Can I just say…

This is a running followup to Thoughts and comments on twitter’s new lists feature. I’ll keep updating this post rather than create new posts.

• You can add your own account to a list you’ve created through the API, but not through the web UI. Once added, you cannot remove your account from the list through the web UI, only through the API. (19/10/09)
• Lists do not show any replies, even from yourself. For example, I have a list called @epc/defrag which includes my id (@epc). The list does not show my own replies to others, though the replies appear in my own timeline. What I can’t tell is if lists would show replies between members of a given list.

I think twitter’s lists feature could be a major addition to the service. One of the interesting creations of twitter has been asymmetric follows: there is no burden or commitment to follow back people who follow a given id. The lists feature takes this a step further: I can create and curate a list of IDs I’m interested in, and rad their tweets, without following the ids in twitter jargon.
The followed accounts will be able to see that they are in a given list, but they’re not being followed.

I think we’re going to need some new terminology.

There’s two immediate consequences and/or benefits of this change:

• Today if I follow another twitter account, that account can send me a direct message (DM) but I cannot DM that account unless it has followed me (a reciprocal follow). But if I add that twitter id to a list, that id cannot DM me back (as far as I can tell in the still–developing API). So this is another form of asymmetric following.
• It makes it much easier to follow a lot of accounts, if the UIs we use allow separation & aggregation of lists.

What I mean is that today I maintain two twitter accounts: one follows people, almost entirely people I’ve met or have a 1/2/3rd degree relationship with (it may be an extremely tenuous relationship). The other id follows almost entirely services plus some A–list twitter users. I embarked on this path because I was losing too many tweets from people I was interested in hearing from amongst all of the other tweets from the various services.

I didn’t want to shut out the services entirely, but if you follow five services which tweet 20—30 times per day, that’s potentially 100–150 tweets per day which can easily overwhelm the tweets you get from someone who posts only a couple of times per day.
Now I can segregate those service based tweets off into a list (and furthermore, by “unfollowing” many of them remove the hole into my attention that DMs provide).

The lists feature is not yet fully baked, but when released I think could be as revolutionary as geotagging tweets will be (if/when geotagging is launched).

Following are comments I posted to the twitter developer’s list yesterday:

When adding a user to a list, only the numeric id appears to work, eg:

   curl -k --user epc:pass -d id=7758742 --url https://twitter.com/epc/defrag/members.xml

works, but:

   curl -k --user epc:pass -d id=enorlin --url https://twitter.com/epc/defrag/members.xml

results in a 500 Internal Server error. I tried swapping “userid” and
“screen_name” for “id” and get a 400 Bad Request back:

   curl -k --user epc:pass -d user_id=enorlin --url https://twitter.com/epc/defrag/members.xml
   curl -k --user epc:pass -d screen_name=enorlin --url https://twitter.com/epc/defrag/members.xml

returns:

<error>You must specify a member</error>

(which is what I’d expect for “id=enorlin” instead of the 500).

Also, if you pass in the authenticating user’s numeric ID you get back
either a 503 or 502 (bad gateway) error, eg:

   curl -k --user epc:pass -d id=420363 --url https://twitter.com/epc/defrag/members.xml

however it does appear to add the user to the list. Note that once added, the user can’t be removed from the list via the current lists UI.

If you try to add a user who has blocked the authenticating user, you get a 403 “You aren’t allowed to add members to this list” which is slightly misleading, you’re not allowed to add THIS user to the list.

If user “A” has added user “B” to a list, and user “B” blocks “A”, that appears to remove “B” from A’s list permanently, even if the block is removed. Is that working as designed?

What are the rules for converting a list’s name into the slug/URI?
Just a conversion to “safe” URL characters?

Couple of ideas:

• allow mass additions of userids/screen names to lists, or maybe
  10-20 at a time
• allow lists to have a tweet-like tag line (the intent being to describe the list)
• don’t groan, but allow geotagging of lists. Ok, groan.

On a quick run through my Google Reader feeds I came across this post by Om Malik: Look Who’s Launching an Email Service which tells a tale of IBM’s Lotus brand launch of a hosted email solution called LotusLive iNotes.

So, some quick observations on LotusLive iNotes:

• The iNotes name dates back to the first Lotus Notes hack for the web, interNotes which became iNotes around mid–late 1995.
• 1Gb of storage for USD$36/year is a joke. Really, seriously guys? When Google Apps gives 25Gb for USD$50/year?
• The sales pitch seems to be positioned against Google’s GMail offering (with subtle comments about advertising in your email and data privacy), when Google Apps for your Domain is the more comparable product.
• You cannot sign up for LotusLive iNotes online, you must contact IBM Sales.
• When you try to contact IBM Sales by clicking the Request a quote for LotusLive Notes link, you get message code 40, This service is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. with the very helpful <title>: IBM 2009/10/01 20:57:10.
• Poking around the lotuslive.com domain is interesting, it appears to be hosted not at IBM itself, but through a company called Virtela which advises us that Virtela is the Premier Global Network Integrator Enabling Business Solutions for Multinational Organizations. Now, that does not mean that LotusLive itself is hosted at Virtela, but it is an odd choice given that part of the sales pitch appears to be that the hosted service is provided by IBM.

Now, I have no inside insight at IBM, having left nearly eight years ago. But I find it bizarre that the company would launch yet another hosted offering built around Lotus Notes (there were a couple floating around in the 1990s, and Lotus itself had had a hosted option when IBM bought the company in 1995). If the offering is indeed hosted by a third party, then this is doubly bizarre.