Moving my blog

In my efforts to roll all my online identities into one, I'm moving this blog. I will now be posting at http://dascgo.blogspot.com. Sorry for any inconvenience. Hope to see you there!

Signing up to web services by following them on Twitter

I've been working on a Twitter project that requires immediate action when receiving Direct Messages and Follows. To conserve API hits (and for speed - emails arrive before the api serves the data), I'm monitoring an email account for those alerts. Twitter puts information in the email headers to help with this, which is great. So while doing all this, I had an idea....

Why can't I just become a member of your site by following your Twitter user?

As an example, say we have a site called cool_images.com which let's you catalogue and tag images you find interesting. This site also has the Twitter account @coolimg.

Ok, so I want to sign up to cool_images.com. Where I expect to see a signup form, I see a message:

To join this site and upload your photos, just follow @coolimg on Twitter.

That's a little strange, but I do. A few seconds later, I get a DM.

Thanks for joining us. You can log into the site with your Twitter username and here's a temp password (you can change later): FluffyBunny05

What's going on that allows this to happen? The same thing I mentioned in the first paragraph... cool_images.com would monitor their Twitter emails and react accordingly. They could also monitor their DM's and reply back to the user. For instance, I'm having trouble uploading an image, so I tweet:

@coolimg Help with uploading images

The site watches it's inbox and routes questions to employee's that can answer them. A few seconds later @dan_at_coolimg messages me and begins to help me with my problem. This also allows the help information to live in the public timeline, allowing others with similar issues to find correct answers.

Maybe I could also do things like:

d @coolimg import http://bit.ly/..... and tag it "downtown orlando"
d @coolimg send @dascgo a link to my favs
etc...

Combined with something like this user detection idea from Chris Heilmann (which Twitter disabled for security reasons), would have been incredible for turning Twitter into a sign on service. Maybe they could rethink what Chris was doing and provide a compromise for achieving the same functionality, because, quite frankly, I would love to join/unjoin sites by following their Twitter accounts.

Where did I pick up my Twitter Followers?

Yesterday I gave a CloudShout presentation at barcamp miami during which I gave out my twitter name (which is dascgo, btw). Later that day, I checked my email to see that I have 10 new followers on Twitter. However, one of them I know was not because of my barcamp presentation. This had me thinking that it would be really useful to know why people have decided to follow me. Here's what I'm thinking...

When you decide to follow someone, next to the follow button is the option to add a hashtag keyword. So here's a random person that followed me yesterday, but if it was I that initiated the follow, I would see something like (underlined in green):


Again, that field is completely optional to not impede the one-click follow process. But if people DO fill something in, it could be used in a couple (at least of the top of my head) ways. First, when a user gets an email notifying them of the new follower, we could see this (underlined in green):


I would totally love that. I would know if what I'm doing is successfully reaching people.

Second, what if I went to, say:

http://follows.twitter.com/barcampmiami

and got to see something like:

How useful would that be to event organizers? :)

So I admit, I'm still a Twitter noob, and there are so many third party tools for the service that someone may have a similar idea working already. Anyone know of anything like this? I think it would be tremendously helpful.

What I'd like to see from Google Reader and Gmail

I love reading articles that make me want to do something. Today I was reading this post on ReadWriteWeb and it begged for me to participate. The question was, basically, "what new feature would you like to see in any Google product".

I'm a Google fanboy, I admit, and the two apps that I can not live without are Gmail and Reader. These two products are often in two browser tabs anytime I'm at my machine. So, what I would like to see, or at least ponder a bit longer, is how could these two products be combined?

Take a second and go look at each one. They look REALLY REALLY similar, right? So, could something like this be what I need?



It's not a full mockup, but you get the idea. Now, let's take it a step further and really get to something I want. Post comments in Reader...

I think it would be great for Reader to be able to import comments, and lay them out in a fashion similar to how an email conversation in Gmail looks/works. I know this is not an easy task, but starting off with some of the major blogging engines, hmmm, perhaps Blogger at least, would be a start.

Imagine something like this:



I would love to see something like that. :)