140Char

Portwiture is an interesting mash-up by Tyler Sticka, which grabs photos from Flickr which match the content of your most recent Twitter updates.

By inputting your Twitter username, a grid or slideshow is created, and you can select the number of photos, to grab photos by relevance, recency or how interesting they are.

And that’s it – as Tyler writes, it’s simply an experiment in mashing social services, using JavaScript framework jQuery and public APIs, some PHP and SlideShowPro. What is quite fun is that he’s suggested anyone who wants to discuss possible uses should do it on Twitter with the hashtag #whyportwit.

I ran my own Twitter account, and you can see the results.

Although there’s no easy embed option, an RSS feed is provided – it would be great if images could be linked to individual tweets – perhaps providing a business model if Tyler uploaded advertiser images, and then pulled them into the system alongside Flickr photos?

And if I could just embed it easily, it could become a really fun way to see Tweeple represented.

But it’s yet another example of the benefits of Open APIs and inventive people, which has fuelled Twitter so far.

If you’re based in the UK with an interest in Microblogging and journalism, then media140 looks like an essential event.

It’s on May 20th, on the Southbank in London, and features a mix of case studies and panels with journalists from The Times, Guardian, Reuters, Sky News, Journalism.co.uk and Frontline Club. Plus prominent social media bloggers.

Topics will include:
- how to persuade journalists to take and use twitter seriously.
- what is news worthy, how do you recognise it?
- breaking the news, how you can potentially undermine your own news room
- will local community create local news through microblog technologies?
- tools of the trade, what works and what doesn’t?
- is microblogging and twitter really a game changer?

Tickets are £45 and available now. For more details, see the media140 website.

And possibly one of the Tweets of all-time:

Link to the original Tweet, and to Hugh’s own blog post on it.

And take a look at the other Tweets of the Week…

So apparently Jennifer Aniston ended her relationship with John Mayer because he didn’t have time for her, but did have time to keep updating Twitter. Meanwhile Ashton Kutcher makes national news in several countries after posting a Twitpic of wife Demi Moore’s bikini-clad bottom.

For those of you with an inquisitive nature, the image is still available.

Besides the gossip angle of celebrites on Twitter (For that I’d recommend @heatworld, one of the titles I work on), it raises interesting questions about both the nature of celebrities when they’re increasingly interacting online, and also the nature of relationships playing out in public.

Will Twitter mean more ‘real’ celebrities?

Twitter undoubtedly gives the appearance of closing the gap between the public and celebrities, even with follower numbers of top stars reaching huge numbers (hundreds of thousands follow Ashton, Demi, and John etc). But does it also put more pressure on celebrities to produce content which previously would have been filtered by their relationship with the press?

Rather than deciding to work with the press and paparazzi, or spend their time trying to hide from the media, will celebrities feel they need to increase their popularity by updating on an ever-increasing basis, and perhaps giving more insight into their lives than they might have usually allowed, in the same way as ‘regular’ people?

Will it also start to change the current mainstream obsession with style over substance, leading to a greater popularity of celebrities capable of creating content of interest?

What about relationships?

As more couples and families are likely to appear on Twitter, as they have on Facebook, it could have serious implications for the people involved. Already there have been tragic cases involving social networking, such as in the UK, when a man murdered his estranged wife after she changed her Facebook status to ’single’. But Twitter could be potentially more problematic due to the space it occupies between instant messaging and previous social networks.

The nature of @replies, and the speed of interaction could see public arguments occurring when couples monitor who their partner is interacting with.

Will we all have to think about not just how we present ourselves, but also how our families and relationships are presented and available online – in the same way as celebrity couples have needed to manage themselves in the past. And will that effectively flip for those celebrities who have a happy and interesting partnership, as they’ll benefit from the ease with which they can reveal details and interact publicly online?

Is this the blurring of the celebrity continuum, so that the megastars at the head of The Long Tail, and those in the tail, are seemlessly joined without some of the segregation between those who are labelled as famous and those who aren’t?

With Twitter just celebrating it’s third birthday and social media still in the troublesome teenage years, the pace of change and the effects it will have are only going to accelerate in the future – it might be worth checking with your significant other about their online plans now, rather than later!

If you use Firefox for web surfing and Twitter (I do!), then you might find Search Cloudlet is a useful plugin.

Search Cloudlet

It’s simple and effective to use – it inserts context-aware tag clouds in Google, Yahoo and Twitter pages.

Apparently the addition of Twitter was the suggestions of @cleverclogs, who suggested I give it a try. And having installed it, I now have a tag cloud on my Twitter home-page, plus search pages, profile pages, favorites and the public timeline.

You can click between the tag cloud for keywords, or, on Twitter, a tag cloud of @ replies, which is quite useful. And there’s a handy ‘Off’ option as well. You can also select to turn it off permanently on your own page, other profile pages, or on Twitter search.

To be honest, I don’t use it a lot – following 2000+ people means that I need more than a tag cloud for the latest page of updates to really look into the available data – but it can be quite handy for checking out who I’ve replied to recently, especially as a reminder if there’s a username I need to look up.

But it’s no hassle to have it turned to ‘Off’ for when I occasionally need it.

Have you used Search Cloudlet and found it useful?

And what Firefox Add-Ons would you recommend using with Twitter, or other microblogging platforms?

As an advocate and evangelist for social media and Twitter usage for business and individuals, I’m a big believer in the power of transparency and authenticity.

However…

It’s essential that you always remember anything you publish anywhere on the internet can, and will, be found.  Even if you’ve got privacy settings enabled, I’d still only ever publish the same things I would happily say in front of my family, colleagues and boss (luckily by being consistently open with them throughout my life/career, there are few times when it would become an issue, and I’ve built up a reasonable amount of trust).

I had a little sympathy with James Andrews, when he managed to slur the entire city of Memphis en route to speak about social media to a company based in Memphis. (You can read his own response)

But the current hot story is mindnumbingly stupid (especially in the current climate):

Someone offered a job by Cisco posted the following tweet:

‘Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.’

(Sadly the account, @theconnor, is now private, ruling him out of Tweet of the Week).

Within hours he got a reply from Tim Levad – Cisco channel partner advocate:

‘Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.’ (Original here)

Info via I’m Not Actually a Geek.

And because I can’t resist:

I had to resurrect the ‘Tweet of the Week’ series after the following message caused involuntary laughter:

Tweet of the Week #6 by @sizemore

And enjoy the rest of the Tweet of the Week series. And please do contribute with any you spot!

First an official Google account appeared on Twitter:

But now Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been uncovered, having had an account for almost a month.

Definitely some validation for Twitter – which also hit 8 million U.S users.

It’s fun to hypothesis that Google, perhaps, is on Twitter as a customer service exercise – after all, they owned Jaiku, and the differences between the two services are fairly open and obvious, so it isn’t a research mission.

But Zuckerberg is even more interesting – Facebook already had an offer turned down for Twitter, so it’s unlikely he’s trying before he buys. And Facebook has also unveiled changes that seem to be partly in response to the real-time nature of Twitter.

Perhaps he sees it as an additional communication channel that is worth spending some time with, or perhaps he just fancied some fun by trying to see how long he could be anonymous?

Personally I’m just excited (and surprised) by the fact that for some strange reason, he’s decided to follow me!

One way to monetise Twitter seems to be using feeds/information outside of the site itself – good news for sites and businesses, if not for Twitter directly.

Probably the best use so far is by Mashable, revealed today. In conjunction with viral scientist, Mashable contributor and Twitter uber-analyst Dan Zarrella, the site now has a widget displaying ‘Twitter Brand Sponsors’.

Quoting from Mashable:

‘Twitter Brand Sponsors is a small step towards our sociable ads goal. Here’s how it works: a limited number of brands (and one charity!) looking to engage with the social media community can have their latest Tweets syndicated into the Mashable sidebar, and interested visitors can choose to connect with those brands on Twitter.’

The first sponsors are Jetblue and Mailchimp, indicating that there’s interest at launch – it will be interesting to see how many companies are engaged with a suitable Twitter presence to benefit.

And it also removes the questions around the previous example of Glam’s Twitter feed widget, which displayed moderated #Oscar tweets in a widget with advertising:

Is it right to profit from user-generated content created on another site, and without the awareness of those creating the content?

Would advertisers, even those related to the target audience/subject get enough value from display advertising around Twitter content.

Instead, the Mashable approach allows people to see interaction from businesses (and charities), and decide whether or not to engage.

I have to admit, I’m wondering whether they’ll white-label the Twitter widget, as I’d be keen to run something similar!

I’m a big fan of the TED talks, the conferences which started by covering Technology, Entertainment and Design, and now include a huge range of thought-leaders on a variety of topics. (More about TED here)

Somehow I hadn’t got around to watching the talk by Evan Williams from Twitter until I saw a good article about it by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen.

One interesting point is how Evan has followed a couple of hunches to build projects – Blogger and Twitter.

Secondly – Twitter was designed as a broadcast medium – one message went out to many.

But users invented the @reply functionality, the API, the use of hashtags, and started using it to raise awareness around issues, raise money for causes, implement marketing and business use, etc.

It’s a pretty quick presentation at just 8 minutes – and worth watching until the end to see what happens when TED Curator Chris Anderson uses Twitter search to look for mentions of Evan Williams.