Sumolabs

How I built TweetTop.com in 6 hours with Drupal.

TweetTop was an idea I had when struggling with managing the hoardes of people who I liked to follow with twitter. I use TweetDeck for daily conversation and Hootsuite for posting, but even with groups bundling people together it was getting a bit ridiculous. I wanted a place to be able to just see what a group of people were saying, all in one page, without "committing" to them. (i.e. Without following them)

It also stemmed from the fact that when most people join twitter, they have no idea what to do (or whom to follow).

So, in order to kill two birds with one stone, I decided to create TweetTop one sleepless night. My goal was to more or less be "inspired by Alltop's interface" but have the near real-time feel of Twitter.

I eagerly went to work, wondering how far I could get with Drupal without having to write any code.

I got pretty far.

The first thing I did was do a standard 6.x Drupal installation, with the Zen theme, admin_menu, and Views (something I figure I was going to need regardless).

Once I had that whole setup installed, I played around with the Twitter Module. The Twitter Module essentially allows each Drupal User Account to have one-to-many associated Twitter accounts. Once associated, it can be set to automatically "scrape" the twitter API at every cron run for each of these twitter accounts.

As "messy" as it was, I made each user account a topic. E.g. "Social Media" is actually a Drupal user account that has many twitter accounts associated with it. This was great for a few reasons: i) I could hand off control of any given topic to have it edited and vetted by someone else (by just giving them the topic login and password), and ii) I can make it so anyone can register and create their own "MyTweetTop" page featuring accounts they want to follow. Yet to do, but solid.

So, at this point I had exactly what I needed happening in the backend. Twitter module was scraping the data and now I just needed to pull it from the database and present it in one cohesive page.

I played around for about an hour with Panels and Views trying to figure out how to create "topic pages" without code, but finally I had to drop down to a text editor and write about 30 lines of code.

Effectively, the code just did this:

1) Load up all the twitter accounts for a particular user account (aka "topic") e.g. Get all associated twitter accounts for "Social Media"

2) Order them according to a ratio including followers, following and status updates (to identify and rank the "best").

3) Loop through them, print a custom header for the avatar and user description, and then dynamically call a Drupal View that displays tweets for a particular twitter user account.

4) Bam. Literally, that was it.

For fun I added in a sidebar that auto-updates every 30 seconds or so for all members of the page, so we could see a sort of "fire hose" of everything everyone was saying.

Finally, I tweaked some CSS, turned on CSS and Javascript caching, created 10 or so more topics and LAUNCHED.

We got a great response from everyone in twitter-land. Nevermind the fact that Kevin Roses' WeFollow.com launched the next day, I was still stoked, because WeFollow's first release sucked IMO (anyone with lots of followers could dominate any category, since authors classify themselves, not the other way around). TweetTop.com on the other hand, is vetted and controlled by editors. Quality over quantity.

The Challenge

Continuously, we added more topics and more topics (meaning that more and more twitter user accounts were being followed). Right now we follow some 1000 accounts or so (give or take).

That means, with the current Twitter Module setup, we'd do 1000 API calls every 15 minutes. Twitter only allows 200 an hour, so we were hooped. This thing wasn't going to scale up for us to add more accounts. Twitter started rejecting our API calls.

So, we came up with a great idea. Whenever a user is added to TweetTop.com, that user is also FOLLOWED by our "tweettop" user account (this is done via the Twitter API). Then we simply poll the Twitter API every 30 seconds and say "which one of the peeps we follow on twitter has updates?". We then take those updates, write them with the existing Drupal Twitter Module and we are done. All in all about 20 lines of additional code.

Now we can follow up to 2000 people without any problems. We can likely follow more but we'll need to get the Twitter boys to up our limit.

Drupal seriously rocks. I am constantly amazed by the fact that I can accomplish very complicated things with limited programming knowledge and do 95% of things without touching code.

If you have any questions about how TweetTop was done, or if you need any Drupal help, don't be shy and give me an "@" on twitter. I'm a busy dude, but I'd been more than willing to walk you through it (even send you some code).

Announcing TweetTop.com - Who to Follow on Twitter

I got bored over the past two nights and created TweetTop.com. It took me 6 hours (which is why it looks like crap -- I'm not a designer).

Tweet Top is the latest and greatest from Twitter people on popular topics. We update the latest thinking from topic experts every 20-30 seconds. Pick a Topic below and we'll deliver it to you 24 x 7. All the top "Tweets", All the Time.

Currently it has 18 topics and we'll add more based on user suggestions. Got any?

So -- if you are struggling with figuring out who to follow on Twitter, or just don't want to bother with creating your own account at all, then TweetTop.com is for you.

Current Topics

Yes. I added myself to the Social Media page. Deal with it ;)

Why Twitter will Fail

In its current form, I think Twitter will fail.

I recently got into this conversation with David Tedman from Invoke. We were talking about his product, BrightKit, which allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts, delay posts and collect stats on your links (If you haven't checked it out, I suggest you do -- Tweekdeck and BrightKit are an awesome combo).

I asked David if he was planning on integrating any of the other microblogging platforms such as Identi.ca (Laconica), Jaiku, etc. I especially emphasized Laconica because of the open nature of the technology.

Here was my main argument: It is rare that an internet communication medium ever becomes extremely popular for the long term when controlled by a private entity.

Take a look at internet history: News Groups (NNTP), Email (SMTP/POP3), Web Pages (HTTP), Voice over IP, Video Conference, etc. All have standards and generally operate in a distributed fashion.

Twitter is from-the-center command and control. They have the data and interactions. They control the end points. When twitter ends, the conversation ends.

Juxtapose this with something like Laconica (which I won't waste time explaining in my own words because Wikipedia rocks):

Laconica is an open source microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OpenMicroBlogging standard. So Laconica provides the potential for open, inter-service distributed communications between communities with functionality similar to Twitter. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data. Its first deployment powers the identi.ca openmicroblogging service.

Back to my original argument: Twitter will fail in it's current form. That was a bit of link bait, since Twitter can still adapt.

This could mean Twitter implementing the OpenMicroBlogging standard, turning into a non-profit foundation, and a hundred other ideas. However, in its current form of command-and-control I believe that Twitter's life is on a dying trend despite massive growth.

Communication mediums, especially microblogging, need to be based on a open, standardized, distributed protocol. Just like what OpenSocial is doing for social networks, so must the OpenMicroBlogging standard do for Micro Blogging.

In summary: I wish Twitter all the best (since I love the product and the ecosystem of applications that are built on it).

FYI: You can follow me at http://twitter.com/jordanwillms

The basics of online personal branding

It is no secret that you have to be in charge of your own online personal brand: The image and message you convey to the world will stay with you forever.

If you put anything on the internet you can safely assume that it will be searchable and viewable forever.

With employers, vendors, friends, and potential co-founders all googling you, you need to be very aware of the all of the different channels in which your life is being streamed out over the internet (and off the internet).

Manage your privacy settings

We need FriendFeed for the Enterprise

Friendfeed, is awesome. In a nutshell, in enables you to produce a feed of all your activity online from various disparate systems. Moreover, you can aggregate the activity feeds of all of your friends, or special feeds in 'rooms'.

It's a Facebook activity stream on crack.

For example, check out my feed that is pulling information from my blogs, delicious, LibraryThing, twitter, Google Talk amongst many others.

But how can the business world capitalize on activity feed technologies?

Why should you care?

Activity feeds are going to be a key technology going forward for managing employees, because they enable management to monitor people based on results and actions, rather than time. It could be one of the missing pieces to make results oriented work environments more marketable.