If you fully realize the value of social media, then you're constantly trying to parse, scrub, clean and otherwise organize your Twitter account. It's a never-ending battle and often a steep, uphill one at that, but Tweepi can shift your effort into high gear - the geeky way.

Tweepi lets you know right off the bat that it may not be pretty and, as its tag line says, it's still "very much a beta", but boy does it do everything we have spent way too much time trying to do with other desktop clients and the Twitter website itself.

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The "geekier, faster way to manage Twitter", as it calls itself, offers four separate utilities, all of them "Geeky": Follow, Flush, Reciprocate and Cleanup.

We tried out the Seesmic Web contact manager recently and, while we were impressed by it, this might win just by the sheer number of times the word "geeky" appears on the site. Tweepi is like taking all of your Twitter friends, importing them in and a whole slew of stats about how they use Twitter into Excel, and then incorporating interactivity.

We may not agree with all of the functions of Tweepi, but to each their own. "Flush", for example, gets rid of users you follow who don't follow you back. Depending on what you're using Twitter for, this may be useless. If you're looking for informati/> [...]

Thu Feb 25, 2010 13:45 pm

The post-relational document database CouchDB reached its milestone 1.0 release today. Couchio, the corporate sponsor of the free open-source project, boasts that speeds in the new release are up 300% over version 0.11.0.

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In addition to the speed increase, Couchio cites the following new features:

• Microsoft Windows support
• Authentication system - write CouchApps without having to create a user model
• Replicator options - flexibility to use replication to build custom systems

The authentication system, which will make development easier, is probably the most significant of these features.

We covered the NoSQL last year in our article Is the Relational Database Doomed? Certain web applications, such as web based instant messaging, have scalability needs that push the limits of existing SQL solutions, so NoSQL solutions like CouchDB have emerged. CouchDB has powered the web based IM client Meebo since 2008, according to Couchio. According to software architect Enda Farrell, the BBC is building a content management system using CouchDB.

Another advantage to using CouchDB is offline access. CouchDB is designed for disconnected use, meaning it could be used to make web apps usable offline and have them sync with a database server while online. /> [...]

Wed Jul 14, 2010 07:21 am

Bill Slawski provides some interesting insight into a Yahoo! patent regarding taxonomies of information for the purpose of answering search queries directly. This begs the question, How would that change SEO? Bill asks the question this way

If you’re a site owner, would it bother you that a search engine might mine your web site to display answers and potentially keep visitors from coming directly to your web site for those answers?

The best search engine optimization people, marketers and webmasters are capable of great flexibility. Whenever a new search engine tactic appears or the search engines change their algorithms in a noticeable way, those webmasters who are observant adapt their content development tactics in response to take advantage of the changes. The result usually is a few webmasters gaining an early advantage with others following and a great Internet-wide conversation coming after. Before you know it, there’s a best practices discussion going on around those changes. What would happen if search engines routinely answered searcher queries directly? Would SEOs and webmasters design their web pages and write their content in such a way that they might gain the advantage in having their site provide that answer? I think so. But how would that play out?

In the Babe Ruth example that Bill Slawski provides, the answer to the search query at both Google and Yahoo! is linked to the web page from which that answer is extracted. But why that specific web page? Bill alludes to a few attributes of a web page that might be selected:

• Source could be “editor” selected, presuming a human bias
• Large traffic volumes
• [...]
  
  Tue Nov 17, 2009 04:10 am

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  Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More...
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  Our number one post this week was that Twitter's archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There's got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you'll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter's past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more.

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  Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress

  
  • Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress
  • Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking
  • 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon
  • Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd
  • Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook
  • [...]
    
    Sat Apr 17, 2010 05:50 am

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