Brick by Brick

Conversations about blog posts are increasingly taking place on Twitter in addition to the comments section of blogs.  Due to this trend, over the last six months we’ve seen lots of blogs integrate tweetbacks into their comment sections.  Building on the trackback concept, a tweetback searches Twitter for links to specific blog pots and displays relevant tweets in the comments section of your blog. 

I’ve had a variety of clients request this feature over the last few months, so we’ve spent some time figuring out how to get tweetbacks working in our core platform, Drupal and WordPress. 

For Drupal, we did an exhaustive search for tweetback modules back in February and didn’t find any that work, so we developed our own custom module.  We are currently fine tuning the code we wrote and hope to release our Drupal tweetback module to the open source community in the next few months.

For WordPress, there are quite a few tweetback modules to choose from.  We tried a handful of the plugins with mixed results.  I’m posting a quick review of our experience with each in the hopes that it saves time for others hoping to implement tweetbacks on their blog.

Before I dive in, please note that we did not test all of these plugins exhaustively.  In my mind, the point of plugins is to quickly add functionality without involving our development team.  So if I couldn’t get a plugin to work within an hour or so, I chose to cut my losses and move on to the next one instead of spending time debugging.

Tweetbacks and Tweetsuite by Dan Zarrella

As far as I can tell, Dan Zarrella was the first to build a tweetback plugin module for WordPress back in January. 

His first take on it was a simple javascript solution called Tweetbacks.  While this solution probably works, it relies on inserting a javascript hosted on his personal server on your blog/website.  While this might be ok for some, we simply did not want to take the risk of inserting a javascript from an individual on a client website.

Later in January Dan released Tweetsuite, which moves away from javascript and includes a bunch of additional features.  This plugin looks awesome, but unfortunately we couldn’t get it to work on the two blogs we tried to implement it on and gave up.  The plugin also doesn’t have a lot of documentation, and from reading the comments it doesn’t sound like it is being actively supported.  So we grudgingly moved on.

Disqus

Disqus is a third-party commenting system that can actually take the place of your WordPress commenting system.  I’ve written about it before, and use it on my personal blog.  I’m a fan of the product, and when I saw Disqus was adding social media reactions to its feature set I was anxious to try it out. 

We decided to install Disqus on our own ImpactWatch blog as a way of testing out tweetbacks and giving the the system a full test drive before recommending clients start using it.  Unfortunately, the tweetbacks feature in Disqus worked correctly for exactly one day and then mysteriously stopped and never got working again. Disqus has also periodically had performance issues that have caused our blog to load slowly.  Disqus recently acknowledged that they are having some significant problems.  Despite my fondness for Disqus, we will be uninstalling it from ImpactWatch this week and go back to WordPress comments, with Backtype for tweetbacks (see below). 

I’ll probably loop back on Disqus in a few months and see if they’ve gotten their act together.  At this point, I simply can’t recommend the service.

Backtype

Last week, we gave Backtype Connect a try here on The Bivings Report.  The installation of the plugin went smoothly and tweetbacks started showing up pretty much immediately.  While the service definitely misses some tweets (probably due to people using some obscure URL shortening services), it seems to capture around 90% of relevant tweets.  It is definitely the best and most consistent of the tweetback services I have looked at and would be the one I would recommend at this point.

Note that I did not look at Tweetbacks by Yoast or Intense Debate, which is a service similar to Disqus that includes tweetback functionality.  If you have used these plugins, please post about your experience in the comments sections.  Please post if you think there is another service I should look at. 

The much hyped “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha launched over the weekend to what can only be described as a mixed reaction.  I played with it for a few hours and came away with two primary thoughts:

1. Wolfram Alpha is something completely new, and that is fascinating.
2. Everything about Wolfram Alpha is going to be compared to Google, and the engine will suffer due to the comparison.

And now for something totally different.

Wikipedia has been around forever, but I still occasionally go on Wikipedia binges where I’ll search for something and then end up following various links and learning lots of things I didn’t intend to.  Wolfram Alpha inspires similar explorations.  Starting from the examples page, here is a list of some random things I learned about as a way of showing what the engine is like:

• AIDS deaths in Africa
• Largest countries by population
• Stats about my birth day
• Weather forecast for today in Washington and the weather in 1995
• The current time in London
• The distance from San Antonio, TX to Washington, DC
• Current exchange rate between dollars and pesos

Pretty cool, huh? I love Wolfram Alpha’s user interface, with its focus on visual search results.  And I love the way it encourages you to explore.

Will people use it?

While I find Wolfram Alpha fascinating, there are certainly idiosyncrasies.  You will simply not get results for a great many of your searches and you will run into strange results at times.   The site is clearly not yet a finished product, and this will frustrate some.

But I think the biggest challenge is the point of reference many users will bring when using the new engine.  Most of the reviews I read focused on comparing Wolfram Alpha to Google, and found it lacking.  Indeed, it seems that the first thing a lot of people did when playing with Wolfram Alpha was search for their own name, which isn’t really the point of the tool.  Fast Company sums up the problem pretty well in its article titled “Wolfram Alpha Isn’t Google, so Stop Comparing Them.”

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.  Google is so dominant in the search space that a service interruption recently caused a 5% drop in overall Internet traffic.  Most of us have used Google so often for so long that if you put a search box in front of us and ask us to type something, we can’t help but compare the results we get to Google.  Google is our defining search experience.

In my mind, Wolfram Alpha isn’t really a Google competitor, any more than Wikipedia is.  I see it as something totally new, that can enrich my search experience when used as a complement to my daily Google use.  This shouldn’t be seen as Wolfram Alpha vs. Google, as I don’t see it as a zero sum game.  Unfortunately, I think most others do see it as an either/or proposition, in which case it is going to be difficult for Wolfram Alpha to truly catch on among general users.

What do you think?

Last week, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) beat CNN's Breaking News Feed (@cnnbrk) to the one million follower mark on Twitter.  This was after a challenge that enjoyed some viral attention last week that even gained coverage by mainstream media organizations like the Associated Press.  In response to his victory, Kutcher exclaimed: "We can and will create our media… Victory is ours!"  He feels that Twitter will help people bypass old media news organizations — like CNN — to get information.

However, I'm not sure if CNN really lost in this challenge.  Kutcher is a widely popular actor, and the fact that he could even rival it for attracting Twitter followers is evidence of this.  That is why his challenge was actually a great thing for CNN, even though it lost.  

During Kutcher's challenge many people flocked to the breaking news feed to follow.  I'm sure that some people feel that it would be a disgrace if a celebrity was able to trump an established news organization.  What would that say about our society's priorities?  

Needless to say, this challenge inspired many to follow CNN's feed — if for any reason other than to help it beat a celebrity.  Thus, many more people now will receive CNN's updates and links to its website now via Twitter.  Let's not forget all the "free press" it brought CNN.  CNN didn't lose here, especially since it won't suffer from the door bell prank its founder Ted Turner will suffer is no longer with the organization.

Energy advocates and online mobilization experts gathered at the Center for American Progress Action Fund in Washington, DC, to talk about successes and challenges in gathering activists both on and offline.

Heather Lauer, director of online strategy for the Pickens Plan, talked about the process of gathering the Plan’s 1.5 million-plus participants and building a social network to connect members. (As the technical partner of the Pickens Plan, The Bivings Group has provided ongoing development and support on the Plan’s web communications network, including its primary site and its Ning-based social action network, Push.)

Other organizations, such as the Energy Action Coalition, built supporter bases through focusing on the goals of a particular voting group. The EAC spread its message among young people throughout college campuses and focused empowering the under-30 vote.

No matter the strategy, all members of the panel agreed on the importance of coming together in a combined effort to face energy challenges and the need to reach out to a growing base of supporters.

"We have a tremendous amount of education that needs to be done and we also have no time. This is not something that the good guys are going to win on the inside," said Brad Johnson of ThinkProgress.org.

In order to reach a broader base, Michael Silberman of 1sky.org emphasized 1Sky’s tactic of organizing community events around key issues, which can be effective both online and off. Silberman and his team worked with Greenpeace to organize rallies and push constituents to contact legislators during Congressional recesses.

While enticing audiences to participate in specific events can be a highly productive way of gaining new members, participants on the panel said it is not as effective as maintaining a long-term, sustained strategy of support.

“We’re relying on dedicated Moveon.org members to motivate other members,” said Michael Sherrard, who works on Moveon.org’s recent Power Up America campaign. “To make real progress is going to require a building crescendo of organizing.”

On top of organizational strategy, the panel discussed effective messaging methods of both within their supporter bases and with the public. Panel moderator and Associate Director for Online Advocacy Alan Rosenblatt recommended using a closed-audience SMS communicator to share messages within your group, and “leveraging Twitter makes that dynamic more public” if you are aiming for a broader audience.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund promotes regular InternetAdvocacy Roundtable discussions as part of its Wired for Progress program. Online attendees can watch live streams of discussions and submit questions online. A listing of past and upcoming Internet Advocacy Roundtables is available here.

In the last six months we have helped build Ning social networks for the Pickens Plan and the National Peace Corps Association, among others.  We are fans of the platform.

Yesterday, Ning launched a redesigned version of their main website, www.ning.com.  This is a major upgrade.  Users of Ning networks know that under the previous design you pretty much had to visit each network you belonged to individually to figure out what was going on in each community.  This redesign allows users to login to www.ning.com and get an aggregated view of activity in all your networks, much like the Facebook news feed.  This is significant, as it makes it much easier for Ning users to keep track of activity on all the networks they belong to.  This should lead to greater participation by existing network members, and help networks grow virally as this participation is documented in various news feeds.

Congrats to the Ning team.  This is good stuff.

Check out the video below and this blog post for more on the redesign. 

Find more videos like this on Ning Network Creators