Looking for The Next Cool Thing After Twitter

I have stopped tweeting. Ok not totally stopped, but the frequency in which I tweet now has drastically reduced. And it is not as if I would be deleting my twitter account soon to never tweet again, it is just that...well...Twitter to me doesn’t feel cool anymore...like it used to be in those early days.

This is my present sentiment or Phase, regarding twitter.

And to appreciate my sentiment you might need to understand where I am coming from and how I got started with twitter and the prior phases I have gone through.

I got on twitter 2007. Sure, i was an early adopter. Back then the user base of twitter was still in the thousands. It was around 400,000 to 500,000. Compared to the whopping 145 Million plus user base the service now enjoys. It was Tim Akinbo that brought twitter to my attention and the reason why I got on board was simple: It was just the latest geeky thing to play around with. It was fun and elitist in a sort of way.

So here i am now, some couple of years down the line, and twitter is feeling noisy. But before getting to this present state, I have actually gone through other phases in time past, using twitter. Let me outline:

The WOW Phase. The Really Really WOW Phase:
In the early days of twitter, If you are following someone and they tweet, you get their tweet sent, free of charge, to your phone as SMS. Yeah right. That was back then. A lot of folks do not know this, but that made twitter really really cool for me. I remembered vividly, taking a bike from INTECU to Fajuyi Hall and my phone was abuzz with SMS all from tweets I was getting from following CNN, BBC etc on twitter. I felt connected to the world. But then twitter started growing; growing to that level where sending free SMS was not sustainable. So they pull the plugged on it and all of a sudden it became...well a little less useful. Because having to browse to twitter.com every time to read my tweets felt unnatural. So I eased off twitter.

The Third Party Application Phase
Then I discovered the Firefox pluggin: Twitterfox, which has since been renamed to Echofon. It marked a twitter revival for me.  Like I said in my previous post, the very nature of twitter makes accessing it via the website a little awkward and unnatural. Consuming twitter requires a non intrusive user notification paradigm. and that was exactly what the Firefox Plugin provided.

With this firefox plugin, my usage of twitter soared. But then again, this particular phase had it own limitations: which was the fact that I had to be seated by my PC, connected to the internet before I can use Twitter.

Mobile Internet Phase
Then I got on mobile internet and my usage of twitter just sky rocketed; It just went off the roof. Having twitter right there in my palms made it possible for me to consume and create tweets just anywhere and at anytime. I was abreast of all happening in the tech community. I had access to useful tips and pointers to resources thanks to the community of twitter following I had. It was cool, really cool. But it did not last forever. I was pushed unto the next phase:

The Crowded and Noisy Phase
Then all of a sudden twitter became noisy and crowded. I think this was due to the fact that a lot of regular Joe started getting bored with facebook and unfortunately twitter was getting a lot of mention in mainstream media, so the natural thing started happening: folks started flocking to twitter.

The other thing that happened, i think, that led to twitter growing to become crowded was that “Who to  Follow” feature twitter incorporated. It was just like the “Suggested friends” feature in facebook. All of a sudden a lot of folks I know started following me...and I started following back...and before I knew it, my timeline...well... became unrecognizable!

I hardly get to catch @takinbo or @dfasoro’s tweets. Or @budzeg tips on security. I follow @jeresig and @gvanrossum but I can’t remember the last time I caught their tweets.

Why? Because all of these useful tweets are now getting swamped and buried in the slew of RT’s RETWEETS and mentions of folks who have taken the liberty to use my timeline as the medium for their conversation; conversations I have no iota of interest in.

O! how I missed the useful tips and pointers to useful resources on mobile dev and UI design @barbietunnie shares. How I missed Guy kawasaki funny and sometimes out rightly useless tweets via @alltop not to talk about @jason. @mashable used to be one of my favorite pointers to interesting articles and resources, but not anymore.

So right now am in that phase where I spend little time on twitter because it just feels too noisy. I have been thinking of things I could do:

1. Create another account which would solely be used to consume tweets I consider useful. But then again, I don’t really like the idea of managing multiple accounts so I really don’t see myself going down that lane.
2. Start unfollowing people.
3. Create a list of followers whose tweets am interested in.
4. Or just go find/create the next cool and geeky thing to play with.

One of my girlfriends commented on the fact that I am no longer active on tweeter: my response? I told her it stopped being fun. That it feels as if every tom dick and harry is now on twitter, and that it has stopped being cool and geeky, like it used to be.

Or well, maybe it’s because I’ve just got geek coy? Whatever!  Twitter just feels *arrrghh* right now, and i am just on the look out for that next cool thing to play with, together with my techhead pals.

My Presentation at WordCamp Nigeria 2010

I am pro wordpress but not the kind to consider the usage of any other content management system as sacrilegious. If I have to handle a project in say Joomla, Plone or Drupal I would gladly dig into it. In fact I have had some couple of dint with Drupal and I think it is very powerful, but all the same wordpress still remain my personal favourite.

And the reason is not farfetched. I personal find wordpress fun to work with, it is intuitive, it is simple yet powerful and it is easy to tweak, bend over, and extend.

And these were the exact things I talked about during my presentation at the first ever wordcamp that held in Lagos a couple of months back. Apart from introducing wordpress and the concept of wordpress being more than a blogging system, my talk also did a great deal in communicating the fact that wordpress is quite powerful, yet simple and a joy to work with.

Here is my presentation

Wordcampnigeria from Aderemi Dadepo

View more presentations from Aderemi Dadepo.


And if you are considering digging into wordpress, there is no other resource I can recommend than the official wordpress codex. It is an exhaustive resource, and a very handy reference. And it is just as simple to use: but then again am not surprised: it is wordpress!

Setting Up Code Completion on Komodo Edit for Google App Engine

I have been using Komodo Edit as my main code editor for over 2 years now. And it works for me! :) It gives me just want I need in a code editor. Basic Debugging, Project management, intellisense etc.

In fact the code-completion was one of the sterling features that made me pick Komodo Edit and drop my previous editor. That and the facts that it is free and Open Source.

As regards Code Completion, it supports a varied number of languages. From C#, Matlab, C++ to haskel, ada, lisp, tcl and Django, Ruby...Just name it! Even our dear fortran is supported.And adding support for languages that don’t come by default is a breeze.

So recently, when I started working with Google App Engine, one of the first things I did was to configure Code Completion for GAE on Komodo Edit. And it was very easy getting Komodo Edit to provide just the code completion I need to get comfortable with the WEBAPP framework.

Find below the simple procedures to follow to set up Komodo Edit to work with GAE.

Click Edit > Preference
From the dialog box that pops up on the left collapse the Language link and Click on Python:

Under the Additional Python Import Directories you can add additional path you would want Komodo Edit to pass to the Python Interpreter.

To Integrate Google App Engine, browse to the directory where the GAE SDK is installed and add the PATH.

And that is all! You are done! It is as simple as that. Code Completion should now work.

So there you have it. And if you are interested in trying out Komodo Edit, you can read more and download it from the official site

Firefox meets Myaiesec.net!

Last two weeks saw me visiting Benin (Edo state), For an AIESEC conference: (AIESEC National Training Seminar), where i was opportune to be part of the conference facilitating team. Trust me, as a Mozilla Firefox campus representative, i found a way of making sure i evangelized Firefox during the course of the conference. Apart from spotting my cool firefox T-shirt, talking to delegates about the cool features of Firefox, i was also able to address the delegates (albeit short it was) on the general features of Firefox and how, using Persona plug-in, a branding campaign for Myaiesec.net could be carried out...

Find below the slides for the presentation


And for the Persona i designed around myaiesec.net, do pick it up here. If you hap. to be an aiesecer and you are reading this, make sure you get your myaiesec.net persona!

Getting Twitter!

In Recent times, Twitter has been enjoying massive adoption.It has moved from a service that appeals to only geeks; the early adopters to one that celebrities now flock to. People are signing up in multitudes. Between Feb 2008 and Feb 2009, twitter grew by 1,382%. Presently its user base exceeds 10 million.

But despite this huge adoption of twitter, a whole lot of people still don’t get it. A lot of people don’t see the utility in the service and they wonder why the Buzz. And this is why we have a lot of people signing up on twitter only to abandon the site after a sparing interaction with it. There are quite a lot of dormant accounts on twitter; according to Neilson Online More than 60% of Twitter users stop using the site one month after signing up for the service. Even amongst my circle of influence, I see this trend. I know an ample amount of people who get on twitter, wonder what the big deal is, leave a couple of tweets and then just abandon the site for the next couple of months.

The issue is that Twitter is so d*mn easy to sign up for but far much harder to figure out what to do on it and how to get benefits from it. It is in the figuring out “the benefits” which is seemingly not that apparent, that a lot of people miss it. I will quickly outline why I think this is so.

It Starts from having the right expectations!
Getting twitter starts from knowing what twitter is not. Twitter is not a social networking utility. A lot of people brand Twitter as a social networking site, but that is not the case. And this is where the problem starts. We have people moving to twitter with the expectation of getting the social networking experience sites like facebook,hi5 or MySpace provides but only to be disoriented when all they see is a “what are you doing” sign, with a slew of twitter lingo: hash tags, @ replies and shortened urls.

An analyst once described twitter as “a broadcast medium rather than a [medium for] intimate conversation with friends”.

I know folks who wouldn’t have taken interest in Twitter if not for the fact that access to Facebook has been blocked during office hours. So they move on to twitter expecting the same user experience they get from Facebook...

But Twitter is not a Social Networking Utility!

Then who do you follow on Twitter.
The quality of utility you derive on twitter is directly related to the quality of tweets of your twitter following. A lot of people have express sentiments similar to this:

“I don’t care that someone is going to take a shower, eat a sandwich, or go workout. That doesn’t make a difference in my life. Twitter is just a time waster”

Well, what are you doing following folks who only tweets about eating amala for breakfast? And what happened to following “stock quotes, project status, thought leaders, breaking news etc”

For example, my interest tilts more in the direction of technology, so if you check out my followings on twitter, you will see it is made up of people who largely tweet around technology. This is where I get to discover new tools, read interesting articles and generally stay on top of what is going on where technology is concerned. As previously describe: Twitter is more of a Broadcasting medium, so if I want to enjoy it, I tune my receiver to channels that broadcast contents that interests me. That is, I follow folks whose tweets, I find useful.

So you want more utility from twitter? Cut off the noise, find folks who tweet on issues that interest you and start following them.

How do you Access Twitter
I would say this factor is the most important factor in determining the level of usefulness one derives from twitter. It might sound kinda strange, but pointing your browser to http://www.twitter.com is not the best way to consume twitter. (But sadly, this is the first way starters get to interact with the site) But when a little thought is put into it, then it becomes obvious that using the web is not the optimal way of accessing Twitter. To enjoy twitter, I would, instead, advise the usage of third party applications.

The thing is this; the very nature of a service would dictate the way it is best consumed. Twitter by its very nature which is centered on tweets, calls for a non intrusive user notification paradigm.

Compare the ease between having to go to www.twitter.com every now and then in other to see your tweets, to having a third party application do the checking for you.

So I’ll say, sign up on twitter and then go find one of these third party applications. Since I am a die-hard fan of Firefox, I have found TwitterFox as my Twitter client of choice. It is a Firefox extension that brings my tweets to me via Firefox as I surf the web, meaning I can go ahead with being busy on the web, doing other things and on having new tweets, I get to see it via a pop up; very non intrusive.



And whenever I have a thought I want to tweet, doing so is as easy as clicking on the Twitterfox icon to start tweeting away...






You can also find other interesting ideas on how to utilize twitter, here, here and here, but it all starts with having the right expectation of twitter, follow people with quality tweets, and start using TwitterFox.(or any other third party client for twitter) ;)

Your Codes Shall Live After you...

Prior to now, I have never worked in an environment where I had to inherit a code base to work with (well except those times I have had to peek under the hood of some open source codes I needed to tweak) It is either I write the needed codes myself or I do.

But recently that I just got a job where I get paid to play around with computers, the internet and write codes, sooner or later I know I am going to be confronted with that situation; To build on codes whose original authors have long left the company and are nowhere to be found. It is not as if am that concerned about this happening, guess am more preoccupied with the thought of the quality of codes I will be giving up for inheritance when I finally take my leave from the company.

Am presently working on a project where I am building, more or less, from scratch and with every line of code I write, that thought keeps hounding me.

Guess the saying: the good evil deed men do shall live after them, is also true for you as a developer. Your codes too shall leave after you. And I don’t think I would want to leave behind an arcane legacy :) so to prevent this from happening I went ahead and got myself a book on how to write quality and manageable codes. A pretty nice book on software development I’ll say.

But then again when it comes to coding style, it’s worth stressing that its sorta like Religion where you can’t claim that a particular method is the way: the most efficient. But the trick is to come up with a style based on some fundamental guidelines and adhere to it. It’s about maintaining consistency. Whichever style you decide to adopt the key is to stick to it and maintain it across board.

So guess am doing my bit in ensuring the quality of codes out there, I can only ask of you the same. Do find the following online articles on the topic helpful, like I did. They are PHP centric ;)

An article from devshed, tim kadlec on the 5s, and Reinhold Weber's tips

Sell Benefits Not Features…

The aim of any marketing efforts is to elicit an action and in most cases it’s to make potential customers make a buying decision. If people don’t take that action of buying then we can conclude that all our marketing hasn’t achieve its objectives.

When dealing with high tech products or services, similar goal is expected: make someone pay for your software or get someone to subscribe to use your web app. As a marketer, this involves coming up with ways to ensure that the marketing decision made by your potential customers favor your product or services.

Its all about coaxing or convincing and in high tech marketing it is not uncommon to see marketers listing features their software comes loaded with in other to coax customers to make a buying decision that will favors their offerings.

But going in the direction of features listing might not be quite a productive strategy, especially for services like software. Ideally the logic behind feature touting goes somewhat like this: “List the features, let the customers know all the cool features they will be buying so that they will know the benefits they will enjoy and how our software will help solve their problems”.

Well it so happens that things don’t normally play out that way. Customers might not necessary see the benefits, straightway from your litany of features. And this is why playing it strong on the feature listing side might not be that effective. Instead of feature touting, I will advocate Benefit touting .

In stead of strictly feature listing, enumerate the benefits offered by your software in explicit language.

Not that listing features is wrong in itself, but we have to keep in mind that our aim is to elicit an action: persuade potential customers to make a decision to buy, and this is easier done when your customers can grasp the relevance of your solution to their peculiar challenges.

The problem with feature listing is that it is not an effective means in communicating the benefits of your offering to customers.

Truth is, if you have features, you should have benefits but you have to take into consideration that half of the time, majority of your customer might not be that techie savvy, so they might not, at once connect the dots of your features to get the benefits. This is why it pays to sell to them by explicitly stating your benefits. This will make buying much easier.

One need to take into cognizance that decision making is powered by emotions, so it will make more sense Listing benefits not features since it will be a faster way to make customers easily identify what they will gain from your software, how it will make their work (or life) easier, thereby generating the necessary emotions that will propel them to sign that cheque.

Doing this makes buying easier like I said earlier on. Have you ever wondered why most people resist selling but enjoy buying? Why is this so? Its simple, buying becomes enjoyable when backed with the knowledge that the Good or Services being purchased is really the solution to a problem. List the benefits and people will find it easy to connect your solution to their problems, list the features, well….

So what is the lesson being learnt here?

“It is a better marketing strategy to design your marketing campaign around benefits listing than feature listing.”

Republished from 60mwtgeeks