On July 4th, I had the opportunity to help introduce TweetDeck to the blogosphere as a fully-featured Twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform, with Summize integration, and the option to show Tweets in multiple columns, including dedicated screen space for replies, and customizable grouping. While the Twitter client space has already seen good penetration by Twhirl, Feedalizer and others, TweetDeck has gained a strong following over the last ten days, with many testing, and a good number, including me, using it as our default interface to Twitter's microblogging platform.


Tweetip Shows the Boom in TweetDeck Use and Discussion
In fact, the blog Tweetip, which watches Twitter closely to capture inflection points of when one term or another rapidly changes on the service, captured the boom in TweetDeck commentary last week, showing how much more mindshare the application got following our first post. But just because a lot more people know about the service doesn't mean it has a free ticket to application stardom. I asked people on Twitter and FriendFeed yesterday if they had made the switch. (See the FriendFeed discussion)

For every "Yes, been using it since launch+1, and still using and loving it!" and "Yes... And yes. Like it a lot" I received, I also got a few responses like "No. uses too much real estate" or "Use tweetdeck but prefer twhirl because it gives me Friendfeed and multiple twitter user accounts at the same time."

While I like TweetDeck's ability to display in multiple columns as a full-screen application in the background, others prefer the single-column look of alternative applications. Also, over the last week-plus, I heard calls to separate Twitter replies from Twitter direct messages. And in both cases, developer Iain Dodsworth delivered. Both the single-window feature, as well as a single column for DMs are available in the latest beta.


TweetDeck Added Support for Direct Messages

TweetDeck Added Support for a Single Column View
With such a healthy debut, users are expecting TweetDeck to grow up and do even more, including incorporating FriendFeed streams, as Twhirl and other newcomers do. I don't know that Iain has these plans, but if he did, the crowd which uses both might find the service even more intriguing. I'm also curious to see if TweetDeck would make any sense in an interface like the iPhone. With Twitterific debuting on the iPhone and iPod Touch on day one, it will be hard for competitors to make headway, especially those that use the AIR platform.

TweetDeck is in public beta, and can be found here: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/. Other reviews so far of TweetDeck include those from ReadWriteWeb, /Message and The Download Squad.

Apple takes great pride in the fact the company controls both the hardware and operating system for its Macintosh line of computers. In theory, this tight-fisted control can lead to higher product quality and an improved user experience. But as Cupertino expands its array of software titles from the desktop to the iPhone platform, independent developers are feeling the squeeze that comes when competing with the hometown team.

Yesterday night, just a weekend after Apple unveiled the AppStore for iPhone and iPod Touch, I got an e-mail from Kevin O'Neil of Candywriter.com, the creator of Imagine Poker, a Texas Hold 'Em game for the Macintosh. O'Neill wrote with excitement that the application had now also been released for the iPod Touch and iPhone platform for all of $4.99. But included in the good news was a foreboding note:

"When the App Store opened last week, it was revealed that Imagine Poker's rival Texas Hold 'Em game on the iPhone was actually created by Apple itself. We encourage you to check out their version of the game too (you can't miss it) but, as an independent developer, we hope you can come to appreciate the same solid game-play and sense of humor in Imagine Poker Touch that has made Imagine Poker Mac a success."

You can read between the lines and see the worry the small independent developer has with facing the Apple machine, just like Karelia Software saw when Apple introduced iWeb in parallel with their development of Sandvox, and of course, famously, when Apple embedded capabilities in Sherlock that closely mimicked their desktop search engine, Watson.

Microsoft got in all sorts of hot water when they embedded Internet Explorer in Windows, and forced third party hardware manufacturers to include the browser as part of their package, or face de-licensing. Apple, enjoying its minority position in just about all markets, has not always faced such scrutiny, even as they rolled out Apple Mail (eliminating the need for Eudora and Entourage), Safari (as IE languished), and an array of productivity offerings for free, including Preview (versus Adobe Acrobat), iCal and iPhoto. While the iPhone doesn't share the market position Windows does, it is taking an increasing share of the pie from Windows Mobile and Blackberry, and there could come a time when Apple's embedded apps or competitive apps gain more scrutiny than they do today.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Profy has discussed the seeming non-balance she's already seen at the AppStore in a pair of posts: iPhone App Store: Eliminating the Competition and Advantage App Store: Two Paths to iPhone User Adoption. As she writes, "People are generally lazy, and will opt for the easiest and most convenient choice." For Candywriter.com, the easiest choice for customers just might be to keep Apple's Texas Hold 'Em game, and not seek out Imagine Poker, and this just might be the tip of the iceberg. If a small developer believes Apple will crowd them out of the market, then why try?

As for me, I did buy Imagine Poker. It's been a fun game on the Mac, and I'm looking forward to wasting more time with it on my iPod Touch.

Do you know any other third-party application developers on the iPhone who are now feeling the heat from Apple?

Whether Web services leverage RSS, send e-mail confirmations or are indexed by keywords in specialized search engines, it's not too uncommon for any activity you make online to set off a series of actions. When taken out of context, something you said in one place won't make as much sense somewhere else. A sentence fragment or a response might be completely confusing to one audience or at a certain time. With this in mind, best practices would suggest writing in full sentences where possible, and offering context.

Two Examples:

Sending replies in Twitter

Often, I will be following "Person A" and they will be following "Person B", but I won't be. If Person A sends a note to Person B, Twitter may often catch that as a reply, and clicking through the "in reply to" link will give you Twitter's best guess as to what Person A was responding to. But this doesn't always work.

Here's how it often happens:

Tweet 1: Person B: "@persona, are you up for seeing Wall-E at the Metreon?"
Tweet 2: Person B: "AFK for 15 minutes, got to get dog food."
Tweet 3: Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go. See you at six."

To the Twitter user following Person A, clicking the "in reply to" would make it sound like the pair were off to consume some Kibbles 'N' Bits, as Twitter usually grabs the latest tweet from the person to whom the tweet was sent as the message.

What would have been better is if that 3rd Tweet had read:

Person A: "@personb, I'd love to go see Wall-E. The movie sounds great. I'll see you at six."

Now, if I'm following only half the conversation, I get the idea, even without having to click through, and I won't think you are a huge Alpo fan.

Also, Tweets are read in more places than just Twitter these days. If I had set up a Summize search for "Wall-E", I would have seen Person B's initial tweet, but not the second one, from Person A, unless they put Wall-E in the response. And if I were following Person A on FriendFeed, the tweet with details would make a lot more sense, when jumbled in the rest of their activity.

The idea of writing in full sentences or giving context is to understand the audience for your messages is larger than you realize, and you should write for the followers on the periphery.

Making comments using Disqus

When I make a comment in Disqus, at least five things can happen:

• A comment is added to the originating blog.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the blog owner saying a new comment has published.
  
• An e-mail can be sent to the person I am replying to if I am in a thread.
  
• A copy of that Disqus comment is added to my personal Disqus page.
  
• The full copy of that comment goes to aggregators like FriendFeed, Profilactic and SocialThing.

Because the Disqus comments can go in so many places, it is especially important to try and highlight the name of the person I am responding to, give context to the reply and to write in full sentences. This way, the comment, wherever it may be seen, can make sense. When I make a comment in Disqus, I am thinking about the fact it's not just publishing to the blog author and commenter, but to those people who have not yet been part of the conversation. This you can see from my Disqus stream on FriendFeed or my profile on Disqus.

For a good idea of how the world uses Disqus, check FriendFeed's public stream of Disqus comments:

Here's one that has no context:

Svartling:"No sorry. But you can look here: Link"

Here's one that works well:

Svetlana Gladkova: "Very true Shey, I have seen it pretty often that a post from Profy receives, say, 30 likes on FriendFeed and a dozen of comments, and our server stats only shows a dozen of people actually visiting the post to read it and leave a comment on FF (if that is the place they prefer to leave comments). It is annoying when I realize that people only use FF to create some presence for themselves by liking and commenting titles instead of actually consuming the content they pretend to like - I think it is even worse than fragmentation of comments that FF initiates."

As aggregators play an increasing role in how we gather information on the Web, it's now possible for our comments on Digg, StumbleUpon and Google Reader shared items, as well as those from other services, to become part of our lifestream. In addition to Twitter and Disqus, two of the major examples, we should know that every time we say "LOL! I totally agree!" when we could have said, "Wow, thanks for sending me to this YouTube video of Conan O'Brien's Friday monologue. You're right, John McCain is old!", you're losing the opportunity for readers who find you in a different place to be part of the conversation.

Much of the time, one-sided conversations without context are called noise. You can actually reduce noise through carefully crafting the signal around the noise. It takes a little bit extra work, but it's well worth it.

Guest Post By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (E-mail / Twitter)

There's a battle brewing, and it's between SEO advocates and content creators who prefer a more organic growth to their sites. On the one side are the SEO abusers who litter poorly written content with an oversaturation of keywords, making content unreadable, and on the other are those who pay no attention to keywords, don't realize that you can add the Page Rank indicator to the Google Toolbar to check the rank of an individual page, and write whatever they want, with no thought to subject focus or search results at all.

There is, however, a fine balance that can be struck between the two sides, and that balance can be achieved with a focus on the reader rather than on the stats. If I had my way, I'd write whatever I wanted with no thought to the dreaded search engines, but if I did that, I probably wouldn't get paid for my work, so I try to keep a constant eye on that balance.

Much like advertising, overuse of SEO techniques is becoming an annoyance to readers, and if someone were to develop a plug-in like AdBlock Plus that could filter out content that was oversaturated with keywords and internal links, people would download it by the thousands, if not millions.

Still not sure what I'm talking about? Let's take a look at this Mahalo page for a spoof video. You'll notice that in a 68-word Guide Note, there are 13 internal links to other Mahalo pages. Some links are split across lines, making it look like even more. While it may look good to a search engine spider, it looks unreadable to the casual visitor. How many users will actually click those links to find more information? How many will instead click out of the page and move onto something more user-friendly?

Walking the balance beam when it comes to SEO involves a common sense approach: keeping the keyword in the URL, title, and text, but not beating the reader over the head with it just to make it more obvious to the search engine spiders. And sure, offer an internal link for something that the reader may want to see for additional information, but don't link to every single possible page on your site in an attempt to plump up your page rank and search engine appearance. Your readers will thank you, and hopefully, send others.