dangerouslyawesome

Working with the team at Red Tettemer has been about seeing the “little things”.

Today I decided to add one of my own little things by replacing the typical Lorum Ipsum that we splatter across our web pages before we get content for them with something a little more…infectious. I mean entertaining. I mean fun.

Since we use Textmate whenever we’re not elbows deep in Flex Builder, it seemed like a quick and obvious place to start, creating a Textmate Bundle that adds the Tab Trigger for the word “ipsum”.

Simply download and install this bundle, which I’ve decided to name BetterIpsum, and try it for yourself. Never more be plagued by barely pronounceable latin garble, and instad, get a tune in your head that you won’t be able to get out.

I’m thinking about creating a TextExpander version of this to make it less IDE dependent, but only if people are having as much fun with this plugin as we are at Red. And if there’s a way to do this for Photoshop (macros, I suppose?), I know our designers would love it as well.

I’m a heavy Gmail user, with 6 (soon to be 7) separate Gmail and Google Apps accounts. On my Macbook, I actually IMAP in to all of the business accounts using Mail.app for one reason: cross-account search. For my personal account, though, I’m extremely reliant on Gmail’s web interface. I’ve used Mailplane in the past, and really loved it…with the exception of the inability to do cross-domain search. I use that daily.

On the mobile, there’s no option for cross-account searching. Mobile Mail.app gives me some native functionality and speed, but without cross-account searching, I’d much prefer to use Gmail’s mobile web app. HTML5 support in recent releases has made it faster, easier to use, and hands down one of the best mobile apps on the internet. I used Mobile Mail to connect to my Gmail accounts over IMAP because having multiple bookmarks was clunky no matter how I configured it, but I was always looking for something better.

In all cases I use IMAP because it keeps accounts in sync; changes made on the computer, the web, and the iPhone are all synchronized via IMAP.

I never used Push for my email because, well, I get a lot of it. I rely on Push for contact and calendar updates, but for email…if I haven’t checked my mail in 10 minutes, I can be sure that there’s something new in there.

Worse are unread counts. I’m compulsive about unread accounts. Mail, RSS feeds, Campfire, whatever it is…I hate having things unread. It’s a bad behavior, because I treat unread counts like to-dos, and in all of the scenarios where unread counts keep me on my toes, they are essentially to-do lists that OTHER people can put things on to. I’m already busy, I don’t need someone else to put more things on my to-do list.

The biggest loss in using Mobile Mail.app is tags, something that I do use pretty extensively. I’ve learned to get around it in Mail.app, which has better drag and drop support for moving things into folders that represent tags over IMAP. Mobile Mail.app was just clunky, and I resolved to not do that interaction on the go unless I had to.

I know I’m not describing everyone, but I am describing a lot of people. And as more corporations move their mail infrastructures away from Exchange and into Hosted Google Apps accounts, the group with this set of needs grows more and more.

A few weeks back, Dave Martorana (of MultiFirefox, Multiplex, and Two Guys on Beer fame) slung me a prototype of an app he’d been working on at IndyHall. It was called “MultiG”, and was basically an app that did fast account switching between Gmail and Google Apps Gmail accounts. It was rudimentary, but instantly useful for me. He quickly added an “unread” count to the accounts dashboard, but then did something I had never seen in an email client. He added a secondary badge that showed how many messages were actually new. I mean, how many of your unread messages weren’t there the last time you looked.

Think about that for a second. The anxiety of unread counts has finally found its Prozac.  All I care about is how many messages are new! In casual conversation, I dubbed this feature “TrueNew”, something that I hope other developers build into their app notifications.

At this point, I was hooked. But Dave wasn’t done.

He’d also whipped up integration with the iPhone’s native address book. I haven’t gone through the process of moving my address book into Google, and again, I have multiple accounts so where would I sync my address book to? Not all of them.

Dave added a button to the chrome of the Gmail browser window in his app that let me pull up my iPhone address book and insert email addresses right into the “To:” field. Sneakily, if I turned on CC or BCC, the exact same feature gave me the choice of which field to put the address in to. Simple, sleek, lovely.

Since emails tend to include attachments and links, Dave also put in a handler that made sure that they opened without leaving the app, much like our favorite iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie.

This feature set changed the way I interacted with mail on my iPhone. It made my life better. It made one of the most painful parts of my day, dealing with email, less painful.

We realized that “MultiG” was a lousy name, and Johnny Bilotta (the other Guy on Beer) proposed “Mailroom”.

Sold.

He whipped up a sexy icon, and we were off to the races.

Dave got the app in the hands of a few other testers, worked out some kinks, processed some feedback, and with the hand of myself and co-conspirator Amy Hoy pushing him to “ship as early as possible”, got it into the App Store.

Initial feedback was mixed. People who were like me in terms of email use loved it. People who had different email workflows weren’t as convinced, and many people saw it simply as a “wrapper for Gmail”.

Technically they were right, but they were missing the progressive enhancements because they didn’t augment their workflow. The app wasn’t for everybody, and we knew that. We’d still struck a chord with a good number of our initial users, and got some great feature requests.

2 weeks later, Dave pushed out a significant release to Mailroom. We’d prioritized feedback against our desired feature set, and introduced some new ideas of our own. At the root of the new release was a settings screen.

Badge Icons were a huge part of our 1.0 release feedback. We’d been hesitant to include them by default because, without Push (which I’ll get to in a minute), the counts were largely inaccurate most of the time.

Since we wanted to encourage people to start using TrueNew, we made that the default badge icon if enabled, but gave the user the ability to turn on unread counts instead.

Another major improvement was both workflow and performance related. If you only had one account and used Mailroom, launching the app to the dashboard was wasteful. If you left Mailroom on a given account screen to go to another app, launching put you back at the dashboard again, which was undesirable. We gave users the opportunity to remember the last account used, meaning that as soon as they launched the app they were where they left off last. This immediately made my email experience more efficient.

And as a bonus, Dave gave the user the option to lock screen orientation. Not something I was particularly needy for, but a nice touch nonetheless.

And then there’s that last setting. Cache management. What’s that, you ask?

Well that brings us to the biggest quiet improvement to Mailroom 1.1. The app is now taking advantage of Gmail’s HTML5 offline storage. What does this mean?

It means that every time you visit an account, the entire interface is cached locally and a HTML5 database is created/updated with the email on your screen. Kill your connection (because ATT sucks, because you’re on an airplane, or because you’re in a meeting) and Mailroom is still useful. In fact, you can not only read messages, but you can reply to messages and even COMPOSE NEW MESSAGES without a data connection. As soon as you reconnect, your cached messages are sent while retrieving new mail.

He even made the multi-account dashboard smart, only allowing you to enter accounts that had offline caches from a previous visit.

Yesterday, all of these 1.1 features hit the iPhone App store, and already a large percentage of our users have upgraded. One of them left us a review in the app store that commended us not only on the app and how great its icon is, but on Dave’s responsiveness to feature requests. Big win for us, that’s exactly what we wanted.

We’ve already talked about feature roadmap for 1.2 and 1.3 releases, and it’s very much in the works. The plan is to continue with iterative releases, process feedback, and continue to grow the user base all at once.

Two “issues” continue to arise: the lack of Push badge updates, and the $2.99 price point of the app.

First, push isn’t as “simple” as some of our reviewers seem to think it is. Among the scaling concerns we have about people who move a lot of email. I ran some averages and my smallest inbox gets well over 24,000 emails a year. Those numbers aren’t staggering, but across the customer base we’re targeting, that becomes a LOT of notifications to deliver.

The real technical challenge is more complicated though. In order to accurately update badge icons over push, we’d need to store email addresses and passwords on a server somewhere, and that’s a HUGE security risk that we can’t figure out how to justify. I know I wouldn’t want that info out there, and I have to imagine that our users wouldn’t like it either.

So until we come up with a more elegant way to support push, Dave has built in an app-specific URL handler. Calling mailroom://username@domain.com from another iPhone app or even from a mobile web page launches Mailroom, and even jumps straight to the account if there’s one in mailroom that matches the email address in the URL. We’re hoping that other push services like Boxcar and  Prowl can build in support for our app. We know it’s not the best solution, but given the infrastructure for Push provided by Apple, we’re pretty limited in what we can do. We don’t want to deliver a half-assed experience, so until we figure this out, Mailroom will not support push. If anyone has suggestions for how to overcome this hurdle, our ears are WIDE open, so please, sound off in the comments or via email.

And about that price point. Some customers seem to think that $2.99 is too much for an app that’s “just a webkit wrapper”. I won’t do more than touch on the fact that it’s not just a webkit wrapper for the right users and workflows since I’ve already explained here. But why $2.99? First, we’re targeting business users and we know it. They’re more comfortable spending more money on apps because in most cases, businesses equate cost with quality. But more importantly than that is the fact that this is, in most cases, a high-touch app.

99 cents for an app that you’re most likely going to touch at LEAST once an hour, if not several more times in a given day, feels undervalued. Like Tweetie, which I launch several times a day, I feel like I get an immense value for the $2.99 I spent on it.

Fact is, our first release might not have been worth $2.99 for everyone and you could say they got pegged with an “early adopter” tax. But since we’re not charging for the updates, and plan to roll them out often, we don’t think its really a tax at all. It just means that you will continually get more value from the app you already paid for.

We’re confident that future releases in our roadmap will continue to win people over the price point and even the “it’s just a webkit wrapper” theme. Mostly because, we’re listening. We hear what people like, don’t like, and how they are using the app. The more people feed back, the more they help to shape the future of Mailroom.

If you haven’t already, please consider heading to the App store and picking up a copy of Mailroom for your iPhone or iPod Touch. We’d love your feedback, and absolutely appreciate you supporting independent software development. You can also follow us on Twitter for app updates, or send us ideas and feedback there as well.

And I’m glad.

Things is launching at next week at MacWorld, and my predection is that they are going to make a killing. I wanted to note a few reasons why, outside of the fact that it’s a really great app.

• The Cult: GTD, David Allen, and the rabid cult behind them are now well past phenominon and fast creeping into the task workflow of people outside of geeky industries. Building a good GTD app and launching it now is good, opportunistic timing. You can’t ride a wave too early or too late. You need to hit the crest just right. I think these guys did it.
• The long-ass public beta: I’ve been hearing about “Things” for what feels like forever. In fact, the public alpha was released just a touch over a year ago. For a relatively small, very well focused app with a talented design and development team, a year is a really long development cycle. But while the  journey from alpha to RC1 was long, it read like an epic, as the application gained critical acclaim and positive reviews from many seeking a GTD app. All the while, providing feedback to make the final, saleable product totally rock. I’m pretty curious how exactly CulturedCode managed their feedback loop, what they did to prioritize feedback against their own roadmap.
• Dealing crack: ok, you’re going to need to stay with me here. You build an app that caters to a reasonably large (and growing) audience’s need. You involve them in the development cycle, giving them the software for free as thanks for being an active part of the feedback loop. The users become dependent on the software not just because it’s software they need, but because it feels like their own. When you take the product out of beta and put it for sale, your conversion rate is going to be excruciatingly high because they’re dependent, they are addicted. You’ve sold them crack, and while they could go to another dealer, many won’t. Some due to loyalty, but mostly, they’re hooked on your stuff and don’t remember how to function without it. It’s how I feel about things like the Web Developer toolbar and Firebug. Sure, I lived before they existed, but I’ve blocked out all of those awful memories. They could charge for those tools tomorrow and I’d pay without thinking, and I barely ever write code anymore.
• Charging for Paraphanalia: Again with the drug metaphors. Glad you’re still with me.Not having a good iPhone app for your productivity software would be a travesty, especially since the iPhone somehow lacks a to-do list natively (wtf?). CulturedCode COULD have given this software away for free. That would have hooked even more people, right? Maybe. But wait, they’re giving away their primary product for free too, right? Not really, in this case, “free” is temporary. So you’re addicted to a really great “free” app, and a really good companion app is only $10? Well sure, I’m in for that. Do you see what happened there?A “free” app turned into a $60 total sale. That’s smart. Charging for the iPhone app showed that they were serious, something that a lot of developers forget to do now and again. It’s important, because it’s really difficult to take a product seriously when it’s not well supported, and you’re crazy to think you’re going to support a product alone for its entire lifecycle without making any loot from it.I add the caveat alone because someone’s going to bash me in the comments saying that “open source software often has better support…” blah blah blah. I know it does. But rarely from the project’s originator. So I’m sticking to my guns here.Back to my point, adding money to the equation is a measure of commitment and seriousness from both sides of the equation: it says that the developer values their own time and work and plan to continue working on the application and it says that the customer isn’t just casually interested, but is invested the value this application provides them.
• Let’s not forget, it’s a great product: All of the marketing in the world can’t make a shitty product awesome. If your product is good, it sells itself. CulturedCode did a great job of everything from blogging about the product revisions, behaving like a human being (actually, a team of human beings) rather than a company on twitter (I bet they wish that co-tweet had been around, it’s perfect for their use). But most of all, they built a product that their users wanted to talk about, and gave them points of reference (blog, forum, twitter, full featured beta software) to do their buzz-bulding for them. They threw a really great cocktail party.

At the Eye of the Storm

Jason, Dave, and I had a conversation at the end of the day today at IndyHall (where I’d estimate nearly 1/3rd to 1/2 of our regulars utilize Things) about the price point. I’m a firm believer in setting a price and sticking to it, but I have to think that without all of the smart moves I listed above, that $50 price tag would scare quite a few people away.

CulturedCode COULD have run a more traditional development cycle, still come out with a decent app, and charged $25 for the desktop and $10 for the iPhone companion (maybe a $30 combo deal?), put some cash into traditional marketing, and it would have flown off the shelf  and into the hands of every man, woman, and child who needed to get their shit together.

But they didn’t.

They built a great app, spent a year actively working with their customers-to-be, and are going to sell the daylights out of it at $50 a click.

Well done, CulturedCode. If you have any interest, I’d love to speak with you and write up a more formal case study about slow-marketing your application. I’m very impressed.

A verbatim conversation, copied right out of Adium, with Jesse about making it easy to sign up for a website.

Jesse: You know, I really love the simplicity of Posterous.  I may start using it. Alex: its sllick Jesse: Yeah.  The no signup is the best non-feature around. Jesse: Oh and they allow custom domains.  Didn’t even realize that. Alex: mmm nice Alex: ive got a devils advocate argument about the “no signup necessary” workflow Alex: it plays into low-impact workflows, too, like openid/facebook logins Alex: clearly, you and i benefit Alex: but from a business standpoint, the ratio of dead accounts goes through the roof Alex: so you can report users as an astronomically high number Alex: but active users as a comparison looks bad, and on a business model, thats bothersome. Alex: not insurmountable Jesse: That’s very true.  I do like how it gives me instant gratification but then allows me to come sign up.

discuss.

Back in the spring, I wrote about Dave Troy organizing Social Dev Camp East, and an address of a 37 signals blog post about building web companies outside of San Francisco.

Social Dev Camp East II

I unfortunately missed the first Social Dev Camp East, though I DID finally get to meet Dave when I was in Vienna for Amy and Thomas Fuchs’ wedding back in September. Dave’s a great east coast entrepreneur and social technology developer, and I’m excited that he’s got Social Dev Camp East II coming up in just a couple of weeks.

On November 1st, a few hundred of the east coast’s finest social technologists will gather at the University of Baltimore to for a day of exchange and creation, relationship and application building alike.

There’s WAY more info on the Facebook event, and even more on the wiki. The event is fast approaching capacity, so sign up soon. If you’re in Philly and planning on going, reach out and we’ll try to carpool.

New Work City Kickoff Party

One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to be in two places at once. In the mean time, I’m planning on driving really, really fast between Baltimore and Manhattan because later in the evening on November 1st, Tony Bacigalupo and the team behind New Work City will be having a launch party to celebrate their opening of their Manhattan community-powered coworking space. I’m so excited for this because it’s such a long time coming. Just a few weeks ago Tony remained uncertain as to whether or not it could happen. Now they’ve secured desks at an office at 200 Varick St, sharing space with consulting firm element^n.

The party goes down at 8pm until “2am”, but I know what it’s like to party with Tony and doubt we’ll call it at 2. The Facebook is the place to RSVP, and you can be certain that it’s not to be missed. If you heard about the insanity that went down at the IndyHall anniversary party, a good number of the same people will be making the trip from afar. I’m quite excited. You should be too.

In my last post (just a few hours ago, I know), I mentioned how I was most fulfilled when I was doing.

I wanted to further clarifiy that point, in that I was most fulfilled when I was doing something that makes life better. Makes the world better. Makes something better.

In the continuing effort to get off my soapbox, I wanted to highlight someone that I met recently that continues to impress the daylights out of me and inspires something unique, I would hope, in all of us.

I was walking back from the lunch break at BlogOrlando along side a guy named Erik. Erik and I were exchanging small talk, he asked me if I was from nearby, and when I said I’d come from Philadelphia, he first remarked how far I’d hiked…then asked, “oh…are you the guy from IndyHall”?

We chatted about coworking, why I was in Orlando (fact is, I really dig the scene there and am continually impressed by their potential). The walk back didn’t really afford much time beyond the ability for me to find out that Erik lived in the general area and was also involved in the local social tech community.

I was ashamed at the end of the day to find out that the closing speaker was the same Erik, Erik Hersman. Moments prior to him taking the stage, my buddy Alex started talking up this guy and how rad he was. He didn’t even get close.

Uploaded on September 30, 2008 by seanosh

As it turns out, Erik is a long time techie. Furthermore, while his family is in Orlando, he grew up in and continues to spend a great deal of time in Africa. He’s a notable technology leader in regions like Kenya and Sudan, where he grew up. I’ve since subscribed to his personal blog, WhiteAfrican, as it gives some insight into the very cool stuff Erik is up to: most recently, some great breakdowns from during and after BarcampJozi (that’s Johannasburg, as I learned). I also now check AfriGadget, which highlights gadgetry and handmade innovation in Africa. Read the first page of this blog. You will have a whole new outlook on technology.

On WhiteAfrican, Erik recently posted follow up from MobileActive08 (also in Johannasburg) which was attend by Blaine Cook, formerly of Twitter, and Rabble (who created Yahoo’s FireEagle platform). What do these three guys have in common, and what does that have to do with Africa?

Well, that’s where my admiration for Erik comes in. In the beginning of this year, he helped create a tool called “Uashahidi“. Erik’s knowledge of technology in a place where not many of us understand it’s importance (or availability) allowed him to leverage technology, specifically mobile technology, to make something better.

There was some serious political turmoil leading to violence in Kenya towards the beginning of 2008. Erik knew that mobile technology was reasonably ubiquitous, even if it only was the simplest forms available. He took that as a prompt to prototype a system that took citizen updates from mobile, email, and web, and map them: both for journalistic intentions, as well as for relief purposes. From the website:

The core [Ushahidi] engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time.

Think about that for a second.

This was not building something to cut jobs, improve project turnaround, or increase profits.

This was not something built to chat, discuss, banter, whine, or kvetch.

This was not something built to gather friends.

This was not something built with a “market” in mind.

Ushahidi leveraged two of the most important technology concepts of our present: mobile and socially contributed content for the purpose of making something that really sucked – a violent nation – and gave it simple tools to make it better.

As you might imagine, this project caught the eye of the news and Erik and the team (all of whom I now desperately want to meet) and got some much deserved press. Since, they’ve secured funding and grown the team, and will be launching a new version of Ushahidi this fall. Open Source.

<applause></applause>

We’re talking about an application that can be applied to real life problems domestically and abroad because it uses a least common denominator and takes into account some basic human interaction.

How is Ushahidi different from most other (not all, just most) “social software”?

I’d venture to say the same way “coworking” stands out from “desk sharing”.

Ushahidi was created because someone cared.

This is the kind of doing that I like to see. This is the kind of doing that I hope to accomplish.

I’m a developer.

I’ve spent some time catching up on videos from FOWA London 08, including highlights of some of my good friends giving really great presentations about things that they believe in and think are important.

It’s got me thinking about the audience of FOWA, and how developer-centric the audience is. I think that’s one of it’s greatest strength, really, and a large contributor to it’s ability to focus. FOWA Miami 08 was one of the best conference’s I’ve been to, hands down.

So looking over the roster of presenters, and thinking about their roles…and then comparing them to my own interests to the tune of, “if Ryan Carson asked me to present at FOWA, what would I say”, I came to some important conclusions.

If you’ve had the pleasure of talking to me sometime in the last couple of weeks, there’s a good chance that you’ve been met with a wicked tongue spitting some admittedly harsh words in the direction of social media, social marketing, and PR “two point oh”. There’s an important distinction that I’ve pointed out repeatedly, and it’s that I came from a different background. Having been a developer prior to…whatever I am now…I spent the time building, or building with, the tools that social media marketing is infatuated with. It’s a lot harder for me to be distracted by shiny objects because, to me, those shiny objects are just tools. As I always did, I’m looking for ways to use those tools, assemble the most powerful toolkits, and doing things with them.

I’m most fulfilled when I’m doing.

I’m not a hater, really. I DO hate playing bad cop, and consciously aware that being a cop at all doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. No matter how strong your police force, people will keep committing crimes.

So while I’ve made a decision a few months back to step away from software development on the code side and put my focus on consulting the in the industry of social technology, I’ve inadvertently slipped into the “social marketer” role for a number of the projects I’ve gotten involved in. Whether or not this a strength of mine is not something I even wish to see through, as I think more about the skills that I’ve had historically.

I’ve been a developer in one way or another for the majority of my life. A problem solver. An analyst. I’ve had a knack for marketing myself and the projects I’m involved in. But when that’s the only role I have – being a megaphone – I’m unfulfilled.

Honestly, I don’t think I could ever be an independent marketer long term. I don’t hate on it, I just don’t get off on it either.

So do I need to be a “coder” in order to be a developer? I don’t think so. I never want to step away from code 100% because I truly love writing code, but there are others who are even more whiz-bang than me. If I have something else to offer, I want to give it a go.

I’m still pretty open about the fact that I’m transitioning, and I’m not 100% sure into what. I’ve been admittedly following demand, for the sake of my bank account not bottoming out. But I’m also admittedly desiring fulfillment. I’ve got an undeniable knack for examining a specific market problem, and acting or advising based on the values of openness, authenticity, permissions, community, and social interactions. You can ask some of the people I’ve shared ideas with, formally and otherwise. I enjoy that work, but the closer it is to being a “marketer”, the further distanced from the project I feel.

If I think about my career path in terms of “What would I present at FOWA”, I realize that I should put focus back on development. Not necessarily on code, but on developing concepts, solving problems, developing relationships and opportunities for collaboration. Focusing on the values of coworking as applied to business. Focusing on the values of collaboration as applied to business. The lessons that Geoff has taught me, and the lessons we’ve learned together.

That’s what IndyHall has been all about for the last 2 years, finding better ways to collaborate. We’ve discovered many, we’ve blindly stumbled upon many, many more. How do I share what we’ve learned, share what I believe in, with others and make that my livelihood? I believe that the discussins surrounding IndyHall Labs is an important step in that direction.  I think that it’s based on an a blend of business plus organic creation, software or otherwise. My hope is that it’s a solution worth sharing at FOWA.

What’s up, friends of the “no-collar generation”.

Many of you know that I’ve been working with the CEO of ChoiceShirts, Matt Cohen, on a number of initiatives for quite a while. Our most recent partnership has produced something that I’ve talked about doing “right” for quite a while, making a really easy way to put the contents of tweet on a t-shirt.

Why on earth would we do that? Well, a few reasons:

• Matt and I, like many of you, really love Twitter. Like, really love Twitter. I <3 you Twitter.
• Matt and I, like many of you, really love t-shirts. Just last week, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks said to me at DreamIT’s funding day, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you NOT wearing a t-shirt”. It was an off day, what can I say.
• Twitter is a really great channel for collecting funny, inspirational, or memorable one-liners. More and more often, we heard from others or thought ourselves, “that tweet would make a great shirt”.
• We wanted to try out some new tools in the ChoiceShirts design studio toolkit, as well as make a case for how we can build out new ones. ChoiceTweets is one of what we hope are many prototypes to showcase new and fun ways to get your content onto a t-shirt. A new vehicle for your content so YOU can make money. That’s what we’re really excited about.

Neato! So how does it work?

The whole thing is powered by a bookmarklet. You can read more about how that works on our how-to page. Not sure what tweets you might want to put on a shirt? Take a look at some of the one’s we’ve done, as well as any tweets that other users are turning into tweeshirts.

Also, don’t miss the Merlin Mann collection! Merlin’s tweets are often angry, but humorous. As other prolific tweeters have large numbers of shirts generated from their tweets, we’ll add new featured collections. Maybe yours?

Developer support baked in

For the time being, the feature set is small but that won’t last long! In the mean time, if you have created a Twitter client (web or desktop) and want to include “ChoiceTweets support”, all you need to do is add an icon that links to the same URL as the Tweet’s permalink, and change the Base URL from http://twitter.com to http://choicetweets.com. More on that on our Developers page.

GO! Check it out!

This is the first iteration of the idea, and we’re excited to see how people use it and add new features and learn lessons for the next site that we build. That’s why we’re using UserVoice to collect feature requests! Be sure to add your ideas there after you’ve made your first Tweeshirt.

Big thumbs up to Erik Kastner, who took on some fun challenges with generating the images necessary to make this concept work. I always enjoy working with Erik, and look forward to having him continue to lend his development expertise and problemsolving prowess as this project matures.

And of course, I always appreciate Matt’s support and interest in taking new ideas like this for a spin.

So head over to ChoiceTweets.com, and grab the bookmarklet. And let me know what you think!

Note: my buddy Zach Inglis pointed out that some of his coworkers prototyped something similar in the past. We certainly knew that this had been done before, but thought there was LOTS of room for improvement! So thanks to those who inspired our creation, and we’re excited to continue to improve on the idea based on everyone’s feedback!

WARNING: This post contains extreme abuse of twitter lingo like “@replies and DMs”. Generally speaking, I’m opposed to this sort of language, however…the service is cool and I wanted to share it.

Back when the ‘track via SMS’ feature was still enabled on Twitter, I honestly did not use it…I didn’t find myself with a burning desire to keep an eye on any particular keywords. Since then, my use of twitter has increased, and my reliance on it for communication has changed. I won’t say it’s gone up or down, but the way I use it is certainly different.

I find myself checking Summize/Twitter Search much more often for ‘@replies’ to my username and IndyHall. The biggest reason that I rely more on replies via Search is because I don’t follow everyone who follows me. Not because I’m a hater (far from it) but because Twitter is completely USELESS to me with that many people in my timeline. But I’m increasingly disappointed when I miss replies from people who can’t direct message me since I’m not following them back, especially when I’m away from my computer.

So, with Summize being acquired and energy going into the development of the Twitter Search API, I was stoked to see a really great project announced on the Twitter developer list: TweetTrak.

Functional and still low to the ground, TweetTrak uses the Direct Message -> SMS capabilities of Twitter + the search API to return tracking-style information via SMS, with a simple toggle command to turn it on and off.

The new features that are mapped out for the next iteration are smart, too: user ignore, and a control panel to set up your tracking terms (I imagine this will act a lot like Google Alerts, which I also love and use).

So while this entire system still relies on a system that occasionally lags (Twitter’s SMS and the recently acquired Summize), this is the best stop-gap we’ve had since Summize itself, and I welcome it with open arms, especially with all of the conference going I have lined up.

Check it out, and be gentile! And this should probably go without saying: make sure you have unlimited SMS if you’re doing ANYTHING with Twitter via SMS. Don’t be an idiot.

I recently found out about an open source OSX App called Precipitate via Viddler’s Brandice, via Viddler’s Colin Devroe. The original app was created by Stuart Morgan, who I can’t find a freaking thing about except that he participated in last year’s “Google: Summer of Code”. Stuart, if you’re out there, drop me a line. I wanna thank you personally for this app and keeping it open source.

Precipitate is a simple prefpane that, once installed, regularly scans your Google Documents repository for a given Google account (only supports one at a time, right now), and makes those documents available in OSX Spotlight searches.

My only complaint: I’m working in a lot of docs that are changing regularly, so the built in “scan for new/changed files every 60 minutes” interval was too long.

Luckily, as I said, it’s open source. So I pulled down a copy, started poking around Xcode, and found the interval and switched it to every 3 minutes.

I had some compile issues due to a whacked out dev environment, but with the help of Dave Martorana (of MultiFireFox fame) got it compiled and it’s now been running and scanning every 3 minutes.

My version (changing less than a single line of code) is available on my S3 Account, as “Precipitate More Often“. The license is the same as the original. The entire codebase is the same as the original, with the exception of the interval.

Download Now – Precipitate More Often 1.0

Hope you enjoy.