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Archive for the ‘Twitter’ category

Buzz Is Already Successful!

February 15th, 2010

I’m surely going against lots of tech pundits and social media experts by saying this…let me take a long breadth..phew!

You may disagree, and you can definitely debate here. I will put my thoughts here why I think buzz is already successful.

First of all, if you are using buzz you might noticed that you see some people on your list, not idle but sharing some stuff and most of them not even on your twitter/friendfeed or facebook followers list. Interestingly, most of them don’t use twitter/friendfeed even facebook but they are using buzz right? But you know them very well, don’t you? Well, in my case I have noticed around 60% people don’t even have twitter or friendfeed accounts. Interesting eh….So what’s happening here, buzz is bringing new people in this (technically) social world as well as twitter/facebook/friendfeed friends. It’s allowing you to be more public with people you know already. Automatically, I had around 60+ people followed and followed back and I noticed buzz didn’t make any mistake to choose them for my followers list. To me this is one of the biggest success for buzz that it’s bringing new people for me in social world and letting me know what they are up to…

Buzz - not just status message

Now think, people who are using this social tools for the first time, is there any chance they will start switching to twitter and never use buzz again? I don’t think so…so these new users are an asset for buzz, How many users will be like that out of tens of (approximately) millions of gmail users? Even if it’s 25% new social network users come out of it that will be huge thing for buzz. That means buzz is already starting it’s journey with a huge users base.

I have been stopped using friendfeed since the day I got buzz enabled in my gmail, why? Because buzz got the same features with improved ideas and easy sharing facilities. And people I follow on friendfeed are already on my twitter friends list, so I didn’t lose anything there…don’t you think there will be more users from friendfeed to buzz like me? I have already seen lots of people switching to buzz from friendfeed.

Buzz allows you to make your post public or private, though as an user you didn’t have much control over privacy at the beginning but buzz updated their status on privacy and gave more control to users’ hand. Certainly, this going to bring more users to buzz.

It’s certainly not twitter, its better than twitter! You can share almost everything on buzz which you can’t do on twitter. So these need will make users to use buzz, no? And why not when you want to share the things from google itself?

It’s in the browser! You don’t have to start another application or you don’t have to open another tab on your browser to use it. You don’t even have to sign in to use it…isn’t it cool? No worries about what platform you are using….i know Desktop client like Seesmic and TweetDeck will integrate buzz soon but buzz web client itself is already a good one, no doubt about it.

You have inbox integration, you can email any content to anyone like you use gmail with the same interface. You can read all comments in your gmail and reply them from right there…cool eh…

Last but not the list, it’s Google dude. There will be less chance to see buzz is down like twitter

I know I’m just talking about all these positive things of buzz, well that’s all I think and I know there are some negative things of buzz as well. Like if we think it as a twitter, then we will see some features are missing. We will see how buzz comes up with their updates in near future. But to me, buzz is already successful. What do you think? Let me hear you…

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Posted in Facebook, Friends, Google, Twitter, Web

Tags: Buzz Facebook FriendFeed Twitter

Web is My Computer

October 10th, 2009

Day before yesterday, i lost all data from my computer that i saved by last 5/6 years! How? I was using this tool called GParted on Ubuntu to add some free space on existing drive. That wasn’t logical at all, but why i had curiosity? if you can do that in Vista or XP then why can’t you do the same on Linux. There was a solution, that you copy the existing drive to an unallocated space and then partition the original drive and then add the space and later get the files back from where you copied files to. Instead of doing that, unintentionally, i clicked on “partition table” and clicked on “Apply” when it clearly says “this will erase ALL the data from your /dev/sda” drive! I don’t know maybe i was drunk or something….i read it! That was all my fault. No blame to anyone.

Then what happened? My whole drive became “Unallocated” – meaning i broke the whole partition of the HD. I stared at the screen for at least 2 minutes, what? that means i lost all the data? Maybe, if i tried i could have recovered some data…but then waited and i thought what i lost from my computer…..

I had, important documents, my projects! tools, Music, tutorials etc….

Now, let me tell you why i said “Web is my computer“

Documents:: I saved most of the important documents on Google Docs. Documents that i couldn’t upload for limit on Google docs, i uploaded them on Windows Live SkyDrive. Same goes for Pictures, my all memorable pictures are saved on SkyDrive.

My projects:: Most of them are stored on remote servers. Just needed to get the FTP/SFTPs access info that i saved on Gmail.

Tools: As i’m a linux user, i didn’t worry about any saved softwares or anything. Just reinstalled Ubuntu and used Synaptic or command prompt to get all the software i used. But some tool like Tweetdeck where i had columns of groups? yes, thankfully i had account on tweetdeck where i synchronized my columns. Just used the accounts and got all columns back

Music:: Unfortunately, i dint save them anywhere. There were around 10 Gb music in my HD, this is one think that made me upset cuz i had my all favorite musics. But again, it doesn’t let me worry that much when i think that i can listen to music online from Internet radio channel like radiodhaka.net. Plus i can get these songs from my friends, of course

Tutorials/Links:: My twitter/Friendfeed and bookmarking tools are there to save my important links. And when i get something interesting i Favorite them on twitter which is kinda like special bookmark for me

There wasn’t any worries for my important links.

Ok….just spent 2/3 hrs to get all these downloaded and updated. Other then that, i actually didn’t loss anything big.

Lesson learned? Do stuff more on web, save them online…..there are lots of tools to do that. Such as, DropBox, SkyDrive, Box…etc. But personally, im waiting for Google’s GDrive. Probably it will come out with Google Chrome OS? i’m not sure but i’m preparing myself for Google Chrome OS, what about you?

Posted via email from junal’s posterous

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Posted in General, Google, Live Hotmail, Twitter, Ubuntu, Web

Tags: Backup Web

What Are You Doing?

September 11th, 2009

Sometimes, I wonder how many developers are working behind this question. How many dollars being invested to get this answer. Not only developers but some psychiatrists as well, probably? I don’t know who started this status system first, was it Facebook? Or someone else? anyways, Facebook was really modest about this status updates from the beginning. They didn’t give much concentration on it at the beginning and so far I can recall people used to update their status when there was something “really” important and something that makes sense. Something educational, something that helps others?

And then we moved. New tools came, Twitter became extremely popular with some simple ideas. There were lot’s of new tools launched following Twitter’s success. FriendFeed was one of them, though their concept was a little bit different than twitter. We people got too many options to answer “what’s on our mind” or “what we are doing”.

Not only, we have options to choose where we want to say what we are doing but also we have so many third party softwares whos making our life even easier. We can say something on LinkedIn and it can come to Twitter, Friendfeed and then Facebook. We can use such tool like SocialToo that allows to update status to multiple places. Same goes for Desktop client TweetDeck, Seesmic or web client Brizzly. And then, Junal becomes really busy when one of them updates their software and adds new feature.

What we usually answer to these status taker? A lot of things! And almost 90% of them are about ourselves. What we like and what we don’t like. What we have and what we don’t have…and then a big sigh! We are still not satisfied…..

But are we not being social? Wait, let me correct….we are being “technically” social. And I guess we are doing 110% on this part. I have been keeping myself busy with this so called “Technically Social” world for last 2/3 years. No, I don’t have regret for what I have been doing or what I have done. But I regretted few days ago, after my marriage, when I realized that I was actually in a different world. When I had to visit to my relatives house with my wife, I felt there was something calling me back. I don’t blame myself for being too much addicted with this technical world but I do blame myself for not being in keep in touch with the actual society. I can remember, when I arrived in my village, how people received us. How our present gave them fun. My grandmother is about 105 years old. Every years she waits for me to see. But Junal never can manage time for her – sigh! I regret.

This year when I went to my village with my wife Tamanna, My grandmother was really happy. I saw a smile that I will never forget. She has nothing to do except sitting idle and counting the day she has in this beautiful world. I wonder how many people ask her what she is doing? She doesn’t have much options there, unfortunately.

One the way to my village

It makes me feel how selfish I’m. I don’t have much time for my relatives to visit them. Lots of my village people are coming in my mind right now. People who never get a chance to answer to someone about their life, their problems, their needs or anything…. but these people never complain! Still they smile, smile with 100% happiness when we people got 100+ complains about our life even after getting lots of facilities.

My grandmother, 105 years old!

I know, I wouldn’t meet these much relatives if I didn’t get married recently. I have this realization that we are totally in a different world. A world that makes us more selfish, more self centric and we are getting out of actual society day by day.

I don't know what they made for us, but that was very sweet of them

Do we have time to give ourselves sometimes to realize if we are really getting out of our actual society?

Personally, I have decided to meet this actual society often to ask “What are you doing”.

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Posted in Bangladesh, Bangladeshi Village, Facebook, For me, Society, Technically Social, Twitter

Tweet Something from Your Website Using bitly REST Api

June 23rd, 2009

Oho, did I actually write the right title of this post? Bit.ly is not for tweeting, it’s for shortening the long URLs right, but hey, why bit.ly is so popular now? Most common answer could be twitter. I don’t know if people would used this service that much if there wasn’t twitter. Anyways, this is very important to shortening something in your tweet as twitter has character limits. So let’s see how we can actually tweet something from a website using this REST based Api method calls.

Note one thing that if your site is using wordpress or any kind of CMS that allows to use plug-ins then you don’t have to worry about it. This is something you can use only for updating some content to twitter from your site. Hope I made it clear at first….

After digging bitly apis, I think its pretty easy to do it as bitly provides Javascript client library so there shouldn’t be any varier about back-end language. So let’s see how easily we can tweet some content from our site.

First of all, if you redirect anything with the following URL, twitter will get your message in the text box and all you have to do is, just press the update button.

http://twitter.com/home?status=your_message_comes_here

So our message has to be customized and you cannot allow anybody to send message more than 140 chars right. This is why we will use bitly api to customized it.

First of all, we have to add the API library with the following format.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=junal&apiKey=R_888fefa724b856672a3276a3905d8e30"></script>

you need to login to get user name and password from bitly, though you can use demo user name and apikey from here but later you have to use your own authentication information.

Anyways, we are done connecting with bitly by including their JS client library. Now let’s create some functions of our own to call them. Open a JS file and paste the following there, you can find this example codes in the bitly documentation.

var TweetAndTrack = {};
TweetAndTrack.open = function(targ, url) {
var callback_name = url.replace(/\W/g, '');
BitlyClient.call('shorten', {
'longUrl': url,
'history': '1'
}, 'BitlyCB.' + callback_name);
return false;
};
 
TweetAndTrack.popResult = function(data) {
// Results are keyed by longUrl, so we need to grab the first one.
for (var r in data.results) {
return data.results[r];
 }
};

now it’s time to create our own function to call. Here is the example one…

function tweetMe(msg, url) {
var textMessage = msg.replace(new RegExp("^(.{0," + 80 + "}\\b).*"), "$1");
var callback_name = url.replace(/\W/g, '');
BitlyCB[callback_name] = function(data) {
var result = TweetAndTrack.popResult(data);
var tweet_url = "http://twitter.com/home?status=" + encodeURIComponent(textMessage+ "... " + result.shortUrl );
window.open(tweet_url);
};
 
BitlyClient.call('shorten', {
'longUrl': url,
'history': '1'
}, 'BitlyCB.' + callback_name);
 
return false;
}

I have used regular expression here to truncate the message. I kept the length of the message 80! why? Because, your URL will take some chars as well and you should also keep some space for people who will retweet your tweet

Now, we have to call this javascript function called “tweetMe()” and it has 2 params right. We have to pass the message and the url along with the message and bit.ly api will make sure that whatever we are sending, it will be customized before sending. So how can we call this function?

<a href=”#” onclick=”return tweetMe(‘Content or message of your tweet‘, ‘URL of your along with your message‘);”>tweet this </a>

Ok, now just click on “tweet this” and then you it will take you to the twitter heaven. Be happy there, and ask me any questions if you can’t reach there

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Posted in API, JavaScript, Twitter

Twitter Desktop Client War Between TweetDeck and Seesmic!

May 4th, 2009

I have just played with Seesmic new twitter desktop client. Though i have been using TweetDeck for last couple of months. Just wanted to try out the new twitter desktop client as there is a huge buzz about it on twitter and friendfeed. So, what’s so difference between TweetDeck and Seesmic? Well, everything is almost same just facebook integration on new Seesmic desktop client simply rocks. But wait, you gotta call Seesmic a clever jack! Why? Because they just used the new “Open Stream API” and “Facebook for Adobe AIR” very smartly. Facebook Open Stream API was just released a few days ago.I just think if TweetDeck’s last release was little bit delayed it would be great for them. Because then, they would include all these stuffs that Seesmic added. I’m pretty sure now TweetDeck will move it’s ass really fast to get all these new facebook api features enabled in their stomach. And well, facebook made a great move allowing developers to access users’ home stream. Seesmic is the latest result of that move and we gotta wait to see more applications based on this new API. By the way, I’m enjoying Seesmic client for now, let’s have a look at some screenshots.

and well, I guess war is just begun. I asked TweetDeck on twitter to know if they are gonna add new Seesmic’s features in their next version. and they said there will be “big differences in the next version, we have different path“. Smart answer Tweetdeck!