Google Opens Search Secrets

Google is giving us a glimpse of its secret herbs and spices, promising to give (some) details on it search algorithms.

Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering, announced on a corporate blog some of the reasons for Google’s renowned secrecy.

Admitting that Google is quite secretive about their search formula, he provides two reasons, competition and attempts to prevent abuse, but acknowledges that this situation might be changing slightly.

“But being completely secretive isn’t ideal, and this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past. We will try to periodically tell you about new things, explain old things, give advice, spread news, and engage in conversations. Let me start with some general pieces of information about our group. More blog posts will follow.”

Udi describes the roles of various teams involved in Google search quality. I particularly liked the UI team and this bit of information about them.

“The UI team is helped by a team of usability experts who conduct user studies and evaluate new features. They travel all over the world, and they even go to people’s homes to see users in their natural habitat. (Don’t worry, they do not come unannounced or uninvited!)”

That knock on the door you hear is the Google UI police.

“One of the key things about search is that users’ expectations grow rapidly. Tomorrow’s queries will be much harder than today’s queries. Just as Moore’s law governs the doubling of computing speed every 18 months, there is a hidden unwritten law that doubles the complexity of our most difficult queries in a short time. This is impossible to measure precisely, but we all feel it. We know we cannot rest on our laurels, we have to work hard to meet the challenge. As I mentioned earlier, we will continue providing you with updates on search quality in the coming months, so stay tuned.”

As you can see, not a lot of secrets in here; it seems more like a PR exercise to me.

All The Twitter Tools And Apps

Well, maybe not all of them, but there are 60 twitter tools here for you to get your teeth stuck into.

AlertThingy - Adobe Air desktop client for twitter, friendfeed and flickr.

Autopostr - lets your twitter friends automatically know you posted a new photo on flickr, by adding a # to your photo title.

Brabblr - mashup that sends and receives messages to all your friends and many microtools at the same time.

Commuter feed - mashup service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.

Celly - add fun to your tweets.

Cellity - twitter on your mobile.

CeTwit - a windows mobile twitter client.

Crowdstatus - very early alpha, allowing you to organize friends into groups.

Digsby - Digsby looks quite interesting. It is a multiprotocol IM client with email notifications and support for social networking tools, including twitter.

Ego Twitter’in - Shizzolate your tweets - from Snoop Dog’s people. Yeah, I had no idea either until I checked it out.

Fring - mobile phone tools and service, with twitter support.

GetMobio - twitter on your mobile.

GroupTweet - allows private group messages via twitter.

Gtwitter - linux gnome twitter client.

Hahlo - twitter on the iPhone.

Itweet - twitter application for the iPhone.

Jargong - mobile client that adds support for instant messaging and twitter, among others.

Jitter - java mobile twitter client.

Jott - converts voice into text for email and messaging.

Jtwitter - mobile java twitter client.

Madtwitter - Windows twitter client inspired by Twitterrific.

MoTwit - twitter client for the Palm OS.

NatsuLion - Mac OS X twitter client.

Pockettweets - a web based twitter client for the iPhone.

Sandy - setup reminders and receive them via tweets.

Snaptweet - send your latest Flickr photos to twitter.

Snitter - Adobe Air application for twitter.

Summize - real time tweet search engine.

Tiny Twitter - allows you to send tweets from your mobile without getting dinged all the time via friends updates.

Twapper - mashup of 30Boxes and twitter.

Tweetbar - update twitter from your Firefox sidebar.

Tweetburner - tracks the clicks on links posted to twitter.

TweetClouds - makes a tweet cloud from a twitter stream.

Tweetmeme - highlights popular memes on twitter.

Tweet-r - Mac OS X twitter client.

Tweetstats - provides statistical information about your tweeting.

TweetShirts - puts tweets on t-shirts.

TweetSpeak - lets you listen to tweets.

TweetWheel - find out which of your twitter friends know each other.

Twessenger - updates Live Messenger with your latest tweets.

Tweeterboard - lists the top 100 twitterers based on tweets and reputation.

Twiddeo - is twitter plus video.

Twimbler - a tumbog updated via twitter.

Twistori - tweet visualization.

TwittEarth - mashup that shows live tweets from all over the world on a 3-D globe as they happen, good for a bit of fun.

Twitterbar - Firefox plugin that allows sending tweets from the address bar.

TwitterBlacklist - list of known twitter spammers.

Twitterbox - a twitter client for Second Life.

Twitterfone - allows you to send messages to twitter using voice.

Twitterlicious - Windows twitter client.

Twitteroo - Windows twitter client with url shortening, clickable links and tweets.

Twibble - twitter client for Java enabled smartphones that can make use of built-in GPS to add location to tweets.

Twhirl - one of the best Adobe Air dekstop clients for twitter.

Twitter Fan Wiki - a list of twitter news services.

TwitterFeed - checks your blog feed and posts any new items to your twitter account.

TwitterLocal - generates an RSS or XML feed to filter out tweets around a certain geographical area.

Twitterrific - Mac OS X commercial twitter client.

Twittertools - WordPress plugin by Alex King.

Twittervision - mashup of twitter and Google showing the latest tweets and the location of the poster.

Twitttwoo - WordPress plugin displays and updates tweets from sidebar.

More Twitter Fun

After my last post on feedalizr, I have been trying to get twirl working properly again. At the moment, it is pretty hit and miss. You can see my twirl screen above; not much activity in it.

It appears, I am not the only one with this problem, but it is kind of strange, since this morning is the first time I have received the ‘limit exceeded’ message. I went to the twirl blog to see what they had to say about it and have copied their post on the issue below.

Many users of twhirl seem to have problems to get updates from Twitter for some time now. twhirl reports that you have “exceeded your limit” and pauses updates for 5 minutes. For some, this problem only lasts for a couple of minutes, but others cannot get it to work for days.

While twhirl reports the error, it usually isn’t the culprit that caused this to happen. This blog article should give you some background information about the issue.

The Twitter API limit

Twitter offers an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows third-party-software to access certain functions of their service. This includes writing status updates and direct messages as well as fetching your friends’ updates, your replies, deleting tweets etc. Everyone is free to use this API, but Twitter restricts usage in some ways. And the most important restriction is that it does not allow more than 70 requests per hour using the same credentials, shared among all applications accessing the API.

What does that mean? If, for example, you use twhirl as your desktop client, and have it configured to use 40 requests per hour, this leaves 30 requests for other purposes. Now you may have given your credentials to a lifestream site that accesses your account. If they do it every 5 minutes for example, this uses another 12 requests per hour, leaving 18 available. Now you might be using a browser like Flock (or Firefox with a Twitter extension), that fetches data in your name from Twitter. Again, some requests are allocated. And so on.

And every request you initiate in twhirl yourself goes on top of those you allow it for its automatic refreshing. So deleting ten tweets will consume ten more requests!

One thing: you cannot exceed your limit by twittering too much. Sending any message (status update, reply, or direct message) does not count for the API limit.

Why is your limit always exceeded?

For some time now, some users report that they cannot use twhirl reliably because they always get the message that they have exceeded their limit, even immediately after starting the application. For most of them, the account lock is released after a few minutes (up to an hour), but some are always blocked and cannot use the API at all.

This is not a problem that only affects twhirl users. As reports from other API developers show, other clients are equally affected. What could be the reason for this? Here are some scenarios that are possible:

1. You are really over-using your account. You have given your credentials to too many services that now access your twitter data simultaneously, more often than 70 times per hour. If you think this is true, but can’t remember all sites you used, change your twitter password and only give the new one to sites or clients you really need.
2. Twitter has a bug and miscalculates your API usage, locking your account too early. The problem has been reported to Twitter, and they are investigating the case. While some users that were sure not to actively exceed the limit turned out to have forgotten about a few services they gave their passwords, they don’t deny that their servers might do something wrong. If we get a feedback from them with any results on this, you’ll be informed.
3. Any service you gave your credentials acts unfair / weird. You may have given your credentials to a service (web site) that does not respect the API limit very well, or at least does not inform you about excessive API usage. Or it simply has a bug that sometimes fires a lot of requests using your username / password. For some users, the problem seems to show up at similar times every day, what could be an indication for this scenario.

We are only guessing here, as no definite information is available yet. And each account has to be looked at individually, as all the above (and possibly other reasons) could be true.

We are only guessing here, as no definite information is available yet. And each account has to be looked at individually, as all the above (and possibly other reasons) could be true.

What to do now?

Unfortunately, it is not easy to give you a good answer to this questions. I’d suggest the following:

Check if you haven’t given your credentials to multiple services / sites.

If you believe you didn’t, change your password on Twitter and only give the new one to selected clients. Give it to one first, adding others one after another (not more than one per hour), to see if any of these services pushes you over the limit.

If with a brand new password and only one client running you still get the limit exceeded message, please mail details to twhirl at info@twhirl.org, so we can report this to Twitter.

Remember to wait at least an hour to have the account unlocked after changing your password!

Conclusion

I’m very sorry if you have these problems. We are actively working on solving this issue, and we need your help to do so. We will keep you updated on the blog if we get new information.

As my problem fits into category 2, and with all the problems twitter is having at the moment, I am not too confident of getting this rectified in a hurry.

Taking Feedalizr For A Twirl

With all the problems twitter is having lately, I have found myself using FriendFeed a lot more. This morning, after twitter was once again down and for some reason my present app of choice, twirl started giving me the s**** by blocking me, I came across an alternative via a post by mattharwood.

Feedalizr is a new Adobe AIR app for connecting to FriendFeed and twitter. Unlike twirl, feedalizr incorporates this into the one window, rather then two separate ones, which is a better. You can also easily post to Flickr, as well as record videos, although I haven’t got this workign on the Mac yet. I’ll have to play with it some more to get this working.

You have some filtering options available, to filter by service or user.

Being an alpha release, there are still plenty of areas for improvement, but it seems to have captured lots of attention this morning already. I’d like to see an extra row of buttons added next to the ones at the top, so I can quickly switch between twitter and FriendFeed rather the having to change it via the filter.

I have also noticed that I have to refresh the window sometimes to bring the posting back up, they seem to disappear when switching around various windows on the computer.

Overall, feedalizr looks pretty promising and should prove popular, especially for those on FriendFeed.

Martin Varsavsky On FON

I read an interesting story on the New York Times this morning about Martin Varsavsky and his company FON.

The premise of FON is that users purchase a FON router, allowing them to share in the global FON network. Essentially, what happens is you share a part of your WiFi in return for gaining access to other FON user’s WiFi.

This sounds reasonable, but there are numerous issues standing in the way, not the least of it being the different pricing models and access of countries around the World.

I see that they have users in Australia, but on the FOn Website, Australia is not listed as one of the countries participating in the service, so not quite sure what is going on there.

I had a similar idea I had a few years ago, only mine was a little more ambitious and perhaps several years away from feasibility.

For example, why not have each mobile device openly talking with each other and sharing unused bandwidth when required, taxis and buses could also act as routers and hotspots, increasing coverage in towns and cities. Think of it like a distributed SETI@home, for WiFi access. Instead of doing processing on unused CPU cycles, unused bandwidth is shared.

And before you start telling me the problems with this, both technical and business; I am aware of them, but hope that one day it becomes a reality, as it is pretty frustrating hunting around for access when you travel.