A little bit less than a year ago I created an open source CFC and companion Mango Blog plugin called SweetTweets that would search for shortened links to your blog entries on Twitter and display any tweets found in a manner similar to TrackBacks. (Note that this wasn't my idea, Dan Zarella invented and pioneered it, I just made a ColdFusion version.) At the time, I was really excited about the project and it seemed to be fairly popular; it even got included in the BlogCFC core, which made my week.

Unfortunately, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I personally view TweetBacks as nearly dead, if not completely dead. Functionally, they still work the same as they did when I originally released SweetTweets in January of 2009. What's changed is market share. In May, Twitter switched their integrated URL shortening service from TinyURL to Bitly, and within days Bitly's market share overtook TinyURL. You can get the latest statistics at Tweetmeme but the rankings from the last 24 hours have Bitly in 1st place with over 57% of shortened urls, and TinyURL in a distant 2nd place with a mere 6.85%.

Why Bit.ly is bad for TweetBacks

The biggest problem is that Bitly doesn't repeat a short URL. If I shorten the URL http://www.google.com with Bitly, I get http://bit.ly/14d7yE. I bet that if you do the same thing, you won't get the same short URL. This behavior is bad for tweetbacks because we rely on being able to predict the shortened url and search for it. If everyone gets a different short url, then we can't predict what it will be, and thus we can't search for it. Your tweetback is out there, we just can't find it.

This isn't to say that Bitly is evil or anything. I'm sure they have their reasons — chief among them is probably being able to track click statistics, and if everyone gets the same short url then there's no easy way to tell whose post of that url was the source of the click. That alone could give Twitter something to monetize, so while I'm not particularly fond of the move from TinyURL to Bitly, I understand it.

Where do we go from here?

One option is to just kill SweetTweets. That probably won't happen. Instead, I will probably release an update that pares down the list of supported url shorteners to just TinyURL and Is.Gd. That means that a majority of potential tweetbacks will still be un-searchable, and therefore NOT found and NOT listed on your blog. Unfortunately, we can't just support every URL shortener under the sun (that keeps 1 unique short url per long url), because the twitter search API has a length limit; so we can only support the top N. Right now that's TinyURL and maybe 1 or 2 others.

I wish it didn't have to come to this, but it has. I thought about asking if anyone is aware of a way to reverse-lookup shortened bitly urls, but even if we could, in a practical sense we would run out of room in just a few links. I'm a little sad, but I guess this is the best we can do with what we've got.

I was hoping to have more time to get my ducks in a row before making an official announcement, but something's come up with a sense of urgency, so I'm just going to kind of unload on you. Sorry about that.

I'm taking over as the manager of the Philly CFUG. I'm still working out the details of organizing our next meeting, but in the meantime I've setup a Twitter account, should you care to follow it.

Now, on to more pressing matters. I just posted this to the PhillyCFUG blog, and it went out via email to the blog subscribers. I figure it can't hurt to cross-post it here as well.

Automated Financial Systems, in Exton, is looking for a ColdFusion developer for immediate assistance. Some experience in server administration would be a bonus.

They don't have an in-house resource for ColdFusion development, but have an immediate need to address errors that their website is generating, as well as a security issue; and they hope to have these problems addressed by Wednesday of next week – November 4th.

In addition, they would like assistance upgrading from an older version of ColdFusion (they think 5) to version 7.

Contact Jerry ThompSon via email (JThompSon@afsvision.com) or via mobile phone (610-496-1456).

I'm a big fan of Twitter clients that allow grouping your followee's into groups. Tweetdeck was probably one of the first to do this, and it was a big step forward. Lately, I've been using Nambu and Seesmic Desktop on the desktop (which I feel are about on par with — or slightly better than — Tweetdeck feature-wise, but more importantly: not ugly), and Nambu and BrightKite on my iPhone. BrightKite's auto-post to twitter and built-in image posting (and hosting) makes sites like TwitPic and Posterous seem very kludgy, and I'm happy to be done with them.

It always seems like the latest & greatest twitter client comes along and makes switching seem worth it, so we all switch. That's great. But now, with the advent of grouping, we've run into a problem. Every time I switch clients, I need to re-enter all of my groups, and so far, nobody has found a way to make doing that quick and easy.

Tweetdeck was probably the best and fastest way for creating groups from scratch, with a long list of checkboxes for everyone you follow. That can get a little bit cumbersome when you follow several hundred people, but worse: the list doesn't seem to update often, and it's not really known when that cache updates, or how to force an update, if you even can.

Nambu has a nice dialog for creating and editing groups — when it doesn't cause the client to crash — but it's about this big —> <— (tiny!) and that makes going through a list of 200+ people a royal pain in the ass.

Seesmic Desktop requires you to see the person's tweet in order to add them to a group. You can search for the person's username, but that counts as an API request, so you're limited to a certain number of those per hour, and you share that request pool with updates, so it isn't ideal. And trying to find a single tweet in the "Home" column — which shows several hundred of them — is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. Worse yet, some people just don't tweet that often, so not only do you have to find that needle, you have to be searching while it's still in the haystack. I like the interface for adding users to groups after the group is already established, but this is far from ideal for creating new groups.

Something I wish all clients had, and I've voiced this on many occasions in the various feedback forums the clients have, is a special group that shows tweets by people that you don't have assigned to any groups. That would make any of these interfaces much more usable, in my opinion, since it's the catch-all bin for anyone that slips through the cracks.

I used a great web-based client, KinkyTwits, that basically accomplished this by allowing you to set an option so that users from groups were not displayed in the Home list. Actually I really loved this client, but it still has some bugs that are show-stoppers. I hear Ben has been thinking about updating it or rewriting it altogether, but haven't seen anything about it in a while.

As much as I would love to see that feature get implemented and become popular, that's not my biggest concern. Switching clients is a hassle. Any time I switch, it takes at least a few hours to get my groups set back up. This is not a unique problem. Think about RSS and having to switch RSS reader applications for one reason or another. Any RSS reader worth its salt can read and write OPML files, which are the standard format for sharing a list of RSS/ATOM feeds.

We need that. We need some sort of standard to develop for storing groups of twitter names. It's really rather simple, and could be represented very easily in XML. If clients started supporting the import and export of these files, trying a new client out could be so much simpler.

Here's just a sample of what I have in mind:

There are so many different ways to skin this cat, but I hope that someone, somewhere, starts this trend, and it catches on. I think it's desperately needed, considering how often a better twitter client surfaces that makes switching worthwhile.