Image by rpeschetz via FlickrAn old friend of mine (Rick Mans) wrote on his blog that heroes and champions are not the solution to everything. His point is that you don't need heroes and champions to drive adoption of social media. So you need them to start the day, but if I understand Rick correctly, you should'nt expect them to save that day in the end.
But Rick, didn't you realize? Super heroes are soooo 1980! They wouldn't dare to go too public these days, because up front heroism is uncool. So they are holding themselves back and try to make a normal living like everyone else. I bet Spiderman is on the web all day from his depressing cubicle and sending updates on twitter (@depressedspider) like "need more coffee to keep me going till 5 pm".
Avid social media junkies with their enormous ego's position themselves as super heroes (like the self declared guru Robert Scoble), but @depressedspider isn't one of them. Real heroes are modest and do their heroic actions "matter of factly" and without a mask on and with their underwear under their clothes. Heroes are modest and don't like all the fuss about the thing they did to save someone's life. They "just" acted out of compassion. So there's my point (and I guess Rick's too): be compassionate about the things you do, and heroism comes natural. If you are in the right job, compassion should come easy.
I got an email today from Justin Vincent. Doesn't ring a bell? Well, he's the guy behind TweetMiner, and of lately, Pluggio (The Helpful Twitter Client). TweetMiner basically is...was an RSS reader combined with a Twitter client. It allowed you to quickly and easily tweet about items from your RSS feeds. It also allowed you to schedule when your tweets were to be submitted to Twitter. After it got extended with multi-acount support and support for other social networks such as facebook and LinkedIn, TweetMiner was renamed to Pluggio (which still provides all those useful functions of course).
I use Pluggio every now and then, but not to its full potential (yet?).
Here's what Justin wrote in his email:
Pluggio needs your help!
Are you (or someone you know) a blogger?
If so we would love it if you could blog/review Pluggio.
I've created a bloggers resource page with pics and videos: http://pluggio.com/bloggers
No worries if you're not interested or don't have time!
Thanks for reading :)
Cheers,
Justin
If you follow the provided link you will read that you could get a FREE 1 year account if your blog gets over 10k unique visitors/month. It could be interpreted like this: Don't bother to help if your blog gets 9999 unique visitors per month or less. My blog only gets about 100 UV's/month, not including my dad (Hi dad, you're always welcome, you know that). So, I shouldn't even bother to bother. My blog is practically invisible, so, whether I like or dislike Pluggio, hardly anyone would see it.
But besides the above threshold, I find it interesting that Justin makes this appeal at all. Maybe I have been moving in the wrong circles, but this hasn't happened to me before. I have accounts for many online services including several twitter clients (Seesmic, PeoplBrowser, ...), but none have ever requested this from me. As far as I am concerned, this is a unique request. I wonder what Justin is exactly after? He is reaching out to popular bloggers to write about Pluggio, so exposure must be a big part of it.
Justin, I hope your Pluggio will get the exposure increase you are after. I am giving you the exposure this post gets. If you're lucky, it'll hit 50 visits. At your service!
My TweetBox project hasn't seen much of my attention in these last few weeks. I have only done a few minor tweaks here and there. I am still struggling with performance issues. I have tried to speeds things up by moving some JavaFX code that was juggling blocks of memory to Java. I also replaced all my Vectors with HashSets to make looking up and sorting objects faster. According to the Netbeans Profiler, those measures have defintely improved things (it made some hotspots disappear), but the user experience is still the same: sluggishness.
I have also spread the retrieval of tweets from the Twitter API during start-up such that it no longer loads several streams in parallel, but one stream at a time. That did have a noticable effect. The application has become more responsive because of that.
The title sounds more official then I intend to, but I guess this what I should call it. I don't even have a versioning scheme for TweetBox. I still see it as a toy project. On the other hand, the TweetBox is taking nice shapes. Programming JavaFX turns out to be a lot of fun, and once you get the hang of it, it is pretty easy too. Imho, java developers now finally have a sophisticated GUI API that is productive (Swing is rather counter-productive, and that's coming from a faithfull fan) and easy to use. JavaFX still has quite a way to go before it becomes as sophisticated as Adobe Flex and AIR, but still. A big pro of JavaFX is that the syntax of the language allows you to build GUI's declaratively (just like Flex's MXML) and that it is very neat and clean. Compared with JavaFX, MXML is definitely more cumbersome.
You can download the binaries for TweetBox here. Simply unzip it somewhere and double click TweetBox.jar (or run "java -jar TweetBox.jar" on the command line). Mind you, it still misses lots of functions that we take so much for granted in tools such as Twhirl, such as sending updates, replies and direct messages, retweeting, following/unfollowing people, et cetera. I have now come to appreciate them even more.
For the time being, configuration of your twitter login credentials must be done through a properties file (here's an example), that you must place in your user home folder (you can figure out the location of that folder yourself, I just use the value of the java system property "user.home").
TweetBox sometimes crashes rather spectacularly every once in a while at startup. That has something to do with the fact that I am using a separate thread for invoking the Twitter API. Also, it is not yet getting your friend timeline at regular intervals. The button with the binoculars allows you to do a twitter search. It will only get 20 results, but it works.
I have only tested TweetBox on Vista, so let me know the results of using it on other platforms.
In short, TweetBox is unstable and misses lots of features, but admit it, the way it fades in on your desktop when you start the TweetBox, it's nice shapes and that you can see through it is awesomely cool.
I have received a few cheers (thanks Lee and Rick), so I continued my hobbying with JavaFX. I am now really getting the hang of JavaFX. This fall, version 1.0 of the JavaFX SDK will be released. I can't wait, because many things in the preview release that I currently using are a bit cumbersome.
It also misses some rather essential GUI building blocks, such as a scroll view. So, I had to build one myself (I used James Weaver's TableNode class as the basis). I also had to write a new Text node that can wrap text. I had to do some very ugly AWT tricks to pull that off.
The current application still is very dumb, but it works rather well. I will next have to implement some config screens and have the tweetbox get tweets at a configurable interval.
At some point, I think I will decide to make this all open source on code.google.com, so you can all look at the code and see how it is done.
In any case, here's a new screenshot (some of you should recognize the color scheme):
I am playing with the JavaFX Preview SDK to see what it does and feels like. I am using Netbeans 6.1. So far, I think I like it, although it takes some time to get used to the JavaFX syntax. It looks like java and underneath it is java, but you need a different mindset to use it. The preview SDK is missing several things as it seems. Maybe I am using the wrong distribution.
To teach myself JavaFX I needed a goal. Something simple and fun to build. I decided on a Twitter client. Using much of James Weaver's (check out his blog, it is worth your while if you want to learn JavaFX) example code, I have cobbled together a very crude Twitter thingy that can only read my own friend timeline (or the public timeline), but I have gotten this far without too much effort.
Here's a screenshot:
Of course, I will never finish it, because I perpetually lack time. Cheering me on might help.
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