I am soooo sorry…

Lets find some slides on Microblogging, some videos and some examples. When I tell people about microblogging (or as some people call it “twitter“) they look at me like “what a freak!”. But let me try to explain why microblogging is realy something new and different from chat, blogs or SMS. First of all lets have a look on Slideshare what presentations are available on this topic.

Slides

There is one very good one in german language:

And one in english with the basic facts:

Videos

Twitter in plain english

Twitter in pain german

The Bleeper Movie – MyVideo

Some Twitters:

IBM

http://twitter.com/IBM_System_z
http://twitter.com/sametime
http://twitter.com/ibmevents

Conferences

http://twitter.com/w2e_NY08

Election and Twitter

http://election.twitter.com
http://twitter.com/BarackObama
http://twitter.com/JohnMcCain

German politicans

http://twitter.com/muentefering
http://twitter.com/hubertus_heil
http://twitter.com/neuepolitik
http://twitter.com/diegruenen_at
http://twitter.com/pofalla

Satire

http://twitter.com/schaeuble
http://twitter.com/rolandkoch
http://twitter.com/merkel

Last weekend on the Barcamp in Stuttgart (#bc0711) I learned more about OpenStreetMap. Extreme impressing! What I really liked was the tremendous power of communities. Peter gave a very good presentation on Openstreetmap.

Presentation:

Here are the live examples:

Buenos Aires

Google:

Größere Kartenansicht

OpenStreetMap:

View Larger Map

Hanoi:

Google:

Größere Kartenansicht

OpenStreepMap:

View Larger Map

Kapstadt:

Google:

Größere Kartenansicht

OpenStreetMap:

View Larger Map

Twitter has a cool API wich we can use legally. The xml list of users you follow can be retrieved with

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends/USERNAME.xml?lite=true&page=1..n (for me its ansi)

Having at the moment 112 user I follow (yesterday more then 160. ) page 1 and 2 are all my guys.

This small xsl stylesheet extracts the userids. (if anyone is into xsl please help me here. Would be great to extract username, realname and user with comma separated per line. Please add comments if you know the solution, I appreciate it!)

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
 <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

 <xsl:template match="/users/user">
     <xsl:for-each select="id">
      <xsl:value-of select="." />
      <xsl:text>&#10;</xsl:text>
     </xsl:for-each>
 </xsl:template>

Save this code snip to a file called extractIDs.xslt and call it with the processor:

xsltproc extractIDs.xslt friendsPage1.xml  | sed 1d >list_of_ids.txt

xsltproc extractIDs.xslt friendsPage2.xml  | sed 1d >>list_of_ids.txt

So now next step howto get the rss feeds out of it. The API offers this call

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/USERID.atom

Short bashscript like

 for i in `cat list_of_ids.txt`

 do

  echo "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$i.atom" >>list_of_rrs_feeds.txt

 done

is doing the job. So we end up with a text file each line with one RSS feed. I totally agree its much easier at the moment to call the “user and friend” rss feed from twitter but the idea behind this is to get a list of each user so future systems can really be distributed among many microblogging systems.

One of the best Videos for explaining the shift is from the “Did you know” or “Shift Happens” page from Karl Fisch. More information you can find here.