1. Do I know the person?
If I know the person, I’ll follow no matter what. Its always fun to read what someone you know thinks or likes, even if he’s only complaining about his mood.

2. What is the person’s following-to-follower ratio?  How many updates were posted?
If its roughly one-by-one, they’re normally using some sort of script that let them leave guys who are not following them. This is not a good or a bad point. If they follow a very big number of tweeps but are followed by only very few, its likely that there’s a follower-builder script involved - look at their updates number or at their updates - if its too few or automated stuff, don’t follow these. If they have a lot of followers but few friends, they most likely tweet good stuff. If they have very few followers, look at the stuff they tweet - maybe they give value but are not on twitter too long.

3. Is the follower really there to engage or to pump up their number?There are a lot of follower-pumpers out there. I run one account with only six updates and a follower script running to see if that works … and yes it does. That account has more than 2200 followers. Many out there ar like this - filter out the automated and you’ll get more value.

4. Does the Tweep have the same interests?

Very important. If he’s interested in the same stuff, its most likly that he’s be of value to you, post interesting links or engage in communication about stuff that matters to you.

5. Are the Tweets of value?

Well thats the most important part anyways. If you gain anything from reading his tweets, then the tweep really offers something to you. And thats where Twitter has its purpose: if you read stuff you want to read, its useful. And believe me, there are a lot of tweeps out there who post interesting stuff.

6. Has the Tweeter engaged?
If there are @replies, the tweep does talk back and might even read my tweets. Thats good for communication of if you need to know somethng. If he also RTs stuff he likes, you’ll get even more info that gets redirected to you - if its good.

Image by magerleagues via Flickr

Well most of you reader will have recognized that my blog was loading pretty slowly. I now decided that I should do something about this. When I thought about my blog and why it loaded so slowly, I recognized that I was loading A LOT OF outbound pictures. I first thought it was only the Zemanta-integrated pictures that took too long to load because of their filesize, but after all I saw something more more slowing: the sociable-plugins POST TO SOCIALNETWORKS-buttons.

“But they are very small! Filesize = extremely unimportant?” Indeed. But each of these elements with a src-Attribute makes the browser perform an HTTP-Request, and browsers don’t do too many of those a time. Especially if they’re on different hosts, like all those socialnetwork-sites.

After all I think every “good” social networking site has their own means of posting good stuff (like the Digg and StumbleUpon-Toolbars or one million clients and browserplugins for Twitter), so I decided to just remove them. If you like my posts, you’ll Tweet them or Stumble them anyways, even if I don’t put two million buttons on my page, I guess. Hmm …. so few pictures … I have to post some more content now I assume.

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This Firefox-Plugin is great: Tiny Menu. If you use your bookmarks in the bookmark-bar (you can put folders there too!) and have a mouse-gestures plugin installed, what do you need the menu for anymore? Very nice, very minimalistic. More place for the webpages!

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Image by Kevglobal via Flickr

How would my perfect twitter-client look? Well. Lets begin with: it should load quickly! Everything should be organized into streams like in Tweetdeck. All streams should be closable and reopenable with one button per stream (button should be invisible when stream is open). Stream width and textsize should be controllable.

One stream of direct messages, one stream of @replys. One main stream. Custom streams should be easily configurable. I want groups (as such a stream), where I can see the tweets of Tweeple configured for that stream, so I can actually read the tweets from the people I know personally or those that interest me most. Filtering a stream should be possible, I’d love regular expressions here but I don’t think that this will be done. Twitter searches should be configurable as a stream.

The UI should make viewing linked videos possible or listening to linked postcasts without going to the web. Shortened links should be fully shown if you hover them and be opened in a browser if you click them. As the client needed to decrypt a lot of links, it should also be able to show me all the links it can decrypt in another stream, this time ranked by the most tweeted link. #topics should be highlighted - clicking on it would generate a search-stream. It should be easy to see if the Tweeters you see tweets from follow you or not. A click on their pic should send you to their twitterhomepage in a browser. Twitterusers should be numbable - making their tweets and links not appear in any streams, if its not an @reply or a DM. I’d also love if tweets containing links that I already visited get filtered out automatically - this would seriously cut down the noise.

I want multiple accounts to work. I in fact would love to have an iPhone-App that onyl shows me tweets I didn’t already visit in my workingstation-application - and vice versa. And I want it to be a feedreader too. It should be possible to view feeds till a certain (configurable) length of characters, and a link to their online version if they’re too long. I’d also like some automatation, so you can make a Tweet from a feed.

Well … as you can see I want a lot of stuff. Perhaps this can be an inspiration for someone who has the time to make a superb Twitterclient. Oh … you should also be able to tweet after all.

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My girlfriend has a new handy: the Nokia Xpress 5800 (and I chose it for her). It features a touchscreen, a 3.2MP camera (with autofokus and flashlight), WLAN, boasting with its music capabilities and all the other usual stuff you get with smartphones today and costs about 300€. It also has a touchpen for writing. Whooho.

As an iPhone-user I can only judge that thing from my viewpoint and compare it with the iPhone. PRO Nokia:

• First, its price is only approximately half (or even one third) that of an iPhone (which is REALLY nice).
• It has a camera button on the outside that lets you directly switch to camera mode and that also trigger the camera, so you don’t have to watch the touchscreen to tip on a softbutton to make a snapshot.
• The speakers rule. Listening to loud music is possible with this thing.
• You don’t need iTunes or some other software to get music or video on that phone. You got the OVI-suite if you want to use that.
• You can just use it as USB-mass-storage. IPhone users dream of that and can only use Wi-Fi apps that do the same, but those need a Wi-Fi key to connect.
• You can do handwriting instead of using the softkeyboard.
• There’s a really BIG softkeyboard that uses the full screen and only leaves a small part of the rest of the background visible where the text is displayed.
• Some nice shortcuts: kamera (button on the outside), clock (tap on the displayed time), the mediabar (one tap for that and there are shortcuts for browser, music player & more). Some more shortcuts can be put on the standard screen, which is nice.
• Headphones are plugged into a controller where you can skip to the next track of music or take an incoming call.

Well thats it with the good stuff, here comes the bad:

• The touchscreen doesn’t feel as insensible as most windows-mobile-devices I tried, but you still have to press it. The Nokia has a plekron attached and includes a small pen to help you with that but iPhoneuse is just easier and more exact.
• There’s no multitouch.
• Most of the time you need more than three touches to come to the application you want. But there are some nice shortcuts (mentioned in the PRO section above).
• The plastic looks a bit cheap, the touchscreen is not made of glass but of some plastic.
• The menus and the browser are not really nice-to-use. Its manageable tough.
• The apps are mostly pretty basic. I didn’t see the OVI-apps so far.
• I can type much faster on an iPhone.
• This might be the most important point: Even when the Nokia has a lot of features, my girlfriend still reaches out for my iPhone if she wants to look something up on the web.

After all, I think the Nokia was a good choice. Its not too costy, and if you dig a bit into it, you can really make good use of that phone. I like it, even if I like the iPhone much better.

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Google and Yahoo just announced that they’re going to support RDFa (and Microformats). Be sure that you understand what that means: This is the dawn of the Semantic Web (or you may also call it Web 3.0) and the beginning of the end of old ways of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In this post you’ll find some more info explaining what RDFa is, why I state that the Semantic Web will now emerge and why it soon will not be important to put the buzzwords into Headline-Tags (<h1>Buzzwords here!</h1>) but to link the word your content is about to the rdf-Source of what that word really means.

Talking about Google. Google is THE defining webtechnology company. The google page rank is the most important factor that a SEO cares about, and he would be doing anything to get a high page rank, as this would rank his site higher in the google search. And google search is the main entry point of the average surfer to get to content he cares about. Being highly ranked in google’s search is like being well-known and this holds a lot of marketing power. Google (and the other search engines) are doing their best for about 20 years to understand a given HTML-site and its contents, to know what to show their users when they search for a keyword. But they can never know what you mean when you talk in your blogpost about Big Ben. Do you mean the Volcanic Massif on Heard Island labeled Big Ben? Do you mean the world champion jumping horse that held this name? In this article, I marked up these three words with their meaning … you can’t see it, but google can (well in fact that might be a stupid idea, because Google will think that this post might be about these items … but anyways, if you find it in the sourcecode, you’ll see what I mean, just in case this wordpress blog won’t have shreddered what I just typed in).

Most people that want to “invent” the semantic web like Qimaya think they can derive semantic meaning from webpages by emulating a human brain which just understands the words. They sell this idea to investors who don’t like technical terms like RDF or Ontologies, because those investors hope that the Web will become “semantic” by magic instead of hard-to-understand science. If that would be possible … don’t you think Google would have already implemented it? Nevermind … we all need some fantasy.

RDFa is a way of embedding RDF into HTML. RDF is the Resource Description Framework, and with that its possible to define semantic meaning. In RDF, you have a Subject, a Predicate and an Object as in real-world speech. You could say “This article (subject with the unique URI http://www.ithoughts.de/google-supports-rdfa-seos-work-changes-forever) is about (standard-RDF-predicate) the semantic web “and Google would rank your article way higher when someone wants to know something about the Semantic Web and uses this keyword in Google Search. You could also model these triple-sentences to make a connection between defined resources. “I’m interested in the semantic web” could be a triple you can put directly into HTML. Google could derive a logical connection here.

Google will first use some use-cases, like that of the ratings. Say you define your blogpost as a rating about a product like some special laptop, and you define it unambigously by using a unique id (in fact a unique URI, perhaps that will be the product page at the laptops vendor), Google has a lot of info that it can directly parse from your website: Its about a certain laptop, you have rated it, and maybe you also give information about yourself. This is all machine-extractable structured data, that can be used by webspiders like Google Search. With these definitions about products, ratings, companies and people, a lot of the central data that a lot of people search about in Google can be automatically extracted from average users like you and me - if we know how to embed that data. This might become a central interest of all SEOs out there - understanding RDF and implementing RDFa into webpages might be the next thing in terms of “Semantic Page Rank“.

Its some kinda funny, that I’m working on an RDFa-Editor for a semantic blog in my thesis. Seems like I have to include Googles usecases in it, or it might be “outdated”. If you have any questions, just add a comment. By the way: Welcome to the Semantic Web!

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Some corporations fear that their employees might tweet something that hurts the corps reputation. And you should too! Most young adults that use twitter or a blog don’t think much about the consequences. Whatever you say/tweet/post might be available to the whole world forever - indexed by seach engines - and for everyone. This includes future bosses you might have, girlfriends and collegues. So if you post something that might be causing a bad reputation to you, try to take it off the net as soon as you realize it and just hope that it didn’t already spread around! Blog entries can be deleted, tweets can be deleted and most sites you post something onto give you the possibility too. Just do it before others recognize it and copy-paste it forever. And hope that the search engines won’t cache it forever.