How many times have you logged on to Twitter and seen somebody note in a tweet: "OH", standing for "Overheard"? Some of these "Overheard"s are a doozy. But with Twitter's ephemeral nature, they fade as time moves on. Now, there's a site that aims to capture all the top quotes, both from the world of history, but also the world of the present, online in one place - called Qwotebook. The new site lets you "Qwote" your friends, attribute "Qwotes" to them and even provide context. The result is a fun site that acts as a quote book for the Web.

Drew Olanoff, an oft-quoted friend of mine, and brains behind the site, says, "I'm passionate about quotes." And one can see why from looking at the earliest aspects of the site. Coupled with top excerpts from friends in the social landscape, you can see quotes from famous people including Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama and others. The result is an insightful mix of funny sayings and overheards intermingled with advice, friendly comments and observations.

With a goal of "Making Quotes More Social", Qwotebook is all about quotes submitted by its users. Submitted Qwotes are displayed with the most recent chronologically on top, as with many social sites, and each quote displays the user who submitted the entry and the user who said it. If the user doesn't yet exist, Qwotebook will make a page for that person. (As I did when I added a quote from Ronald Reagan last night)


If a quote has context, only mutual friends who are connected can see the context of the qwote, allowing for some privacy.

Over time, as your qwotes build up, your profile displays not just the qwotes you have entered for others, but also those that are attributed to you. You can "Favorite" some quotes by clicking the star to the left of the quote, and these will be displayed on your profile under your favorites tab.


Drew is not rolling this out as a one-man project. A duo of developers from the site I Heart Movies are the coders behind the scenes making everything work, and they recognize there are a number of features they want to add to the site over time. I have already seen opportunities where I would want to make a comment to a quote and explain what it means to me, or even provide some feedback. I can see situations where somebody qwoted could reject a qwote outright and say they never said such a thing, or maybe, like other sites, you would want to hide all updates from a specific user (like Einstein, for instance). But for a gen-one site, Qwotebook makes sense and could be a lot of fun. So go sign up and get to qwoting.

There are a number of invites with the code of "louisgray". Go to http://www.qwotebook.com and get started.

Over the last few years, I have enjoyed watching new sites spring up built around conversations and social engagement. These new social networks, be they about friends (Facebook), business colleagues (LinkedIn or Brazen Careerist), shared interests (MyLikes), shared items (Google Buzz and FriendFeed) or even shared purchases (Blippy), are primarily architected around posted items, and various groupings of gestures (likes) and comments. Practically all of the best sites are now following this model to varying degrees. But some are doing a better job than others of alerting you to your being mentioned or pulling new voices into the conversation. I believe that we are on the cusp of even better improvements to connect people across the Web, no matter where they are.

Take, for example, a basic share on Facebook. Today, when a shared item is added to Facebook, you can add a person's name to the item through their own twist on the familiar Twitter address of an "@reply". You can also tag photos or notes with people's IDs and they will be alerted, either by e-mail, or in their message box.


That's a great addition. But if I am making a comment on this entry, I can't refer to anybody in the same way (an @reply), and nor can anybody else. This is the same issue on FriendFeed, where I can copy a connected friend on a native entry, but can't do any kind of @reply to add them after the fact, nor can anybody else.


Two sites that do this very well are Google Buzz and Blippy.

Google Buzz has it set up so you can notify somebody they are being talked about by adding the @ symbol ahead of their e-mail address. For example, you can tag me by writing @[email protected] in the middle of any thread, and it will resolve to something that looks like @Louis Gray. The catch here is that you need to know the individual's e-mail address, have previously messaged them before through GMail, or you have to open up the person's Google Profile and use their username ahead of Gmail.com to get it right. It absolutely works, but is clunky, with too many steps.


Blippy's is the very best I've seen so far. Forget about e-mail addresses. If you want to reference another Blippy user, just enter @ and their ID, and a link is added to their profile. For me, as usual, that's just an @louisgray away. I will get notified you mention me, and no doubt, jump into the conversation, or at least see what you were saying. I used that just today to pull Jason Shellen of Thing Labs into a conversation on Brizzly, and in minutes, he was there.


By using this kind of @reply functionality, it takes out some of the guesswork and overdone ego-searching and vanity-searching from network to network. Just as Twitter has integrated mentions as part of their service, this mention functionality is becoming part of how we communicate - and I think we're about to see this taken up a notch thanks to two movements - one being WebFinger and the second being Twitter's @anywhere platform, even if it's not the goal right away for the latter service.

WebFinger is essentially supposed to leverage your e-mail address to aid in providing one true identity that is yours, across the Web. Google Buzz leverages WebFinger to tie back your mentions to your GMail account. If more services were to leverage WebFinger, I could tag your "true identity" in a comment, a blog post, a tweet, a photo, or practically anything else, and there would be no ambiguity in terms of whether I meant you or another person with your name (just like the easy confusion between Louis Gray, tech geek blogger and Louis Gray, Osage Indian senator). The open standard, being promoted by Google engineers, and some others, leverages public profile data to be made complete.

Meanwhile, Twitter's @Anywhere platform is looking to put a thin skin of Twitter on top of some major partner sites, at least at first, letting you follow people from 3rd party sites or let you perform Twitter-related actions outside of Twitter.com. I can see a future where this functionality could in theory be embedded as part of major Web browsers, or via plugins, or on enough sites whereby my mentioning of @ and then your Twitter ID would tie back to your Twitter account. Once that gets turned on, you can forget about just counting @replies and @mentions on Twitter.com, and you would instead get, for example, 2 @mentions from ESPN.com, 3 @mentions from The Huffington Post and 1 @mention on TechCrunch. At this point, Twitter's @anywhere could become the @mention and @reply engine for entire Web.

Any good social media maven knows the best ways to search for their own mentions and see if people are talking about them or linking to their content across the Web. I get real-time notifications if I get mentioned on BackType, and I use IceRocket to see links from around the Web or mentions on Twitter. Google News and Blog alerts still work, even if they seem stale. And yes, Technorati is still alive. But if more sites leveraged the kind of @mention and @reply functionality in a great way, as Blippy and Buzz are starting, and Twitter and WebFinger are promising, we could have an even better, more connected, more participatory Web without demanding constant searching. I'm ready.

Are you ready to see this work, @chrismessina @dewitt @ev @biz @scobleizer @parislemon @kevinrose @paultoo @btaylor @finkd @elatable @daveman692 and @pud?

If the runaway success of the iTunes App store has been any indication, Apple is getting ready for an onslaught of new and refined applications from its growing hoard of developers as they jockey for position on what's possibly another big hit - the iPad. Today, Apple sent a note to developers saying they could be included as part of the "iPad App Store", as it is being called, on its grand opening, so long as they submit their app by March 27th, or this upcoming Saturday. The initial apps will be reviewed by Cupertino's App Review Team, who will judge their readiness for the day of unveiling.

Preliminary estimates have said Apple has already sold hundreds of thousands of iPads to eagerly awaiting customers, the vast majority of whom have never seen, let alone touched an iPad, but recognize its significant potential for casual computing and content consumption. Developers, keen not to miss out on what could be Steve Jobs' latest hit, following the iPhone, iPod, iTunes, iMac, and many others in his ten-plus years in his second go at leading the company, are likely salivating at the expanded real estate available on an iPad, when compared to the iPhone, and wouldn't mind becoming one of the many coders who have found financial success through the iTunes store.

Apple's note, sent to iPhone Developer Program members, advises developers to build and test their iPad app using the latest iPhone SDK: 3.2, beta 5, and says only those that use the latest version will be accepted. The app then needs to be submitted through iTunes Connect by 5 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday, March 27th, following which the App Review Team, no doubt under some amount of stress, will e-mail details about your app readiness, and provide feedback on what is needed for final review before the iPad ships.

If developers miss this March 27th date, they will not be considered for the grand opening of the iPad App Store, Apple warns. So if you know an iPhone developer who is looking to hit the iPad on day one, leave them alone for the next week. They've got some work to do.

On Tuesday, Twitter added computer security veteran Bob Lord to the company's expanding employee roster as the manager of network and infrastructure security, bringing with him 20 years of experience focused on electronic security systems at large companies, most recently including Red Hat, AOL and Netscape. Highlights in Lord's background include his building security and encryption features into the Netscape browser, iPlanet servers (an alliance with Sun and Netscape) and the AOL Communicator product, which also included Mail, Address Book, Instant Messenger and Calendar. Since leaving AOL, Bob has worked with a team of cryptography experts to add security features to many projects including FireFox, Mozilla Thunderbird and Red Hat Linux.

Bob's LinkedIn profile shows praise from colleagues who gave him credit for ensuring successful releases of complex application suites at AOL, as well as his being recognized as a "visionary" with energy and intensity, while at RedHat. Bob is also a patent-holder for his development of temporary digital certificate proxies that can be used for a specific amount of time.


As Twitter's Web site and activity become more critical in the way the planet is communicating, so to will its need increase for security to protect that which is private to remain private, and enable accounts to be secured. It's also not unexpected that the company's core offerings will get increasingly complex - maybe not to the level of AOL Communicator, but expanding nonetheless.

We should be seeing what Bob will be bringing to the Twitter team over the next few years, or just keep tabs on his updates at @boblord.