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Twitter Annotations are going to change your life
While the news of Twitter Annotations has been around for quite a while, it was announced at Chirp in April, outside of a geeky developer audience it hasn’t captured the imagination of the Twitter global echo-chamber. For me the potential of Annotations could mean, for Twitter, this changes everything. Again. At the same time it could lead to a lot of divergence and confusion in the client marketplace.
Twitter Annotations allow metadata to be delivered along with a tweet, that is additional structured data outside of the 140 character limit. Now some Tweet metadata already exists, such as geolocation and a specific tweet you may be replying to and there is also some unstructured user created metadata such as #hashtags and @replies. Twitter Annotations is going to allow developers through the API to deliver any form of structured metadata they want to.
How it looks inside the machine
For the technical inclined the Annotation format is going to look something like
[{type1 => {attribute1 => val1, attribute2 => val2, ..... attributen => valn}},{type2 => {attributen+1 => valn+1 ... }},
......
]
For the not technically inclined, this means that a tweet can contain a number of keys and values, grouped into a type of attribute. For example if you were watching the awesome Argentina v Germany match. You might send a tweet like this, that Tweet may contain an attribute like:
[{"world cup match" => {"round" => "Quarter Final", "home_team" => "Germany", "away_team" => "Argentina", "home_score" => "4", "away_score" => "0", minutes => "89"}]This information is very unlikely to be entered by the user Tweeting but instead added by the client dynamically depending on the context of how it is being used, much like how a mobile Twiiter application will use GPS to insert your current location into a Tweet at the moment (random statistic as of late last year only 0.23% of tweets were geotagged.) You could easily see how a BBC iPlayer Live Twitter application, or Google TV Twitter application could add that data while watching a match.
How this data is then used depends if the receiving client (or website) knows about that annotation format and what it means. In the Tweet above I added some metadata using the unstructured format that is the #hashtag, by adding #ger Twitter have displayed a little German flag, a nice touch but you could see how this data can be expanded to provide awesome insight and commerce potential. Twitter have said annotation tracking will be supported in the Streaming API and likely in the Search API which means in the example above, a site or app will be able to collect and display all the tweets of people watching that match or TV programme (combine that with some demographics analysis and you could get an awesome contextual advertising)
Changing everything
Now the example above is quite complex but it could be as simple as including metadata for a link to a website article you are Tweeting about, saving those valuable characters and making link shorteners less relevant. It could also include an image or video URL to be shown inline in a Tweet. The possibilities are quite literally limitless.
And it is those limitless possibilities that also cause the problems. For Twitter Annotations to be relevant, they need to be produced by and application and consumed by a Twitter client in the same way. This could lead to a free-for-all of competing standards and markup. Twitter have announced they will do no annotation “validation” on their side, but they will lead by example and have already published some recommendations for recommended types. The annotation structures that “win” will likely be a darwinistic process driven by the crowd depending on usefulness and adoption by popular clients. Twitter will need to get this right for annotations to be successful and plan to publish an Annotations “explorer” with statistics of most used, most adopted and trending annotations to identify “winners”.
What we are likely to see first
Twitter’s recommended types give us an indication of what the first use cases will be:
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Will Technology Creation enter its own Age of Abundance?
The proliferation of computer software and the internet has brought many powerful tools to the masses.
From desktop publishing to cheap and powerful design tools, from affordable HD cameras to global publishing platforms such as blogs and YouTube, and self-publishing and self-marketing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, technology has given power to the amateur and the semi-professional — the power to create media and content that can been seen by millions of people, quickly, cheaply, whenever and wherever.
This is the Age of Abundance. People love it. Now, anyone can create fan sites, parodies, anti-adverts and dissenting PR for their favorite/most-hated brands that are seen by millions. It creates challenges and opportunities for the worlds of marketing and advertising.
John Winsor, for example, created Victor & Spoils to build on crowd-sourcing principles. Victor & Spoils aims to tap into a broader client talent base than can be maintained within a single company and, notably, to co-create with consumers as well as with other creators. It is using this abundance to create a more diverse base of creativity.
At the same time, this technology shift has created a new opportunity to add value in a networked age. Call this ‘Ideas that do‘ or ‘marketing with meaning‘, advertising as a service, brand utility or one of any number of other terms, it involves leveraging networks in order to target specific users or customers. A large part will be technology creation, not just web platforms and iPad applications but networked FMCG products and internet-enabled real world devices.
In the past the advertising industry was able to create long-lasting cultural impact through Big Ideas and broadcast media but now the major effects on our culture, especially the ever-increasing network culture, are caused by innovations in technology and software platforms. To offer these same effects in the future we must look to Technology Creation.
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Who is your real competition?
In the last two-and-a-half years at Made By Many we’ve often been asked, “So who would you consider your competition to be then?”
The question always bugs us, because we’re uncomfortable with everything it assumes, but we know people are trying to work out who we are and what we do when they’re asking us this – and so we usually mention some names of people who seem a bit like us in one way or another: in terms of structure, world-view, beliefs and opinion about what is effective online. These are the people most likely to answer a brief in a similar way to us, whose work we respect and often wish we had done.
The problem is that these awesomeists are not our competition at all
Our real competition comes from ‘old new media’ thinking, from people who instinctively reach for a “viral” (sorry @bud_caddell, and the little kittens), or want to “do a social because it’s like the new SEO”, or people for whom complex engineering equates to a jerk-off Flash interactive TV-ad. We compete against bloated process, ‘waterfools’, Big Design Up Front (BDUF), proprietary software and people who’ve got the social media badge by checking in with all their former school-friends on Facebook. The competition can take on many forms – ranging from large old-school above-the-line agencies to two-man band digital shops.
The people like us are allies
Like us, they’re trying to reach beyond traditional marketing communications, to create real value exchange, new services, emotional and practical utility, community and earned media value – what Undercurrent’s Mike Arauz calls “designing for networks” – with users and executing at the highest possible levels – these people are allies. We have so much more in common with them – not least, a common enemy. While we’re still in this great transition, and while we’re all experimenting with the same new models, we should all celebrate each and every great, effective piece of work any of us produce. Every time any of us do anything awesome it works for all of us, to open up the possibilities of doing more awesome work, by giving clients confidence for example – or by showing them how brilliantly this stuff works when you get it right. And so, weirdly, the people you might immediately think of as being our closest competitors are actually working with us – we’re all still at the stage where we’re raising the bar and helping make the market bigger and more exciting for all of us.
We are not alone in thinking like this
While we SXSW, I participated in a meeting organised by Tim and his brother Ben Malbon of BBH Labs with some of the brightest thinkers in the online agency space. Edward Boches has a write-up of this meeting over at AdWeek in “The Digital Exchange. How collaborating with competitors could make us all smarter”.
That meeting was very exciting, and the antithesis of old-school closed-shop, creative control thinking. Brought together in the first instance by the Web, through blogging and Twitter, here was a whole room of people you might have thought were rivals and competitors, meeting in real life to discuss how they can work more openly. These weren’t competitors, but allies against an axis-of-evil of mediocrity, broadcast thinking, future-deniers and the status-quo defenders.
So in the future, here on the Made By Many blog, we are going to celebrate our allies and their work.
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The more you try and practice Agile the less agile you become. And vice versa
This Agile has a capital A. It can also have a lower case a, in which case it is an adjective, to be lean/nimble but that’s not what I’m talking about. Agile with a capital A is a noun, a name used for the philosophy described in the the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and the suite of methodologies primarily used for software development such as SCRUM and Extreme Programming.
Tim’s post on Agile as a ‘Cargo Cult’ highlights a problem in the adoption of Agile, not only for software development but for creative and business processes. Everyone is trying to adapt to a rapid and disruptive world screwing with business models in every category. Organisations are looking to close the gap with nimble digital start-ups who are out-innovating them at a fraction of the cost-base. Agile seems to offer a well-packaged magic ability to compete in a new way.
Unfortunately, a lot of confusion happens between being Agile as an adjective and a noun. Without understanding both, without the philosophy of being nimble and the processes of an Agile methodology, failure is assured.
At it’s best Agile is fluid and rigorous, it can be more controlled and structured than a waterfall project but open to adaption and change. There is a necessary tension between the rigour on one side and it’s resistance to codification on the other so the more you try and practice Agile the less agile you become.
When it comes to adoption lots of people suffer from the McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous medium as the content for the next (props to Scott McCloud). In this I mean that they try to fit some of the rhetoric of agile around their existing people, culture, process and tools. This normally happens in one of two ways:
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Compass and Video on the IPhone opens up an Augmented Reality World
Massive excitement at Made By Many as the resident Apple fan-boys stayed in the office to keep up with the WWDC keynote. We cursed our recent MacBook Pro purchases and waited for news of the new IPhone. Some great news there but let down by the news that getting the IPhone 3GS means buying out the existing contracts! (Bad news here, all employees have an business IPhone at Made By Many).
In that exciting news, the new IPhone will have a video-enabled camera and a compass. This means just one thing, with a GPS-enabled device, internet device that can now tell where it is pointing we are going to get a flood of Augmented Reality applications/games showing meta-data, social data and content onto the phone video screen. Combined with things like Google Streetview and Latitude (soon to be released on the IPhone) people will be viewing their world through the IPhone, with reviews of restaurants/bars, transport services (and bus times) projected onto their iphone-world. This could lead to an explosion of social geo-tagging for the IPhone carrying-set.
I for one welcome our new augmented overlords and will be producing a line of AR-symbol carrying baseball caps for instant identification of Twitterers on the streets.
For now the Sekai Camera iPhone application gives an early vision of this world.
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SXSW-Free Twitter with Pipes. But what we need is middleware..
Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough of not being at SXSW and getting assailed with people going to cool lectures, eating Tex-Mex and drinking cocktails. I’ve decided to create myself a SXSW-free Twitter.
Unfortunately I only have a half-way-house solution feeding the Twitter stream through Yahoo Pipes and hacking out all SXSW mentions.
For those that don’t know Yahoo Pipes it is a way of producing mashups and filters using a graphical interface for connect up “pipes of data” and little processing units. What i’ve done is taken some inputs for your username and password, built up a URL string for your Twitter RSS and passed it through a filter to strip out those annoying SXSWer mentions…. The end result.. a clean RSS feed. (props to www.techlifeweb.com who did the original Twitter pipes setup)
Unfortunately it’s only a halfway house as I can’t hook TweetDeck up to it. What is why we need Twitter-MiddleWare to allow applications to be invented to clean, filter and process your stream but can seamlessly hook together with the same API to allow any end-client to connect. It would require some authentication standards and a way to scale but hey, not too difficult right.
You can use the SXSW-Free Twitter Yahoo Pipe at http://pipes.yahoo.com/stueccles/sxswfreetwitter
Anyway for totally SXSW free twitter experience follow me @stueccles
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Why all newspapers need a printed permalink
Have you ever been reading your daily morning commute newspaper and stumbled across a great article and thought “I must share that with my friend X”. After getting to work, after partaking in your morning coffee, you browse through that papers online edition as you know with today’s more-convergent news operations everything is re-published online. Then you can twitter, del.icio.us or email that link off. But it’s impossible to find and the newspaper’s online search can’t find it because lets face-it their search is terrible. You give in and return to Techcrunch.
So all I want is something dead simple. Why don’t newspapers publish a small tinyurl permalink underneath every article title pointing to it’s location in that newspaper ’s online website. Then when I see something interesting I want to read in full later, bookmark for reference or crucially share with friends and colleagues, it’s immediately available to me. I could even Twitter it on the spot.
In the future newspapers are going to need to continue the reading experience back and forth through online and offline media to help fight the rising tide coming their way.
So Telegraph, Guardian and Times Online how about a little link-love in the paper?
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Tutorial for restful_authentication on Rails with Facebook Connect in 15 minutes
[Update (10 April 2010): we've edited the tutorial to bring it up to date with the current incarnations of Facebook Connect, Facebooker and Rails.]
Back in June 2007 I wrote a popular tutorial on writing Facebook platform applications with Ruby On Rails. Time has moved on and Facebook has launched Facebook Connect which allows you to integrate Facebook into your own sites allowing authentication, registration, friend connecting, and Facebook feed posting in the context of your application. Mashable has a great post on 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect including Joost, Vimeo and Disqus.
At Made By Many we are fans of the possibilites of Facebook Connect for lowering barriers to registration, extracting social graph and injecting your social media functions into the daily online life of users. There is little point trying to create a “new” facebook on your site. Your unique social proposition lies elsewhere with your content, community and tools.
People have found the integration of Facebook Connect tricky and while great libraries like facebooker handle the API part, actually getting the profile linking and integration flow is harder. So I’ve written this tutorial to integrate the most commonly used starter plugin for authentication and registration in Ruby On Rails, restful_authentication, with Facebook Connect to allow your users to login and register through Connect.
First of all, let’s state what this integration is going to achieve:
- As a user I can register to the site through entering my details so I can access all that great functionality
- As a user I can login to the site through my entered username and password
- As a user I can register to the site through Facebook Connect so I don’t have to fill in that form
- As a user I can login to the site through Facebook Connect so I don’t have to remember two passwords
- As a user I can connect my existing site user with my Facebook Connect user so I can later login through Facebook Connect
We also have a constraint we need to consider:
- As a user if I register a user through entering my details and later login through Facebook Connect I want to make sure I retain my old user account
So read on and I’ll have you Connected in 15 minutes.
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BBC IPlayer Desktop on AIR. It’s all a little bit tricky.
It’s news we have expected for a while, and it’s here in big bold BETA. The BBC IPlayer Desktop is going to let you download IPlayer video to watch offline at a later date (well within 7 days as it’s using Flash Digital Rights Management Server to protect the catch-up window).
But it was a little tricky and use to find to say the least, although they have updated the site with some docs during the day. Sign up to the IPlayer Labs. Then you can install the player from http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/install/bbc_iplayer_desktop. Or find some content to download (it’s not all of the content mind you) and look for the download button at the bottom and right after the video.
After that it works nicely. Well as long as you remember to change the Settings in the application to give it more than 0 GB Hard disk space to use. So kind-of nicely, it certainly doesn’t feel intuitive.
But it’s just a download manager, that’s all, there is no navigation experience like in Adobe Media Player. It’s just a respository to play your Iplayer from. A bit of a disappointment but if it means getting it this year rather than next, i’m for it.
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Tutorial: Easy Rails recommendations with acts_as_recommendable
Following up on Alex MacCaw’s post on collaborative filtering. The plugin we recently released acts_as_recommendable allows Rails developers to quickly add some user-driven recommendations of items to their latest great millionaire-making startup. At Made By Many we’ve been developing some great niche social-media Ruby On Rails sites recently with New Bamboo and Headshift. The new edge of social media is in the maths, commenting and rating is so old-school, it’s what you do with that data that counts.
This is going to be a tutorial for simple integration of acts_as_recommendable to recommend your users some books.
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