It wasn’t the best weekend, mostly because Chris was super sick all weekend. It didn’t entirely stop us but slowed us down. It’s now Monday and he’s not 100% better, but improving. Poor guy.

I spent the majority of the weekend working on my WordPress plugin. Standout Comments runs the comment system on this blog and many of my other personal blogs. My partners in this, Alex Shalman and local marketer John Chow hope to launch this to the public on March 25.

I’ve been struggling with Tweetbacks, a system for tracking tweets about your blog across the Twittersphere. I think I finally nailed it 100% this weekend, but it cost me about 8 hours of tracking, testing and coding to get it. The main problem was that it sent thousands of requests and Twitter would rate-limit me. When Twitter rate-limits you, they send back an error that says “Enhance your chill.” Cute, but not helpful.

We had to cancel some plans with friends and the weather wasn’t great for getting out or having the windows open too much either, it seemed like I was opening and closing windows every 5 minutes, or turning the heat on or off too.

Combine that with “Spring Forward” and the new early morning darkness and it was a little confusing. Oh well, now it’s Monday. Which can only mean one thing…

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Twitter Code Swarm from Ben Sandofsky on Vimeo.

Last year got off to a bad start. I don’t remember why exactly. A lot of things went wrong but I didn’t whine about them on my blog hear so I have nothing to go on. I do remember talking to people about how I wanted to start over and that lasted for about 2 weeks. If you remember what I complained about, let me know.

2009 did get a lot better, things were good etc. And then it came to an end much the way it started. I had a headache and was generally “out of it” for a couple of days, including New Years Eve, leading to me being in bed between 10:30 and 11:00. Yep, hardcore party people in the house.

I was actually asleep by 11:10 and woke up not feeling too well again. But it passed.

And then we were in 2010. Corey Monteith of TV’s Glee ran a quick check on Twitter and said it’s officially ‘aught ten’ which I’m not going to pick up. The Olympic branding, which hasn’t taught me much, but has engrained Twenty Ten into my brain, so that’s what I’m going with. It may not stick either but I gotta start somewhere.

Vancouver is roughly 40 days from Olympic Chaos. I could complain about how much it’s going to mess up my commute, but it won’t be too bad (I hope). Considering Rumble and I will mostly be walking. I will have to change my bus route though. It won’t be too bad. I think the 50 False Creek will keep running from the Keefer Street side and end up on or near Granville where I need to get off.

I’m also hoping for nice weather for the Winter Olympics, not to be mean, but just because I don’t like winter.

Oh – and a rant.

Chris and I went to The Bay downtown and I wanted to buy us each a pair of the Red Mittens to wear during the Olympics as we wander around. Apparently the Olympic store in The Bay only accepts Visa and Cash.

Yep, no debit cards, no MasterCard, no American Express. Only Visa (the official card) and Cash (the official cash).

We left without mittens… For now. We’ll be back, oh yeah, we’ll be back.

Screw you 2010, I’m going to win.

This is of course an important concept for people and companies building brands. If you can’t get a good Facebook name, the world will end. Ok. Not really.

Facebook reportedly registered 500,000 user names in the first 15 minutes! On Twitter, we’ve already seen people complaining about the way it was handled and the lack of control. This lead to someone else getting Darren Rowse’s http://www.facebook.com/problogger. This is important to his brand.

My name was also taken by the time I remembered to check an hour later. The other Jeff Rose looks like a hard working guy in a suit.

So I got to pick something else. Thankfully, I was reasonably clever and got TheJeffRose so I made out fairly well, I think. I won’t likely use it directly since I can set up this site to forward http://www.jeffrose.ca/facebook there and maintain my name. Same with http://www.jeffrose.ca/twitter.

Have you got your Facebook Username yet? When it comes time and your name is taken, remember to think creatively. I could have had jeff.rose1 – which was tempting as it’s my Skype ID, but Chris commented that it reminded him of AOL accounts circa 1995. I agreed. He got ChristopherJTurner which is pretty good.

Don’t settle for jeff.rose1 or something banal. Be creative, be memorable and most of all, be yourself.

If you’re not completely lost then you must know about the social media phenom called Twitter. It’s technically a micro-blogging system. What this means is that instead of writing hundreds of words for a blog (like this one), you have just 140 characters in which do answer “What are you doing now?” for anyone who’s listening. In reality it’s used for just about everything from micro-blogging to customer service to finding jobs etc.

It’s like Facebook in terms of having some privacy options, allowing for followers and private timelines and yet in the absense of the private timeline you can see what a person has been doing by simply knowing their Twitter name. For example, visit http://twitter.com/jeffrose and you can see everything I have posted in the past.

Twitter Fail Whale

Twitter’s growth has been incredible with figures reported that they have been doubling growth in a single month. Recently, Ashton Kutcher fought it out with CNN to get 1,000,000 followers and won. That’s right, celebrities use it for real! You can keep up to date with Brittney or Ashton and Demi, or Shaq, provided you can find their REAL account among the usual fakery. They are out there. I had to turn of Ashton and Demi because they just weren’t that interesting. Sorry guys.

Twitter’s growth has caused a lot of problems recently in that their site is often down or slow resulting in the notorious Fail Whale shown to the left. This is their page that says that something is wrong. They’ve got quite a sense of humor and show an owl asking you to “mosey along” when you find a page that’s been suspended for some reason.

Since Twitter has been growing so fast and because they provide a nice open API there are tons of third-party clients, tools and site available to assist with various tasks. Many attempt to fill in missing features, add more features or improve on existing features. I mentioned several at the top and don’t profess to be an expert, but I’ll share my experiences with you.

TweetDeck and Twhirl are 2 Windows based desktop applications that use the Adobe Air platform. I use both and they have several differences. Tweetdeck takes a semi-tabbed approach and lets you create groups for various uses. I have a Van Folks group, a developers group etc. This lets me more easily follow people or conversations I care about. That’s one of the main benefits of TweetDeck. Twhirl’s main benefit (as far as I use it) is that you can have multiple Twitter accounts setup and open simultaneously in it. I have mine, Rumble’s and West Coast Favors (defunct) setup. Yep, Rumble Tweets.

HootSuite is a website that lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts and even pre-schedule Tweets to go out when you’re not around. Great if you’re going to be away. HootSuite offers lots of other options too such as a bookmarklet that lets you instantly Tweet out a website you discover by just clicking a bookmark and you can share it with everyone.

On my iPod Touch, I use Twitterific and Twitterfon and have heard good things about Tweetie (which is not free). Twitterific just released version 2 and offers a lot for it’s price (Free) and works really well.

Every day, Twitter grows. Every day, new applications appear to add more and more features. Biz Stone, founder of Twitter, recently talked about the need for Twitter to make money but how they don’t want to resort to classic banner advertising.

As I think about it, the vast majority of people I know use Twitter through an external service like those mentioned above and therefore Twitter’s monetization will have to no rely on on-page advertising since quite a few people won’t see it, thus reducing impressions and the effectiveness of advertising.

Remember to follow @jeffrose, @rumbledawg and @exTurnern8or.

Using tools like Twhirl, then TweetDeck and Twitterific to manage the flow of information seems to be the key. Depending on how many people you follow (get updates from) it can be overwhelming trying to keep track of the conversations.

What have I learned? Nothing overly earth-shattering YET. There are a few lessons in development still. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

1. There’s a lot of people out there using Twitter to communicate, micro-blog and more importantly (to me) make money.
2. You can communicate a lot of information and detail in 140 characters. You can also make a lot of mistakes in that small space.
3. Twitter is a tool to be used. Whether for good (@livestrong), evil (Someone I’m sure), education (Mars Rover used Twitter) or just fun you can reach a broad responsive audience.
4. Time exists more on Twitter than anywhere else. Twitter is all about the NOW. Although it has a memory (ie: search & history) people mostly care about what’s you’re doing NOW. Which is it’s founding principle.
5. On Twitter, nobody knows if you’re a bot, or delaying, or auto-tweeting. (I am not and don’t, although I am testing delayed Tweets for West Coast Favors).

Twitter themselves don’t seem to have a money-model yet. It’s all free. There are rumors floating about changing that shortly, but in the mean time, everyone can use it, tie to to blogs, cellphones and Facebook for full coverage.

How are companies using it? Tune in another time for that answer.