Apologies to any names I’ve misspelled, product names I’ve left out, etc.

1. Focusing API efforts on 3 main areas
   1. Reliability
   2. Developer Happiness
   3. Utility
2. New internal “Developer Advocate” (Taylor)
3. When can we access past 3000 tweets??
   1. big focus, working on it
4. http://dev.twitter.com
   1. Developer portal
   2. API Blog to be revived
   3. Better docs, etc
5. HTTP Basic going away in June
   1. xAuth to exchange user/pass for OAuth token
      1. Only for non-web apps
   2. Everyone else use OAuth
6. Signup API
   1. Might be exposed
   2. Available to very limited partners
   3. More of a policy decision
7. api@twitter.com
   1. Email for access to xAuth/any other biz-dev type things related to API
8. OAuth Echo
   1. Delegated OAuth access
   2. Will be available before HTTP Basic is deprecated
   3. Allows you to “pass authentication around”
9. Inefficient to retweet counts
   1. Adding “object counts” to a lot of objects
      1. Retweets
      2. List membership
10. Streaming API replaces XMPP
    1. XMPP never coming back
       1. It doesn’t scale for one to many(?)
    2. Firehose = 100%
    3. Gardenhose = 15%
    4. Spritzer = 5%
11. HTML5 geo tags will be supported
12. Quarterly meetups similar to this
    1. Roadmap
    2. Upcoming
    3. Community developments
13. Username to email resolving API?
    1. Used to be available
    2. Spammer’s heaven
    3. Looking at ways to expose something similar, without being spammable
    4. Address Book API coming soon
14. Commercial Licensing (data) is be part of their revenue model
15. Favorites system highish prio to be “improved”
    1. Favorite?
    2. +1?
    3. Like?
    4. Bookmark?
16. New Big Data store
    1. Cassandra
    2. Spearheaded by Ryan King
17. Analytics on API usage etc
    1. Will start posting to blog
    2. They are trying to collect more internally
18. Twitter is hiring
    1. Pretty much everywhere

Interesting stats:

• 21 web services analyzed
• 10 (48%) are using OAuth (including YouTube)
• 5 (24%) are using AuthSub (also including YouTube)
• Dopplr is the only non-Google property using AuthSub
• Tumblr is the only property using plaintext passwords, although Posterous is using HTTP Basic, which is basically plaintext

Looks like OAuth is gaining some real traction, and in fact if Google switched over to using it, it’d have a real hold on the authentication space. That would probably be a good thing. Next up in my adventure will be seeing how truly conformant/compatible all these OAuth implementations are, and how portable my code be able to be in accessing them all.

If you’d like to add any others that you know about, please throw them in the comments and I’ll add them to the table above so everyone can find them.

1. Integrated search
2. “Personal Search” — I want to be able to perform a search just within the tweets of people I follow. This is just a filter on my own tweet streams.
3. I should be able to save “Personal” and “global” searches and easily come back to them. Ideally the client should tell me (badge or notification) when new tweets show up under any of those searches.
4. Support for multiple Twitter accounts.
5. The ability to view a combined stream of all tweets from all accounts that I follow through any of my configured Twitter accounts.
6. Simple (2 clicks) Retweet and Reply functionality.
7. URL shortening via bit.ly
8. Autocomplete of people I follow, and ideally those who follow me as well (even if I don’t follow them back). It should search both their Twitter username and their real name. Ideally I should also be able to “rename” or associate a real name with anyone I follow.
9. Groups — I want to be able to associate people with one or more arbitrary groups.
10. I should be able to view a stream of tweets from all members of a group.
11. Ability to “mute” an individual, or an entire group with a single click. A simple UI to show me all current “mutes” would be good as well. Muting an individual/group would remove their tweets from all views except for their explicit (group/person) view.
12. I’d like to be able to get SMS notifications for all mentions (@beaulebens) as well.

If you know of an app that does all of this (in a simple, clean UI), I want it. If not, let me know when it exists

In the “old days” (or in a lot of big corporates today), those support cases would have been handled behind a corporate “veil of secrecy”, tucked in a back end system somewhere, responded to by anonymous “Customer Service Representatives” via a generic email account like “support@intensedebate.com”. While we’re also making use of a generic email address, the similarities between our approach and that of big corporates ends there. End to end, the differences are pretty stark.

Plugin Release

Previously, companies may have tried to encode their plugins, or released them as some sort of binary so that they could control access to them and avoid people modifying them. When we released the 2.1 version of our plugin, we “checked it in” to a public-readable Subversion repository which then publishes to the WordPress Plugin Directory. That code (and all other code in the Plugin Directory) is GPL licensed and available for re-use/hacking/modification. People are welcome to read the code and see what we’re doing, point out where we could do things better, and ideally improve upon it themselves.

After we’ve uploaded the code, people will start getting notifications in their WordPress admin panel that there’s a new version available. To help explain what’s going on, we published a blog post announcing the new version, the new features etc.

Comment Support

Not that it’s a recommended channel for receiving support, but this is where we start really differing. People have posted a number of issues and questions about the plugin right there on the announcement post. We could moderate and remove those comments (or not allow them in the first place); instead, we work with our customers and try to address their problems right there an then. Michael and I have been bouncing around on that post answering questions and finding out more information from people so that we could fix some problems and get to 2.1.1. With email notifications coming in every time someone commented on that post, we’re able to quickly respond to people and help work out any issues they’re having.

Seeking Satisfaction

If people aren’t commenting on that post directly, they’re often over at the Intense Debate Get Satisfaction forum, a community-powered support system where a number of people are contributing. Again, this is a very public way of supporting users, and puts us out there in the limelight, warts n’ all. We answer what we can, assure people that we’re still working on things and that we’re making progress (which we are, a lot of it) and that we’ll get back to them as soon as there’s something to report. When there are updates, or when we need more information for troubleshooting, we post another message and get a stack of responses from eager users, hoping to have their problems solved. This is very real and very connected, and I truly believe that being open and transparent about problems that people are having and the way that we’re working with them helps not just that user, but others who may have similar problems.

Late-night Tweeting

For real-time feedback and almost-instant-messaging-immediacy, there’s Twitter. I know, with Oprah getting in on it now Twitter will probably implode soon, but in the meantime, I’ve found myself providing support direct to people via Twitter as well. One user wanted to use IntenseDebate, but found the comment importer wasn’t working. I replied that we were about to release a fix, and that user was then able to get up and running. This all happened, asynchronously, within about 4 hours of his first tweet.

In Your Facebook

Then for one that I really wasn’t expecting, someone contacted me through Facebook to try to sort out a problem. A user spotted me providing support via Get Satisfaction and other methods, and tracked me down on Facebook. In this case, it was someone that we were already working on a fix for, but it demonstrates just another way that people have been able to get in touch with us.

Better for Customers, Better for Us?

I guess the big question (or 2 questions really) this all poses is: Is this new way of providing support better for our customers? Is it better for us (as the company providing support)? Could it be better for everyone still?

The biggest problem I have (as someone providing support) is just trying to keep track of all these different “vectors”. I’ve identified 4 different support vectors above, and that’s not even including our normal support email/form, official Facebook group or VIP support channels. That makes at least 7 different vectors through which we might be providing support. It can get messy trying to keep up to date with them all and ensuring that you’ve replied to people where they’ve contacted you and in a timely fashion. Perhaps there’s an argument for traditional, centralized systems after all

1. It’s Open: I’m a fan of the idea of “open” (as in open source, portable data, etc etc). Facebook is not. Twitter is. Putting my status updates through Twitter means that I can do fun things like load them into my sidebar (on the right of my blog) easily (via an RSS feed). If I updated in Facebook, those updates become useless because I can’t get them back out.
2. Client Apps: I don’t want to have to go to the Facebook site all the time to update my status. I can run a Twitter client (currently DestroyTwitter or TweetDeck) on my computer and update my status in a couple of key-presses. I also have options (there’s that “open” thing coming in handy again) as far as clients go, so I can pick and choose something that I like.
3. Be Part of Something Bigger: Facebook is great and all, but it’s owned and controlled by Facebook. It’s a world unto itself with an established set of protocols and expectations. Twitter is something new. It’s a new type of “web” as we know it. It’s “live” in a way that not much else is yet. I’d like to be a part of that, so that I can see what’s really going on, which brings me to…
4. Search: Twitter’s search system is a whole new ball-game. It allows you to see what’s going on and what people are thinking/doing/asking now.
5. Community: Twitter’s omni-directional “follow” system means that the community/network is fundamentally to Facebook’s bi-directional system. I don’t “allow” people to follow me. If they want to, they do. If they don’t, they don’t. I can reach a whole different group of people on Twitter that I am not connected to on Facebook.
6. Laziness: Last but not least, I have a Facebook app installed that loads my Twitter status into FB anyway, saving me the hassle of updating both

So why do you use Twitter (or Facebook Status)? Chime in on the comments and I’ll add any good ones to the list!

This blog (and literally millions of others) are powered by WordPress. I write my content here and then potentially tweet about it, my feed gets published to FriendFeed, etc. I consider my blog the “central hub” of my online content production. My content gets distributed out into the wider web and ends up all over the place. Conversations occur at many of those locations, so why not aggregate those conversations back to my blog? As far as I’m concerned my blog is and should be the canonical version of my content. This system could leverage the various APIs and feeds provided by other systems, pulling back conversation related to one of my posts and storing it locally using WordPress’s comment system. Upon presentation on my blog, I would then include an icon or text message against each comment declaring where it happened (“on Twitter”, “via FriendFeed”, etc).

Off the top of my head, I’d suggest that part of this system would require you to automatically generate a shortened version of the permalink for your post on as many of the TinyURL type services as possible, then store those URLs against each post. These become your keys for identifying comments/conversations relating to that post. Now you go out to each service (where you don’t already have some sort of programmatic relationship that’s more reliable/simple) and locate all conversations mentioning any of your URLs. Those conversations would then be aggregated back to your blog, and published on that specific post as a comment. With some voodoo, you could even theoretically maintain threading if it was supported on the other systems. This part might require the addition of a wp_commentmeta table though (which has been discussed repeatedly in the WordPress developer community).

I took a quick look around at some of the more popular “conversation-generating” services/platforms to see how possible this would be. This means I’m looking for an API or a feed of some sort which can be access and parsed to locate relevant conversations. Here’s what I came up with:

• Twitter: Search API should allow you to easily locate all tweets containing a URL. You could also quite easily add the ability to reply to a user on your blog and simultaneously post your reply as an @reply on Twitter (the first 140 characters anyway). TweetSuite adds some of this functionality to WordPress already.
• Facebook: Walled Garden! Their APIs do not currently allow you to pull comments back from their system. There has been a lot of talk about Facebook opening up more though, so hopefully this will change soon.
• FriendFeed: Their API is extensive, and seems to allow everything needed. There’s even a WordPress plugin that already does something similar.

There’s even the potential on some of these platforms to reply to the comments left (for example) on FriendFeed, via my blog, but cross-posting that reply back over to FriendFeed to keep the conversation alive.

What do you think about this idea? Which other services would you like to be able to aggregate conversations back from? Drop me some ideas in the comments below.

My main reason for going?

Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny

The reason this is specifically important for me is that I was on the WordPress team that’s competing/presenting on this panel. We put a heap of work into building a website/system based on supplied specifications/designs and will go head to head with Joomla and Drupal during that panel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m also really excited to attend a bunch of other panels, and of course the parties, but this one panel is my main reason. Oh, and I get to stay and hang out with my good buddy Ray Hernandez as well, so it’s all good. I’ll try to post a summary here when I get back, but in the meantime you can follow me on Twitter for live updates on what’s happening.

Automattic built the wonderful Prologue theme for WordPress which turns it into a private Twitter. Coming soon is Prologue Projects, a powerful yet lightweight project-management/monitoring version of the Prologue theme. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could use existing Twitter-tools on a system using one of these themes? Let’s do that.

It seems like it wouldn’t really be all that big of a task to write a layer (implemented as a plugin and/or theme) for WordPress which walked and talked like the Twitter API, but on the backend, interfaced with WordPress. Then you’d just point your Twitter tools (which support specifying a different URL) to your WordPress install and you’re off and running. I could see it supporting the core functionality relatively easily:

• Public Timeline
• Friends Timeline (if you added the concept of friends, not that hard)
• User Timeline
• Show
• Update
• Replies — perhaps showing comments?
• Update

And what about the Search API? No problem. WordPress has a search system (although it could use some work). In fact most of this functionality would be easily achieved through a custom theme with a little bit of intelligence baked in so that it could output its data in different formats (JSON, Atom, etc) and intercept requests at certain URLs.

The big question is – what’s the point? Well… I dunno… it’d be kinda cool? Apart from being cool – this could also be a very powerful internal business tool, we’ll see where it all goes.

1. Bookmark any page (seriously, any page).
2. Put that bookmark into your Bookmarks Toolbar.
3. Right click it and select Properties
4. Change the Name to something like “Search Twitter”
5. Change the Location to this (copy and paste it):

   javascript:var%20d=document,w=window,e=w.getSelection,k=d.getSelection,x=d.selection,s=(e?e():(k)?k():(x?x.createRange().text:0));if(!s.length){s=prompt('Search%20Twitter:','');}if(s){document.location.href='http://search.twitter.com/search?q='+escape(s);}else{void(0);}

6. Save Changes

That’s it. Now click that link in your Bookmark Toolbar and it’ll prompt you for a search string. Enter anything and hit OK. If you happen to have some text on the page selected, it’ll automatically search for that text. Voila – Twitter Search.

I’m not going to go into great detail on how to actually implement all of these ideas, I’m just putting them out there.

Real-World Examples

Content Management System

According to Matt Mullenweg, over 50% of people who are downloading and installing WordPress now use it as a CMS rather than a blog. If you look around on this site you might notice that everything here is actually managed by WordPress. All of the pages outside of the blog are actually “Pages” in WordPress as well. The tools and plugins available for using WP like this are improving every day, so expect to see a lot more of this.

Address Book

Use WordPress to store and manage your Address Book/contacts list? Why not, Simon Wilson does. He made a WordPress Address Book plugin that you can download and install to do the same.

Prologue

This is an interesting experiment from Automattic (the company that “sponsors” WP development, amongst other things) that turns a WP installation into something resembling a private Twitter. It has turned out to be very valuable for them for internal communications and they use it to keep up with what everyone in the (distributed, entirely virtual) company is working on. You can download the Prologue Theme and install it to try it out.

Prologue Theme for WordPress

MyBabyOurBaby

One of my own projects, MyBabyOurBaby, took WordPress MU (the multi-user version) and wrapped it up in a completely different skin, modified all sorts of things, and created a shared environment for people to capture and store memories about their children. Most people have no idea it’s based on WP until I tell them because it’s completely hidden beneath the hood.

MyBabyOurBaby - scrapbooking for babies

Ideas For Other Applications

Task Manager

I’ve long been on the look-out for a decent online task/project management tool that I can use to keep track of what I’m doing. I’m yet to find the perfect solution, so at one point I got to thinking – what if I built one using WordPress as the core?

• Categories could represent Projects
• Each post would be a task/something that needed to be done
• Post even support “parent posts” for nested lists of tasks
• Meta fields could be used to apply priorities, due dates, etc
• There’s already a user management system in there
• Themeing is handled obviously, but you’d want to build a very customized one to handle this system
• There are plugins available for email notifications and other features that you’d want along the way

It could just work.

Job Application Manager

Of all people, I was talking to Matt Mullenweg (lead developer of WordPress) and he mentioned that they don’t have a good system for dealing with job applications (all emailed to as single mailbox, then they have to rely on someone to check that and sort through them). That got me to thinking, why not use a  WordPress installation to store them? It could work something like this:

1. Instead of applying by email, applicants would fill out a simple form.
   1. They would enter their personal details (stored as custom meta-fields) and
   2. Write a cover letter, which would become the body of the post
   3. Either copy-paste their resume (which would then become “Page 2″ of the post) or upload a file perhaps (upload into media library and link to this post).
   4. They would select which position they are applying for from a list of positions (which is actually a list of Categories from WordPress)
2. Once they’re done, they would submit their application and it would just automatically get added to your WP install. At this point you could:
   1. Get notifications via RSS by simply subscribing to the feed for the whole blog
   2. Subscribe to a specific category if you’re only interested in applications for the position
   3. Use something like the Post Notification plugin to send out an email to anyone in your company who’s interested in hearing about new applicants.
   4. You could even change this process to make use of something like Peter’s Collaboration Emails to post applications as Drafts until someone approves them
3. Now you’ll build up a “blog” full of applications, which you can search, filter, display however you want (custom themes could provide clean list views, or any other variation), and if nothing else, you’ve got your information in a database-powered backend. You can even comment on applications using the normal commenting functionality, and possibly use tags or another category to shortlist suitable people.

• TwitterProxy: Which allows you to do some cool filtering on your Twitter status feed (and then use it for whatever you want), and
• Gravatar Shortcode: A quick WordPress plugin that gives you a shortcode that you can use to inject a Gravatar into your Pages or Posts.

Check them out and let me know what you think.