So, with a few client calls to make and some artwork sign-offs still outstanding, I ambled into the seat at the back of the balcony of York’s beautiful Theatre Royal one last time and, almost completely out of charge in every conceivable way, settled in for the last talk.

The talk was from Jonathan Harris of Number27.org. Jonathan describes himself as “an artist working with complex datasets”, as you probably will have gathered from the tone of the piece so far that’s a bit like Caravaggio describing himself as “a bloke who paints Jesus and that”. Looking back on a lot of my past posts this year it seems I’ve been quite consumed by the idea of presenting information, and lots of it, in particularly beautiful ways and Jonathan certainly ticks that box in a big, fat way. Rather than hyperbolise much more about the man, he possesses the sort of profound, beat-poet Americana of Keroac, Dylan or early Woolf but manages to uniquely fuse it all with the sort of Bay Area timbre and vulnerability of a very modern geek. He is, in short, a pretty engaging guy. Personality cults aside though it was Jonathan’s work that I found the most interesting thing about him. You can see all of his projects on his website here but I’m going to just pick out a few highlights below.

We Feel Fine was the first thing of Jonathan’s that I happened across. It trawls the Social Web for mentions of the words “feel” or “feeling” to analyse and present fantastic infographics of the content. The really fantastic thing about We Feel Fine is that it presents its information back in such lovely ways, the realisations and the interfaces – of which there are many – are actually tagged back to human emotions. The database entries are also visually represented in a way which mimics the emotion they represent, so the “fear” entries act scared andthe happy ones group together. It even goes so far as to reference the weather in the person’s area at the time, mind blowing.

The Whale Hunt is a fascinating, if a little gruesome, project which uses tagged and Categorised photos to chart Jonathan’s nine day expedition with Inuit Whale Hunters using tagged variables like “blood” and “heart rate” to track the excitement – and also boredom – of the experience. It splits down in a number of ways like by cast member and chapter and you can also see a mosaic of all the images which really hits home the colourlessness of the ice and the gore of the blood when they actually catch the whale.

Lovelines works in similar territory to the We Feel Fine project, concentrating this time on the rawest of human conditions of Love and Hate. It uses the same data collector to harvest mentions of the words “Love” and “Hate” from blogs every few minutes, it then also collects the name, age, geolocation and any other data it can about the blogger and factors that into the presentation too. It’s formed through the three different themes of Words, Pictures and Superlatives and gives you an odd experience of being a detached voyeur.

Update: It would seem that the massive amounts of traffic my blog has sent to We Feel Fine has melted the servers. *cough* I’m sure it’ll be back up soon.

Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter and head of the API Team no less, put out the following Tweet:

“If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)”

It might not sound like much but there’s now such a flourishing, healthy industry that has built up around Twitter clients that it has a lot of people fearing for their livelihoods. Twitter’s back house team are rumoured to have all manner of cool tools they use to develop things with and it seems that they might have now reached a point where they are able to integrate these into a more coherent stream, one that’s able to actually be deployed onto the site.

The Tweet was later clarified

“Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.“

and

“I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.”

But it seems as though the genie was well and truly out of the bottle as the rumours spread far and wide across, ironically enough, the Twittersphere. The jungle drums appear to be beating louder and louder when you consider that they have just hired UI Specialist Bryan Haggerty from LinkedIn and API Evangelist Taylor Singletary who all but confirmed his next port of call is but this rather lovely cryptic tweet.

Expect everything to be clarified at Twitter’s Chirp Conference taking place in San Francisco on April 14th. If anybody fancies getting me a plane ticket I’ll be eternally grateful.

I’ve been lucky to speak to, and be spoken to by, several Twitter staffers over the course of the past year and what best characterises them is, apart from all being incredibly smart, the way they seemed to be focussed with keeping the service live in the face of such immense growth. They also have a surprisingly small staff in comparison to other Social Media behemoths. Twitter suffered several major outages over the last year where the service fell over due to volume and the concentration seemed to be, more or less, making it more robust.

As the year went on Twitter also began to roll out a selection of new features like lists and a revamped retweet feature which, whilst not placing significant load on the service, certainly improved and matured the user experience. It’s also perhaps a sign of the fact that these incredibly talented people had finally been let loose on improving and developing the service rather than just plain coping with the demands placed on them by this exponential growth.

But that said, are all these reports of Twitter’s growth slowing actually accurate? Neilsen certainly think so, claiming that Twitter is suffering from a deficit of user retention, with 40% of Tweeters coming back the next month after joining, as opposed to 60% with Facebook and MySpace.  Twitter, of course, works very differently from anything of its size that has gone before. Facebook and MySpace have also both constructed a product where 99.999% of the interaction takes place on the site. This makes sense on a number of levels, not least advertising where you can serve incredibly well targeted ads to users based on the detailed information held, but the major drawback is that you have to develop software and capacity on a “one size fits all” basis.

The beauty with Twitter of course is that there are a million and one ways to use it over a million and one platforms. None of which are “owned” by Twitter. This multiplicity of platform is a key difference, not only in keeping a smaller more agile development staff, but also to measurement. It’s actually much, much harder to measure Twitter’s usage because of it. See that graph above? Pointless. I’ve done a count of my follower list and – right up to the point where my eyes crossed – I counted about 5% of tweets that actually came “from web”, that is to say directly from the Twitter site itself. The truth is only Twitter know the full story of their usage. But, much like Facebook, reports of Twitter’s demise are way off of the mark.

Anyway,  Hubspot’s “State of the Twittersphere Report – January 2010” posits some quite interesting theories about Twitter and its direction of travel. For those of you who are time poor here’s what they had to say, more or less:

1. Users are following more, are being followed more and Tweeting more. (Does this look like a drop off to you?)
2. Biographical information in profiles stood at 24% in July 2009, up to 53% in January 2010
3. Location information in Profiles stod at 31% in July 2009, rose to 65% in January 2010
4. URLs in Profiles were around 20% in July 2009, up to 41% in January 2010
5. 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations in July 2009 were outside America compared to 40% of the top 20 Twitter locations in January 2010 outside America.
6. Top location in July 2009 – London and still No. 1 in 2010
7. 82% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers
8. 81% of Twitter users are following less than 100 people
9. Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in our study
10. 10-11 pm is the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day

Slightly ironically for a web-centric conference though, the wi-fi was a real issue. Ryan Carson promised us “Weapons Grade wi-fi” but sadly I could barely get a connection, either on wi-fi or my iPhone, for the whole two days. There were also some grumbles from those who had been before who objected to the slightly heavy-handed presence of some of the title sponsors Microsoft, Vodafone, Sun and Paypal. It was a great conference though and rather than go through speaker by speaker, theme by theme, I thought I’d just quickly run through some of the highlights for you all.

Francisco Tomalsky, 280North

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications

280North are a fantastic company formed by Francisco Tomalsky and two college friends, all of whome were former employees of Apple and worked on iTunes and iPhone development. You may know 280North’s work, they are the guys responsible for Cappucino, an open source application development framework for developing web applications that look and feel like desktop applications and 280Slides, the presentation software that works in your browser.

Probably one of the stars of the whole show, Tomaskly gave a simultaneous talk and live demo of Atlas, another wonderful Cappuchino tool which makes creating web apps an absolute doddle. Without going into too much detail or giving too much away, if you can resize boxes then you will be able to create web apps in Atlas. The presentation was so well received that they called him back the next day to show everyone more of what Atlas can do.

Bruce Lawson, Opera

The Future of HTML 5

Bruce is a big personality and has a passion for the internet and within seconds of him taking the stage he lets you know it. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated talk of the whole two days with many people staying glued to the good seats through the afternoon interval.

Bruce’s style borders on that of one of my favourite all time comedians, Mark Thomas, and whilst peppered with jokes and witty asides the stuff that he talked us through was pretty mouth watering. HTML 5′s dynamic graphics capabilities alone were worthy of an entire lecture and the demo of the new feature “canvas” took the form of a first person shooter game (ala Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein etc) which impressed the audience. Bruce, claiming claiming he was “not of a militaristic bent” decided to rejig this and instead showed the audience a first person flower giving game instead.  The bad news about canvas is that it isnt yet accessable (for the visually/hearing impared, that is) but it can be worked around if you use .svg graphic formats as the text is still treated as text.

We were told that we should “think of HTML 5 as a broad form, rather like AJAX” rather than like anything that went before. There’s tons and tons of other very cool stuff that HTML5 can do as standard, multiple file uploads, local and session cookie storage, and a wonderful facility to embed (and thus tinker with) video right in the browser window. There will also be no more calling in of javascript libraries to validate forms as they will be automatically validated in 5 and there are also all sorts of nice things like calendar widgets which should make your designer and developer’s lives a lot easier.  Very exciting indeed.

Aza Raskin, Mozilla

How people will use the web in the future

Mozilla are great, firefox is great, all of the add ons are great and rather unsurpisingly Aza’s presentation was great. Rather than talk about specific technology he chose instead to look into the future to see what we should be expecting from our browsing experience. Aza asked us to think of the browser “as a broker of trust, as an insanely smart butler”.

He also intruduced us to Ubiquity, probably the most forward thinking add-on available which acts on an intuitive command system based on wants and requests, Aza took us through the many steps that we go through to do what in reality are small, simple tasks online. Ubiquity is an impressive concept, far too esoteric to describe with any brevity, and Aza probably summed it up best by saying “with google you type what you want to fine, with Ubiquity you type what you want to do”.

Ed Anuff & Mike Malone, Six Apart.

The Future of Social Web Apps

Ed and Mike from Six Apart, the company that brought you Barack Obama’s MyBo social tool, took us through some of the developments around Motion, their new tool for the Movable Type platform and Typepad. Motion promises microblogging features which replicate Pownce, Tumblr or Twitter. Activity streams like FriendFeed and really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect. I also attended the product pitch on this and it’s a really great tool that I’ll be fiddling with in the future.

Bonus video section:

Kevin Rose, Digg

How to get your site from 1 to 1,000,000,000 users

Cnet review of FOWA

Anyway, so with my melon twisted and my mind rammed full of the knowledge of those much smarter than me I headed off into the night and back up north to Yorkshire. But first there was one little thing that I had to settle before I could jump on the train, my little girl had asked me – perfectly reasonably for a two year old I suppose – for a pink dinosaur. The only place I could think of that would even possibly have a pink dinosaur would be the Natural History Museum. I was in luck, one pink dinosaur under my arm it was back off to Kings Cross and the train north.

Thanks to the guys at Carsonified for a great few days.

Anyway, Twitter is not great in and of itself. What makes Twitter great is the fact that the code and content can be molded and shaped into any number of different things and presented in a myriad of ways. Anyway, what I’ve attempted to do here is bring together my five favorite Twitter apps, there are probably about another 10-15 that I’d reccomend people to use for specific purposes.

Number One

Tweetdeck:

Simply wonderful application that allows me to segregate my pretty large band of followers into manageable groups, I use this on my own account and even though you have to download it it’s pretty robust and easy to use. It also has a lovely search facility and shortens your urls for you quickly and easily. Oh and it also shows your facebook friends status to boot.

Number Two

MobyPicture:

Mobypic has been around for a fair old while now, essentially it allows mobile phone camera users to upload their photos and videos and tweets a link to your tweeple. It also works with facebook, youtube, blogger, wordpress etc etc. It’s pretty simple to use and a great way of enhancing your tweeting experience.

Number Three

Autopostr:

This service lets your friends in Twitter know when you post a new picture on Flickr, similar to MobyPicture but obviously flickr based.

Number Four

Twitterfeed:

If like me you run a blog then you’ll find this absolutely invaluable, TwitterFeed checks the RSS feed to my blog every hour (or whenever you like) and if something new has appeared in the feed it takes the link and tweets it for me. It allows me to customise the tweets so I can add a little message (”new on Totaal:” for example) so followers know what the link is.

Twitterfox:

Twitterfox is a great little firefox extension that turns your Firefox browser into a twitter client. It isnt in any way obtrusive, in fact it goes out of its way not to be. It notifies you subtly when your friends update their tweets and allows you to tweet directly from your browser. Great for work based twittering with unsympathetic bosses.

So there you have it, like I say it’s by no means an exhaustive list, just a quick run down of the apps which I find most valuable. Before anybody starts, I wouldve added Seesmic but to be honest I prefer tweetdeck and the assumption I made was that early twitterers would have enough on their plate without multiple accounts to juggle.

(Phil, Sue, Dale) This post is for you BTW

Perhaps the most pertinent thing in all of this was that it is Microsoft that brought this project together, typically they seem to have wanted to keep their cards close to their chest. Maybe I’m doing them a disservice, maybe they cant align the system with Flickr’s API or something, either way though we are missing out and it’s a shame. Photosynth would be going great guns now.

As it is though it’s still a great tool. Check out these these lovely examples of the Rio Duoro in Porto (Look out for the bridge by Gustave Eifel), The Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and Gorsdale Scar in the Yorkshire Dales.