mark.bockenstedt.net » Social Media

What Happens When WordPress Stats Fails

Mark — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 15:30:43 +0000

Here’s an error message that I’ve never seen before. It’s from the WordPress Stats plugin for WordPress blogs.

Aren’t error messages fun?

Inaugural Ames Tweetup a Success

Mark — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:34:10 +0000

The very first Ames Tweetup went down last night at Olde Main Brewing Co in Ames. Due credit is given to @mrdallasjmoore, @jkeyla and others who were involved with planning the event. It’s been a long time coming to have a tweetup in Ames. I haven’t seen an exact head count, but I estimate that at least 20 people showed up at one time or another.

One of the benefits of going was to throw your business card into a hat (or a pitcher) and be eligible for a 6-pack of Olde Main’s brews. Here’s the card I threw in the mix.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy the Dinky Wheat.

TweetDeck Continually Improves the Twitter Experience

Mark — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:30:22 +0000

I’ve used a lot of Twitter applications. I’ve reviewed at least four on this site. I generally don’t stick with a single application for more than a week or two. TweetDeck has become the only exception to that rule – it has changed the way I use Twitter. I started using it back when it was somewhere around version 0.15. Since then, it’s evolved into an extremely powerful tool.

If you haven’t used TweetDeck, you really don’t know what you’re missing. Users of Tweenky will find a number of similarities with TweetDeck, but I think TweetDeck is still the best Twitter client. It puts a ridiculous amount of information right at your fingertips, but does it in a way that’s easy to manage and use. It takes a columnar approach to tweet display and allows you to create columns for a multitude of categories including replies, searches, direct messages, favorites, groups, TwitScoop, and 12seconds.tv.

The latest release of TweetDeck (v 0.20b) came out today and implements a stunning number of fixes and new features. One of my favorite features is the ability to filter a stream based on keywords. You can choose to include or exclude a keyword to refine what’s displayed in that column. Oh, how handy this could have been during the election.

Some of TweetDeck’s most prominent appeal comes from its ability to usefully display a wealth of information. While some argue that there’s too much of a need for desktop real estate, I feel that TweetDeck’s implementation of columns is a perfect approach to enabling multiple streams without having to switch views. You can literally just watch the tweets go by without lifting a finger. Naturally, your experience will vary based on the amount of screen space you let it have, but it’s much better served for use with a widescreen monitor.

A single feature does not make a good Twitter client. Many great features, a solid user base, and listening to user requests has made TweetDeck the best Twitter client on the market today. It is a true power user’s tool, which may ultimately make Twitter noobs shy away from it. Trust me when I say once you’ve learned how to use TweetDeck effectively, you’ll probably never use another desktop Twitter client.

WPTouch Skins Your Blog for iPhone Look and Feel

Mark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:00:56 +0000

This morning I was alerted (by @trutter) of a WordPress plugin that greatly improves the UI experience for iPhone and iPod Touch users called WPTouch. When a user hits your blog with a user agent resembling that of these two devices, WPTouch takes over and transforms your blog into something that fits with Apple’s look and feel.

The plugin has a good number of options you can set, including disabling AJAX and fancy stuff to make it load faster (EDGE and even 3G users will appreciate this). There are a slough of other options regarding what’s displayed so be sure you spend some time on the settings page for the plugin.

Analysis of Twitter Client Statistics

Mark — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:15:45 +0000

Tracker has been running since August 6th (almost 3 months) so it’s time that I look at what it’s reporting to see how useful it can be. If you’re not familiar with the methodology that’s employed by Tracker, read the description before reading the analysis. Here are some stats related to traffic and tweet analyzing:

You can see that Tracker has sampled almost 2.5 million tweets, an astounding number. What’s even more amazing is that it’s found that almost 800 unique services have posted to Twitter at one time or another. That’s an impressive figure even if you think you know there are a lot of Twitter services out there.

A previous experiment was conducted by ReadWriteWeb back in April that shows results that vary greatly from my results. Unlike RWW’s analysis, which was for just 37,000 tweets gathered over 24 hours, Tracker’s pool of tweets and timespan is much, much greater than RWW’s. I’m really hoping that this leads to increased accuracy in results.

All figures for the following analysis were gathered from the screen that shows all services for the life of the project. That link can be found here.

Top Services

Web traffic accounts for almost 44% of the updates Tracker has seen. However, this figure is bloated as any service that isn’t recognized gets lumped in as Web. ReadWriteWeb ran an article quoting someone in the know as saying that the API receives as much as five times the amount of traffic the web UI does. For the most part, I take the web’s share with a grain of salt as Tracker was written to track the statistics for third-party clients.

The next three most popular services are TwitterFeed, Twitterrific, and txt. These services have 17.0%, 10.6%, and 10.5% shares on the web-excluded sample, respectively. Rounding out the top 5 clients are Twhirl and TwitterFox with 9.5% and 8.2% shares. The top five clients account for 56% of all known third-party tweets that go to Twitter.

Of the top 10 clients, two are AIR apps (Twhirl and TweetDeck), one is Windows only (Tween, a Japanese service), two can be found on the iPhone (Twinkle and Twitterrific), one on the Mac (Twitterrific), one for Firefox (TwitterFox), and two that are mobile-based (mobile web and txt).

Twitterfeed Reigns Supreme?

It’s interesting to note that the top service requires no consistent manual intervention by the user. Twitterfeed simply tweets your blog posts (from your RSS feed) so you don’t have to. In the words of KDFrawg (amongst others), “Twitter is for announcements”. Auto-fed posts have a lower chance of being followed up on than a physically published post does. Along the same lines, #17 on the list is Twitter Tools, which accomplishes basically the same thing. Way down toward the bottom is mu :(

So what does this mean? Depending on your friends, you can expect to see almost two out of every ten tweets coming from Twitterfeed, which means that automatically no more than 80% of tweets you see are coming from a live human.

Twitter in the Mobile Space

The two most prevalent sources of mobile tweets are txt and mobile web. Together, they account for 9% of all tweets. That’s not even counting how many of the web hits could have been accessed from a mobile browser or the iPhone/BlackBerry only applications. Of the top 25 services, three can be found on the iPhone (Twitterific, Twinkle, TwitterFon) and one on the BlackBerry (TwitterBerry). Just behind that are applications like BrightKite, Hahlo, Loopt, and other primarily mobile applications.

Suffice it to say that Twitter’s presence in the mobile space dominates that of any other major microblogging platform. To top it off, Twitter doesn’t even have an official mobile application like other platforms do (unless you count the mobile interface). I strongly believe that one of the key reasons Twitter is so successful is its mobility. Look at the facts and figures and try to prove otherwise.

Availability Dictates Service Use

When Twitter’s API was restricted to 20 calls per hour, I noticed a major shift in the user base back to the web UI. Once the cap was removed and put at 100 per hour, people jumped back to their favorite third-party client. As of yet, there is no “killer app” for Twitter – at least none that I’ve seen. Each application has its own strengths and weaknesses. Looking back to the first major section of this article about the top apps, you might have noticed that there are no Linux-specific applications on the list. You’ll also see that a good number of applications are being developed on the Adobe AIR platform.

Why air AIR clients so common? Because it’s cross-platform availability on the cheap. Why build a native app that only works on one OS when you can build the same app to work for three? AIR has its advantages and disadvantages, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not going to be going away anytime soon. It’s not because programmers are lazy – it’s because they’re trying to reach out to as many people as they can with the greatest ease.

Tracker’s Future

Once every few months I’ll look at Tracker and see where the ship is headed. I haven’t done any major analysis until now because I’ve been waiting for data to draw conclusions on. It’s hard to look at 2.5 million tweets and tell me I’m wrong, which is exactly the reason I wrote Tracker in the first place: to be your go-to source for client statistics in the world of Twitter.

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MLB ScoreBot: End of Season 1

Mark — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:33:08 +0000

So, the Phillies are the 2008 World Champions of baseball. My Cubs made it to the dance but turned out to be the dorky kid standing on the sidelines yet again. Looking back on ScoreBot’s run…

There were a couple hiccups along the way, but I’m pretty happy with the way ScoreBot performed. For its inaugural season, 34 followers is pretty good. I wonder how many followed at one point but stopped following because there were so many updates. ScoreBot actually missed the first two months of the season with a torn ACL.

So will it be back next year? Hell yes. Will it come back for preseason or in time for opening day? Should there be changes? Want it on more networks? That’s up to you, ScoreBot followers. If there’s something I can do better, send me an email (mark [at] bockenstedt.net) or leave me a comment with your opinions.

Follow NBA Scores on Twitter with NBA ScoreBot

Mark — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:04:46 +0000

By now, you know the drill – another season, another ScoreBot. This one’s for the NBA. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the ScoreBot, check out MLB ScoreBot and NFL ScoreBot. For now, NBA ScoreBot will be limited to Twitter. If there’s a good enough demand for it on other networks*, I’ll port it over. You can hit up this slam dunk on Twitter at @nba_scores.

Disclaimer: NBA ScoreBot was conceived and written by Mark Bockenstedt and is not affiliated with the National Basketball Association.

* Other networks I can move this to: Plurk, Pownce, Identi.ca, Friendfeed. Minimum of 5 parties must express interest before I’ll do that though.

WordPress Releases Version 2.6.3

Mark — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:38:48 +0000

Someone found a security flaw in Snoopy, the technology that WP uses to grab feeds on the admin dashboard. There are two files that need updating, so this is a pretty minor update. Now would be a good time to remind you of the article I wrote in early September, Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion. My update took about 10 seconds this morning because I had everything installed from SVN. Hooray for simple!

Akismet Launches Stat Tracking

Mark — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:35:20 +0000

In a recent announcement, Akismet has launched some pretty nice graphs for WordPress blogs. The graphs are just a part of the new statistics features that come with the release of Akismet 2.2. Since the release of 2.2, version 2.2.1 was released, which fixes a few bugs.

Akismet stats tracks the nature of your comments and breaks it down into spam, ham (legit comments), missed spam, false positives, and a spam-to-ham ratio pie chart called “yummy pie”. The other major feature of 2.2 is instant adaptation to the feedback you give Akismet. This means that if you mark a comment as spam, it’s filter will adapt to that message so it gets better over time. It’s already pretty dang good, blocking 99.4% of all spam comments to this blog.

The next thing I’d like to see Akismet put in is a chart with all the IPs that have spammed and how many spams they’ve left. After one IP reaches a certain threshold, I’ll ban them into oblivion with no remorse. Until then, I’ll just monitor it manually.

Update: I left out a few important details. I assumed that everyone knew they’d have to update their copy of Akismet on their blog to see these changes. The other detail is that the stats page is on the main dashboard under “Akismet Stats”.

Plurk Updater Issue Fixed

Mark — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:03:41 +0000

Well, some people were complaining that their plurks weren’t being sent when their posts were published. Naturally, my first inclination was that something was broken with my plugin, so I dove in and tried to figure out where the code was misleading me. In the end, the cookie needed for the plurking process wasn’t writeable, which would cause the plurk to not be sent. Always something simple, isn’t it?

To remedy the issue, you can manually create a writeable cookie.txt file in wp-content/plugins/plurk_updater and that should take care of it. When I say writeable, 777 is preferred, but really your Apache user has to be able to write to that file. If you’re having the same issue and this doesn’t solve it, leave a comment here.

mark.bockenstedt.net » Social Media

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