TweepML Is For Sale

It has been a great run, but the time has come for me to transfer TweepML.org to someone else to grow it and reach its full potential. You could be the next owner of TweepML.org.

 

The service is being auctioned at Flippa. You can make a bid for it.

 

Why should you buy TweepML?

 

In my mind there one of three reasons for you to buy TweepML:

• Monetization: Although we are making just about $200/month today, this was a zero-effort deal. With the right growth in traffic and a few ideas that I’ll tell the winner, you could probably bring TweepML monetization into the thousands per month.
• Drive traffic: There are hundreds of thousands of lists on TweepML. From Travel to Books, from educators to social media, from Joomla to Drupal. You can run your own “house-ads” and drive 100,000 visitors to other properties you own. It doesn't hurt the PageRank 6 either.
• Increase Twitter Followers: Because of the nature of TweepML, you could actually increase @TweepML or your own company number of followers.

The sale will end in 18 days and you can learn a lot more on the auction website.

 

TweepML Allows You to Import Twitter Lists

Twitter has just started rolling out their new Twitter list feature to a percentage of users. A few people compared it to TweepML and said it was going to replace it, however, as we pointed out there are many differences and we’ll certainly coexist peacefully.

We’d like to take a moment and give you a tip: You can import a Twitter List into TweepML very easily, even if you are not the list owner. We also would like to announce that we made it very easy for you to import your friends or followers into TweepML to create a list as of today.

Here is how you import a Twitter List:

1. Go to http://tweepml.org/
2. Click on “Add It To Your Site” (big orange button)
3. On the first input field, enter the link of the Twitter list you want to import (like this: http://twitter.com/tweepml/team) and click “Find”.

Done! Everyone on that list will be imported. You can do the same thing by using the friends or followers links on Twitter, even if they are not your friends or followers. We’ll take care of everything for you and make it really simple.

Stay tuned for a few more cool announcements on the coming weeks.

TweepML is a month old! We have a gift for you…

It has been a month! We might think it’s a long time, but you might be surprised to know we are just a month old. Who cares? We do. To celebrate a very successful first month, we have a gift for you: We just increased our list limits to 250 members! Go ahead, splurge, add that 101 person that couldn’t fit into your list. Now you can!


Here is the number that really matters:

1,629,276

That’s the number of connections we’ve made on this planet in just 30 days. Which are more than 54,000 connections per day! If we stop today we would be happy, but why stop now if we are still generating tremendous value for those creating lists, sharing lists, following lists or just enjoying our funny name.

We just want to say thank you for using TweepML and sharing it with friends.

Happy 1-month anniversary TweepML!

10 Issues with Twitter Lists that TweepML Addresses Today

Yesterday Twitter announced it’s officially supporting lists – a way for you to group people you follow into categories, like “family”, “entertainers”, “sports” or whatever you want. People were very quick to point out the similarities between Twitter lists and TweepML and the rightfully ask if this is the end of TweepML (here, here and here). The short answer is no. The longer answer is below.

This announcement is a blow to many websites that have implemented listing and grouping for Twitter, but the reality is that most of them will adapt and thrive (and a few will vanish). Twitter has cordially invited us to the sneak peek of this feature and I’ve been using it since yesterday. My first reaction was: it’s about time. My second reaction: It’s about “me”, not about “us”.

Keep this in mind: Twitter list is a way for you to partition a subset of your own friends. Period. They also added a neat way for you to follow someone else’s list. You will be able to follow http://twitter.com/calbucci/entrepreneurs if I create a list called “entrepreneur”. It’s not clear how the syntax for lists will work, but I’m suggesting right now we use the “+” sign, either in “calbucci+entrepreneurs”, or “@calbucci+entrepreneurs” or “+calbucci/entrepreneurs”.

Some users have used TweepML to partition their own follow list. A few users have created their own “Follow Friday” list, or people they admire, or people they recommend you to follow. That’s the minority of the users of TweepML. We expect that with the launch of Twitter lists this category of lists will become less popular on TweepML (or not!)

We will integrate TweepML with Twitter Lists to make a seamless experience for users and we’ll have a set of features that will augment Twitter lists (maybe that’s why Twitter has invited us to try to the feature ahead of time).

However, there are at least 10 issues we found with Twitter lists that won’t be solved with this launch. Some of those problems are going to be addressed by Twitter soon, some they might never do it. But all of them are non-issues if you use TweepML:

#1 You can’t create a list with yourself: A Twitter list is a subset of your followers. You cannot follow yourself, and you cannot add yourself to a list you create. If I create “Entrepreneurs in Seattle” list, I cannot be on it.

#2 You can only add people you follow: That’s the same issue as above, but what if I want to create a list that doesn’t have everyone that I follow. For example, I might not want to follow all the 300+ Entrepreneurs in Seattle.

#3 It’s hard to add people to your list: To add someone to your Twitter list you go to your Friends page and select one-by-one who you want on your list.

#4 No way to go from list subscriber to tweep subscriber: Imagine you are following a list of 25 photographers. You get upset because the list owner keeps adding irrelevant people, or removing cool people. You decide you just want to follow them directly. There is no UI to do that now.

#5 No way for people to know you are following them: If you follow a list, the people on that list won’t be notified you are following them. You lose the opportunity of them following you back.

#6 No way to “follow-the-list-except-that-guy-who-tweets-too-much”: If you follow a list is all or nothing. You can’t exclude that guy that can’t stop tweeting.

#7 You can’t import/export lists: They don’t support the TweepML format, but they’ve promised a server-to-server API, which doesn’t matter for end users. If you have a list with 25 accounts, there is no way to easily import a list. There is no way to export that list either, like into a spreadsheet or a text document.

#8 What if you block someone: Blocking on Twitter is somewhat weak already, because the person can continue to follow your tweets by just going to your page (if your account is public like most people). Now, if someone creates a list that you are part of it, anyone that you blocked can follow your tweets again by following the list.

#9 No stats or analytics: Right now Twitter does not tell you anything about your list. I believe in the future they will tell you how many people are following that list, but that’s it. No way to know how people found the list, how many people came and went, etc. This is probably not important to your average user, but for power users and business, this is critical.

#10 No dynamic lists: Finally, Twitter doesn’t allow you to have dynamic lists. For example, if you go to TweepSearch and you want to follow everyone who’s a Security Consultant in Seattle you have to be manually updating that list.

And TweepML…

As I said before, Twitter will address some of those issues over time, particularly around UI and making things easier to use and enjoyable. TweepML.org (the service) and the TweepML format already addresses all of the issues above and once we integrate it with Twitter list you’ll have the best solution possible.

It’s Time To Update Your Websites Footer Links

You know those links on your website that are well below the fold, usually with a link to an “About” page, to a “Contact Us” page, and sometimes to a “Follow Us on Twitter” link. Well, it’s time to update them -- not all of them, but the “Follow Us on Twitter”.

 

Your site might represent your company or organization and many of you might be on Twitter. You might even have many different products accounts on Twitter, a corporate account, the CEO account, etc. Sure, you can make it easier for your users to follow a single one of them, but why not empower your visitors to pick it from a menu of Twitter accounts to follow with a single click?

 

TweepML makes the process of following a group of Twitter users very easy.

 

Here are the 3-steps to add TweepML to your site and let your users follow more accounts with a single-click:

 

1. Go to http://tweepml.org/ and click on “Add It to Your Site” (you can’t miss it, it’s the big orange button). Enter the Twitter usernames and give it a Title, like “Acme Corporation”. If you don’t have a TweepML account click on “Create one now” and click on “Sign Up & Save”
   
2. The next page will give you many options to choose from on how to link to your TweepML list. Pick the HTML Text, Icons or Buttons that you like the most, select the HTML on the box on the right, and copy it.
   
3. Go to your website, paste that HTML on the Footer, Header or Sidebar, and save it.

 

Now, instead of users following just one of your accounts on Twitter, they can follow all of them, or only the ones they chose. Look at the sidebar of our blog or the footer of TweepML.org on how we use it.

 

Another subtle advantage is to learn how many people followed that link and actually followed you through that new link.

 

The Case Against OAuth and Why It’s Bad for Users

Yesterday we officially launched TweepML. Lots of small bugs, but a relatively smooth launch. However, the number one question I’m getting is why is TweepML asking for Twitter passwords instead of using OAuth. If you don’t know what OAuth is, then this blog post is not for you.

 

The reason for not using OAuth: I wanted a great user experience!

 

OAuth is very good for several reasons:

• Users don’t need to enter the password on some untrusted service that could do whatever they wanted with their account.
• Users don’t have to remember their password if they are already signed in on Twitter (or whatever service is providing the OAuth)
• It’s a simple authentication mechanism, that doesn’t take much time to implement

 

However, OAuth is an unatural behavior to most users. I can hear you yelling at me right now, but it’s true. Users are not used to that. Techies are, but those are the minorty. Users are so used to enter their email + password or username + password that it’s not a big deal. Unless you care and understand about security, then you know it could be an issue. But again, most users don’t understand or care.

 

Asking users for their username and password is very smooth. You can handle all the errors, you can provide them with feedback, you can store (we don’t do that) that information for later use, etc.

 

OAuth to authenticate a user redirects you to Twitter, which presents the user with some butt ugly scary screen with a big “Deny” button. Why would I send my users to that screen? If it wasn’t for that issue, there are also Twitter downtime. If Twitter is down, you can’t give your users a good message. They are sent to another world and they can’t come back (unless they click the back button), but they don’t know why it failed. You don’t know why it failed. Lastly, redirects are a crappy way to authentica users because they can fail. OAuth requires at lest 4 client-side HTTP requests. Any of them could fail.

 

How to fix OAuth?

 

So, if you read and understood my points above my issues are around: Unfit user experience on the authentication screen and excessive number of redirects. How do we fix them? The fix is actually relatively simple.

 

Browsers should implement OAuth support. That’s it.

 

Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome should just start supporting OAuth. Either through a plug-in or natively. I’m not sure if the OAuth protocol has all the right elements for that, but it wouldn’t be hard to add a few HTTP Headers or HTML elements to make it happen.

 

Just like browsers support Digest Authentication which is very secure and give you a browser dialog box to enter your credentials, they should support natively OAuth Authentication.

 

Twitter has the attention and the will power to make this a reality. The strategy is to convince Google and Firefox to do it, and get some third-party to develop an IE plug-in, and bang! We can start seriously using OAuth everywhere.

 

Announcing TweepML, the Open Standard format to share groups of Twitter users

This is a first post on this blog and as such, I want to keep it short. TweepML is an Open Standard Extensible format to share groups of Twitter users. That description makes it sound much more complicated than it is.


Beyond the format itself, which you can find it explained here, we are also announcing TweepML.org, the service, an easy way to create, manage, share and find lists of interesting Twitter users to follow.

Imagine your small business has 3 people on Twitter and a corporate account. What happens if you want to tell people “Hey, you can follow Joe, Anne, Marc and BizToday”? They might decide to follow all those people, but it will be a bit of hassle of click-follow-back-back-click-follow-back-back. With TweepML you can tell people “Hey, follow all of us on Twitter” and with a single-click your visitors can start following 1, 2, 10 or 50 Twitter users at once.

If you are a geek, and you want to add TweepML to your site, go check out the format and how you can implement it (I bet in 1 hour or less you can add to your service). If you just want to create a list and add a button to your site without gobbledygook, go to http://tweepml.org/  and get started.

Acknowledgement

More than a few people contributed to make TweepML a reality. From the initial draft concept back in June, Damon Cortesi (@dacort) and Adam Loving (@AdamLoving) have helped prune it. Adam actually implemented TweepML on Twibes for more than a month, which makes it the first application to support TweepML even before TweepML.org. Damon has also contributed to a Ruby project to TweepML, not complete yet, but halfway there. Also, all the beautiful branding for TweepML, including our signature icon was created by David Conrad (@DavidConrad) and the team at Design Commission, a Seattle-based Web Design and Development firm.

But instead of clicking on each individual Twitter name, why don’t you just try our own TweepML:

http://tweepml.org/TweepML-creators/