m about to describe already exist, but I haven’t seen them yet, or heard of them.

In a nutshell, I’m envisioning a filtering system that would apply filters based on the ‘from’ email (validated to whatever extent you can with SPF-type systems). The filter would consult your address book and analyze your behaviour with that person before. If you routinely reply to bob@aol.com within a few minutes of receiving emails from bob, the filter would apply certain flags/labels to that email, perhaps things like “urgent” or “frequent contact” or something like that. Your email program would then allow you to construct views based on those labels.

However, I’m envisioning taking that a step further, as most email systems have a rather limited view of your ‘address book’. Merge in your social media contacts via their feeds, and you have another set of data to filter against. If I get an email (or generic incoming message routed through this ‘system’) from someone I follow on Twitter, then a ‘someone I follow’ flag/label is applied to the message. If I’m following a corporate blog and get email from someone at that company, it gets another flag/label, and so on…

There are likely a dozen or more logical holes in this I might be missing, but at a conceptual level this sort of thing will eventually be built, I’m pretty sure. We’ve only seen ‘social media’ *really* take hold in the last couple of year, so I’m not too surprised that this concept hasn’t gone mainstream, but I do think it will. And it might not end up being applied *just* to email – the ‘inbox of the future’ might end up looking something like friendfeed.com (I hope not from a visual standpoint) for a majority of people.

What do you think?

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