ReStream.me Mobile is almost ready for launch. Soon you will have many of the great filtering and sharing features of ReStream.me every where you go.

Highlights include:

• Real-time Twitter Stream: Transforms tweets from your stream into web page titles.
• Twitter Trends: See what links are trending from your stream.
• Recommendations: Receive recommendations based on your interests.
• Most Popular: See the most popular links currently being tracked by ReStream.me
• FavMe: Just like ReStream.me, you can favorite people. The people you favorite influences the content ReStream.me recommends.
• Highlights: A highlight area shows recent Tweets from the people you’ve favorited or content recommendations from ReStream.me
• Tweet, ReTweet, Favorite Tweets, and more…

The ReStream.me mobile web app has been optimized for the iPhone. If you would like to preview this release, please send me an email and I’ll send you a link. If you run into issues using another mobile platform please let me know. I want to make this accessible to everyone but I don’t have other platforms to test on.

Yesterday, I added a new features to ReStream which allows you to search across multiple tags. Now when you go to a tag page.

Example: http://restream.me/tag/inspiration

You can add several tags in the search box.

Example: inspiration, history

Now your search can focus in on the topics you’re looking for.

Result: http://restream.me/tag/inspiration,%20history?time=8

Try it out and let me know what you think.

It’s amazing. The hype that went into Apple’s iPad event last Wednesday couldn’t have been greater. The same could also be said for the backlash following the event. Everyone has an opinion and many of them are negative.

The problem is that our expectations were too high. We expected be blown away. We expected to see things we had never seen before. We expected Apple to hand us the future on a silver platter. We were expecting too much from a device that hasn’t even launched yet. Like many, I found the event to be a let down. But here’s why I think we’re all wrong and Apple is right.

The iPad is the future of computing. It’s not trying to mold itself to our expectations. With this comes the consequences of app developers not fully understanding the power that Apple has put in their hands. That combined with just a couple of weeks of development time left us with apps built more for today’s internet rather than tomorrows. Apple is suffering from the chicken and the egg effect.

Why Apple’s Bet is the Right One

What was missing from the event was how cloud computing is finally coming into it’s own, how web apps are the future, and how interactive content is finally taking shape across all media.

Cloud Computing

What Apple left out on Wednesday was how MobileMe will impact the iPad. I suspect it will in a big way. With little to no file storage, the importance of the cloud is immense. Sharing of files in the cloud will open huge collaboration opportunities across all devices. You can already see Google becoming a huge factor on the Apple iPad.

When I first thought about how I’d like to use the iPad, one thing that came to mind was web app development – something I’d like to do on the iPad. Typically, I do the coding and testing locally before publishing to the live server. Clearly, if local file storage is a problem, then running any kind of server app on the iPad won’t happen. But with cloud computing, you don’t need to test or even code locally. You can do this from the web – just look at Heroku with Ruby on Rails. When you factor in the cloud, there are few, if any, apps that can’t be developed using cloud computing as a substitute for local file storage.

Web Apps

When Apple first launched the iPhone, they hestitated to create a development API. They insisted that web apps were the future. Apple was right. They were just a few years too early.

Now, with HTML5 and CSS3, you can build almost any app using the browser. There are exceptions, and many will continue to build apps for the App Store, but the future of mobile computing is web apps – it’s insane to think developers are going to build separate apps for Apple, Microsoft, Google, and other such mobile app stores.

The iPad is perfect for web apps. It’s large touch screen provides an awesome user experience and opens up many UI possibilities. Touching the web just feels right but it has too be done on a larger screen than the iPhone and this is where the iPad delivers.

Interactive Content

One of the iPads greatest strengths is the openness it gives you to interact with content. Books, Movies, and TV come alive when you can interact with the content.

MLB’s showed off some of this potential. The iPad has given MLB, and most other sports, an opportunity to engulf people with their product. As consumers, we’re use to watching the game on TV, with camera angles, replays, and stats controlled by the producer. But that’s not the case for much longer.

Interacting with content gives us so many opportunities.

What if we can pull up our own replays, from any angle, and zoom into the smallest details? What if we can touch a player and receive all of they’re stats and watch the game from any camera inside the park? How would this change the experience? Throw in Twitter and you wouldn’t want to watch the game again without your iPad. The same could be done across any sport or movie. Interacting with content is the future. Watching on a big screen is nice but watching on an interactive 10 inch screen will be better. Touching does what no remote could ever do.

Thoughts

It’s for these reasons that I’ve done a 180 degree turn on my stance on the iPad. I’ll still wait for the 2nd generation model before I buy one – I expected it to address some shortcomings. I’m very optimistic about the iPad’s future and you can bet I’ll be thinking about how I can leverage it’s potential in the web apps I develop going forward.

So what do you think? Will the iPad succeed?

Over the past week I’ve made several updates to ReStream.me.

One of these updates caused some tagging issues. You may notice some links have several unrelated tags. Please ignore this for now. It will be flushed from the system over the next 24 hours.

Changes:

• More links now have tags associated with them.
• The home page was simplified to help new visitors to better understand the value of ReStream
• You can mark links as read on your recommended reading page. This is only used to give you access to more recommended content as we only display the top 15 links. Soon you will be able to mark a link as like/unlike to further improve ReStream recommendations.
• User pages – displayed when you click on a persons image – now show the top tags related to this person. We’ll be using this information in a future update to recommend people you should follow.
• Performance Updates: I’ve made better use of caching while still giving you a real-time look at the data. Several database queries have also been reconfigured to speed up

Two women were traveling down the freeway when they passed an abandoned billboard. It was old, crumbling, and faded but you could still make out the words and images of the last advertisement.

The first women looks at the billboard and thinks, wow they really got their money’s worth. That advertisement has been there for years.

The second women looks at it and thinks, wow what a waste of money. Clearly, that billboard didn’t work or people would still be paying to advertise on it.

This leads us to the problem with ROI. You can’t just measure it. You have to know what you’re measuring and why. If you don’t, then you’ll measure success like the first woman and all you’ll receive is more time on broken billboard.

Update: Twitter has apologized for mistakenly suspending the @socialmediafltr account. The account is back up again for those who would like to follow news, articles, and blog posts related to social media. Thank you for your support!

One of the biggest problems with Twitter is that you can’t follow topics. If you want to see all of the social media related tweets on Twitter you can’t. You can follow social media lists but only a small percentage of the tweets are about social media. You can search for hash tags or keywords but these terms aren’t always part of a tweet and there is no guarantee the link actually goes to social media content.

After thinking about this for several months I finally came up with a solution.

Two days ago I created a new Twitter account called socialmediafltr. socialmediafltr leverages the filtering from ReStream.me to create an account which people could follow that retweeted links to social media content. The retweets didn’t change the tweet text at all and they used the old retweet style to give the author ful recognition. In less than 24 hours, with no promotion, it gained a nice number of followers, 60+, and was added to 3 people’s social media lists. Not bad for less than a day.

People found value in following an account focused exclusively on social media content. Unfortunately, Twitter disagreed and suspended the account without notice. It’s not clear why the account was suspended. Most likely it was automatically suspended based on some hard coded criteria that was detected by Twitter’s system. I’m trying to get clarification from Twitter but from what I can tell, the account violated the following spam rule:

“If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates”

Personally, I don’t think that these tweets were spam but they weren’t personal updates either. Hopefully, I can get clarification and the account can be turned back on. I’d love to refocus my attention on improving the Twitter experience. If it can’t be turned back on then I’ll look for other ways to provide the same service.

What are your thoughts? Is setting up such an account in violation of Twitter? If so, how is it any different than the thousands of other automated Twitter accounts that don’t post personal updates?

Update: After waiting 5 days to hear back from Twitter on why the account was banned I’ve decided to start over with a new account. I’m not a very patient person and I think it’s crazy to have to wait up to 30 days to find out why my account has been suspended. If you’re interested in following our new Social Media filtered content account, check out twitter.com/socialmediaflt (Twitter has reactivate the account. You may follow us at twitter.com/socialmediafltr). It will have the same information as the old account but with fewer updates per hour to avoid the Twitter bots.

Several years ago Geoffrey Moore wrote “Crossing the Chasm”, a fantastic book about why high tech companies need to use different marketing strategies to cross the chasm from the technical literate to the mainstream. In many ways, the same information applies to Twitter.

Since 2007, Twitter has seen a huge surge in the number of people using its service. These numbers were predicted to continue into 2010 but that hasn’t transpired. Instead, Twitter’s growth slowed to a reported 3.5% in October. Not good if you’re Twitter but I think there’s a good reason.

Twitter has enjoyed a lot of success amongst marketing, tech, and media professionals. Even celebrities have jumped on board. This created a huge frenzy but it appears we’ve all been talking inside our own echo chamber – promoting our love of Twitter to people already on Twitter. The mainstream public has failed to jump on board but this doesn’t mean that Twitter is dead in the water. It just means they need to adjust their marketing strategies so they can cross the chasm.

What Can Twitter Do to Cross the Chasm?

• Make Life Easier for Noobies: When you sign up for an account it is difficult to figure out what to do next. It took me almost a year after I created my Twitter account before I used it. Twitter could help itself out by understanding the interests of new users and suggesting people and lists to follow based on those interests. Get people engaged early and they’ll better understand the hype surrounding Twitter.
• Why Should I Use Twitter? Perceptions have formed around what Twitter is but until you use it, it’s impossible to understand the benefits. Here’s two examples:
  • Introverts Welcome: There’s a perception that you need to be an extrovert to use Twitter. This is horribly inaccurate. The best part about Twitter is that you can stay on the sidelines. You can follow your favorite author or sports start. You can hear from the people at ground zero of a natural disaster and see what charities are doing to help. Twitter needs to inform people of the benefits of using it’s service even if you don’t post a single Tweet.
  • More than Status Updates: Right now, Twitter is one of the best news sites on the planet. It’s also one of the best ways to find new content to read on topics that interest you. It’s great for getting the inside track on your TV shows, movies, and other entertainment. Unfortunately, a stigma has been attached to Twitter by the mainstream that it’s a bunch of status updates about what someone had for breakfast or when they’re feeding their dog. This couldn’t further from the truth. Again, the benefits need to be more obvious.
• Better UI: The Twitter UI comes from the early days when we were all supposed to be answering the question “what are you doing”. Twitter is so much more than this and the Twitter UI needs to reflect it.
• Build Microsites: Why not have a Twitter news site? How about a sports fan site? Twitter should leverage it’s own stream to build sites on topics that interest the mainstream public. The mainstream doesn’t know 1% of the information flowing through Twitter on a daily basis. Show them what they’re missing.
• Move Beyond Text: People like to share photos and videos. There are Twitter apps for this but the mainstream public doesn’t know. Expand the service to use other media and make it easy to share with people who don’t use Twitter. They’ll see the benefits of the service and sign up for their own account.

There are many ways which Twitter can regain it’s growth but it’s clear that it’s marketing strategies need to change to expand beyond it’s current user base and into the mainstream public. Twitter has time to make this happen but it needs to do so soon while it still has the momentum.

Finding the 27% of Tweets that Have Value

A recent study by ReadWriteWeb has shown that only 27% of tweets contain information with some value. Many people will point to this and use it to dismiss Twitter as worthwhile platform. However, this number comes from Twitter’s flexibility. Some people use it to keep in touch with friends, others use it break news. Some use Twitter for advertising and others use it for sharing information they find on blogs.

It’s this last group that’s the most interesting. It’s the human web. It’s people finding information and sharing it that adds value where search engines can not.

The problem is finding the tweets that make up this 27% of the stream that holds information of value. Further, 27% doesn’t sound like much until you realize it’s 70+ million tweets per week. The best information on Twitter amounts to a needle in haystack.

This points to the growing need for filters and recommendation engines for the real-time web. Last week I posted on micro filters and I believe this post by ReadWriteWeb further emphasizes this need.

To leverage the value that Twitter and the whole real-time web hold, we need better tools. We need more filters that go beyond the basics; Twitter lists, follower lists, and individual favorites. For example, value can be attributed to the number of people sharing the same content or  the credibility and clout of those sharing it.

If the web is going to evolve beyond search, micro filters will play a huge part in it but filters alone are not the answer.

Recommendation systems are the other piece of the puzzle. They’re needed to understand user behaviors; what people like and don’t like, what they favorite, what they read, and what they share. Recommendation systems leverage this data and combine it with filters to find the best information that people want to read. This helps us to take a full advantage of the real-time web without becoming overwhelmed.

To solve the problem of finding the 27% of Tweets that have some value, filters will be used to narrow the stream of information. Then recommendation systems, which have some insight into our past behavior, will be able to narrow the focus even further by taking the information output by these filters and funnel it to us based on our interests. This means that we’ll all be giving up some privacy on the web but it’s a trade off we’ll need to make to keep up with the barrage of information.

The other day I was looking at my sites performance score in Google’s Webmaster Tools. According to Google, my site was considered slow. This was very concerning as Google has made it known that in 2010 site performance will influence its rankings.

When I looked at my source code it became very clear what the problem was. I use WordPress to host this site and all of the plugins I was using were dragging down the performance. Each plugin had it’s own JavaScript file, it’s own CSS file, and several images. What makes WordPress so great can also be a detriment to you page load times.

Web Page Analyzing

I used the web page analyzer at www.websiteoptimization.com to find what areas of my pages could use optimization. The web page analyzer tool pointed out several JavaScript files that could be optimized along with CSS code that could be condensed.

WordPress Page Caching

Now that I knew where the problem was I had to find a way to fix it. There are several caching plugins for WordPress but the one that worked best for me was W3 Total Cache. This plugin allows you to perform several caching and page optimization techniques that will save you seconds on your page load times.

Page Caching
You can cache each page on your site to improve your response times.

Minify
Minify will shrink your web pages, JavaScript code, and CSS. It removes spaces and even comment tags to reduce the size of the files that are downloaded to support your site.

Database Caching
Caches database objects to improve your response time

Each of the features above have additional customizations which you should look at carefully. I found the minify settings to reduce my page load time significantly by putting most of JavaScript files into a single JavaScript file and the same for my CSS files. There are a lot of different features. I’d recommend trying several of them and then rerunning the web page analyzer to see which improve you site most.

Overall, I knocked several seconds off the load times shown in web page analyzer tool above. You’ll need to experiement a little to see which JS and CSS files can be combined in single files without breaking your web pages. I found that I could make great use of this feature but it didn’t seem to work with the Disqus plugin I’m using. This is unfortunate as Disqus is one of the biggest causes of slow page loads. If anyone is able to get W3 Total Cache and Disqus to work together, please let me know.

In 2010, we need to find a better way to filter the web. It’s growing exponentially every day to the point that only the largest server farms can keep up.

Twitter’s API can’t keep up with it’s own traffic. Soon this will change when the firehouse is opened up to everyone but it will just push the problem further downstream. Developers are eager to have access to the firehouse of data but they won’t be able to process it all, nor should they try. And this is only for one piece of the real-time web puzzle. Factor in Facebook, Google Wave, Linked-In’s upcoming API, many more, and it becomes next to impossible for one company to filter and analyze everything.

To resolve this problem, we need micro filters.

What is a Micro Filter?

A micro filter is a filter that has a unique purpose and is reusable and available to anyone.

One example of a micro filter is a Twitter list. These lists are filters that web applications can use to narrow the firehouse and make information gathering manageable. But there’s one problem. Twitter lists don’t filter the information in a meaningful way. You can’t grab every Twitter list on marketing and gather all the marketing tweets. A marketing twitter list can be as diverse as Twitter itself and can overlap with many other lists outside of marketing.

This is why we need multiple micro filters to get the information we want. A series of filters – when put together – would narrow the focus of information to the data you need for your web application or research project. Running your marketing twitter lists through a marketing filter would narrow the focus and give you the marketing information you need.

Creating Micro Filters

Creating micro filters is very complex. I used Twitter lists as an example but this is one of the easier filters to build. The complexity increases when you try to create the “marketing” filter in the example above. How do you know what information in a Tweet is related to marketing?

There are several ways to do this:

1. Hash Tags: Hash tags are great identifiers but they’re not popular enough to filter on. Too much information would be lost.
2. Open API’s: Take the links from each Tweet, convert the URL to it’s long format, reference it in Delicious, and look for marketing tags. This works but it has a couple of downsides. First, it requires a lot of processing time. Second, the link may not be tagged in Delicious yet.

There isn’t a perfect solution but it’s clear that a combination of tactics are needed to build this “marketing” filter – tactics that go well beyond individuals categorizing other individuals in a social networking platform such as Twitter lists.

Further, several micro filters could be  put together to keep narrowing the focus. You could add a third filter to the example above that shows all marketing information shared within 5 miles of you. This location filter would be the third micro filter and it could be used an many different situations.

In 2010, I expect to see more filters become available to help people focus on the topics that interest them most. Looking at Twitter, it’s clear that filtering is going to become the next big development as people gather more followers, share more information, and expand their presence across more social media platforms.

Currently, Twitter is an unreliable platform for contacting people as the API can’t handle the streams of information going to its most popular residents. Further, at close to 300 million Tweets per week, there’s a lot of great information getting lost in the noise and this isn’t just an issue on Twitter. It’s happening everywhere which is why micro filters are the future of the web.