I’ve recently started to use Twitter and I keep getting questions from friends as to why…

So here are the things I like about Twitter -

• Ability to follow “leaders” in a given field. For example, during the Tour de France, I can see quick updates from Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, and many other direct participants in the race. Within photography, Scott Kelby, Joe McNally, their assistants, and many more leaders and influencers post worthwhile things to read on a regular basis.
• Ability to send those leaders messages directly. They then have the opportunity to read/scan “fan” email very quickly. They can create a community without having to involve others
• Dynamic creation of communities such as during the 2nd Annual Worldwide Photowalk, where participants can post related messages by simply adding a special “tag” to their messages(tweets).
• Having a character limit of 140 characters forces messages to be short and to the point.
• Ability for “news” to be reported first from the masses of users around the globe. Remember the photo from the US Airways crash in early 2009? Came from Twitter first

Here’s what intrigues me and I’d like to research -

• How communities are created
• How trends spread
• Determining a person’s interests from whom they follow and the content of their posts
• Figuring out the degrees of separation within the Twitter community as a whole. (ie, the Kevin Bacon game)

And, yes, there are things that I really don’t like -

• Individuals who post inane things like “Heading to the post office”, “going on a photowalk”, “eating dinner with the family”, etc. If you’re message isn’t going to be have value or having meaning to others than don’t post it.
• Individuals who take advantage of communities to sell their products or direct traffic to their sites/blogs

Of course, Letterman always has his say….

Update (25 July 2009): Twitter posted Twitter 101 for Business this past week.

Here is Sleep Inn’s Usage Terms:

Internet access at Sleep Inn & Suites, Albemarle, NC is a service provided to our customers for their own use. Internet access will make available an abundance of information from the Internet and it is each user’s responsibility to exercise discretion with the information accessed and to determine and abide by all restrictions placed by the provider on its use. This includes without limitation potential liability for infringement of copyrights and/or trademarks owned by the provider and for any defamatory statements placed on the Internet or otherwise published by the user in relation to the information accessed. Some materials available on the Internet may be considered offensive or inappropriate. Sleep Inn & Suites, Albemarle, NC has no control over the content of material available on the Internet and disclaims any responsibility for the content of the material accessed.
DURING YOUR USE OF INTERNET SERVICES AT SLEEP INN & SUITES, ALBEMARLE, NC YOU ARE EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED FROM SENDING, RECEIVING OR ACCESSING PATENTLY OFFENSIVE MATERIAL. SLEEP INN & SUITES, ALBEMARLE, NC RESERVES THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE FOR INAPPROPRIATE USE.
Internet access at Sleep Inn & Suites, Albemarle, NC may link to other Internet sites. Sleep Inn & Suites, Albemarle, NC is not responsible for the content or software of any such Internet sites, and the links to such sites in no way constitutes endorsement or sponsorship by Sleep Inn & Suites, Albemarle, NC of such Internet sites. These links are provided for your convenience only and you access them at your own risk.

Translation: Stop clogging our small amount of bandwidth with porn.

Although, I don’t agree with all of the items here – 30 Skills – this is still a worth while read with some good nuggets.

Google released their version of a new browser today.  This was an interesting move of their part of several reasons:

1. The web has basically become their platform.  This gives them their own foundation.
2. Current web browsers all have some significant deficiencies.  Google must have spent significant energy trying to support the major browsers and stay current with their releases
3. With a fresh foundation, they can build it as necessary to support applications rather than viewing web pages.
4. Since they’ve built it from scratch, they can build in security from the ground-up and not bolt it to an existing application.

Due to an unexpected problem with one of the servers, email forwarding was down between last Thursday evening (July 31) and Saturday morning (August 2). Email forwarding is back up and functioning properly now. During the period that the problem occured, email messages that were sent to any alumni.XX.edu email address were bounced back to the sender. Unfortunately there is no way to recover any messages that were sent during the outage period.

Email forwarding has both good and not-so-good aspects. The primary benefit is that you have one address that never changes, no matter how many times you change your ISP, your place of business, etc, which controls a standard email address. The downside to any email forwarding service is that it adds one additional step where emails can encounter delivery problems. It adds one additional spam filter that can reject email, as well as an additional server that can get too busy and time out and fail to deliver a message. For these reasons, email forwarding may not be the best choice for certain uses, such as business matters.

We apologize for the disruption to your email delivery. If you have additional questions about the email forwarding service provided by the Alumni Association, please email onlinehelp@alumni.XX.edu.
—–
University of XXXXXXX, Alumni Association
XXXXXXX Help Desk
onlinehelp@alumni.XX.edu

http://alumni.XX.edu

Ran across this “hack” to determine the tcp/ip port used by MS SQL Server 2005 -


declare @ports varchar(256)
exec master.dbo.xp_instance_regread
'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE', 'Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib\Tcp\IPAll\',
'TcpPort',
@ports OUTPUT,
'no_output'
select @ports


For 2000 –

declare @ports varchar(256)
exec master.dbo.xp_instance_regread
'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',
'SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib\Tcp',
'TcpPort', @ports OUTPUT, 'no_output'
select @ports


Once again after updated iTunes on Windows Vista, I had yet another occurance of an issue I had to deal with on previous installs -

Every time iTunes starts, I get the following dialog box – “Please wait while Windows configures iTunes.”

UGGGHH!!!  It’s really more of annoyance, but I shouldn’t have to deal with crap like this. 

I’ve found a couple of items on the Internet.  The most promising seems to be SoulManX’s post at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5440570

However, this never seems to fix it for me.  After searching a bit more, I usually run across a thread to run the program directly from the installed location under “Program Files”.  This works and I can create a new short cut to it.

I’m not whether or not to blame this on Vista’s poorly engineered security model or Apple’s laziness to fix the problem.

Although I’m a big proponent of Java, you do need to watch how it is deployed in your company.  It’s not just something you can release software in your company and forget about it.  You have to manage which Java run time environments (JREs) are installed and manage those throughout their lifecycle.  In many cases, you may be able to let legacy environments persist, but sooner or later it will catch up to you.  

Of course, further complicating this issue is how IBM and other vendors make application server version available plus how software vendors test/certify their applications on different environments. 

Be proactive and stay ahed of the curve…

One of the realizations I (and thousands of others) came to early in my career was the interplay among people, process, and tools.  Thinking about this within the context of producing enterprise applications for a large organization, I realize that there’s another piece of the puzzle I’m missing -> delivery.  The first three items are largely about how we build something, delivery is about how we get it to the users.    The concept includes technical concepts like availability management, but also more human-based items within change management.  What communications to people receive?  How are they trained to use the site?  What drives them to use the site?

So how do you judge the quality of the website?  I’m not going to even attempt to guess or research how many sites exist out there now.  Some are outstanding.  Some are scary.  Some are scams.  Some should never see the light of a monitor.

Here’s some of the things I examine (often subconsciously as in “Blink”, but that’s another blog topic) -

• How well laid out is the site?
• Do I understand the site’s navigation?  Do I know where I am on the site?
• Appropriate use of graphics and fonts?
• Is the site content what I want or need?  Am I getting value from it?  (This point is more important than the first 3, but I tend to form a judgement from the appearance first.)
• Do I understand intuitively how to use the site?
• Does the site use SSL as required?  Is the SSL certificate correct?
• Is it free from errors?
• Do the forms have appropriate error checking?
• Where is the site hosted?

The last bullet point is something that I’ve recently started to research – its not immediately apparant, but I do feel it plays in a role in how serious a site is.  Aer they using a consumer-based host service such as bluehost or hostgator?  Or are they running their own server(s) in a professional hosting environment.  There’s nothing necessarily wrong with bluehost, hostgator or some of these other sites.  This site is on bluehost and so far it is going well.  However, I’m not getting a hundred thousand page views a day either with this blog.  But if I was getting that many page views or this site was mission-critical to my business, I would use a different service.

It is a little complicated to figure out who is hosting a site, but here are some steps your can take.

1. Look up the “whois” information for the DNS name.  This will at least tell you who the registrar is for the domain name if not the actual corporation/person who registered it.
2. Get the IP address of the site.  For instance, this site’s IP address is 69.89.31.177.  Next perform a “reverse dns” on that address.  There are several services on the web that do this.  This search will return box377.bluehost.com.  This tells me that this site is being hosted on a shared server and the hosting service is most likely using a “name-based” virtual host to support multiple sites on one machine.