After following a link from Kevin Dente to a twitter client called Mixero and installing it I thought I would just list my 2 favourite Twitter clients, why I like them and what I dont like. First of all to those who do not see or understand the value of Twitter, its NOT Facebook and it does not attempt to be Facebook. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that has taken the world by storm and clearly if you do not “get it” you may never. I have had friends asking me “What is Twitter?”, “Is it like Facebook”, and I’m like you don’t get it so leave it. I use Twitter for one primary reason, fresh content. I get updates from top Microsoft guys in a quicker way than say through an RSS feed, and Twitter seems nicer than RSS feeds to me. So that is why I keep going back to Twitter, because knowledge is good, and if you know about things its always good.

In essence Twitter uses a 140 character mini-blog post from a user, me or you, about anything you think is important, and sometimes what some people say is important. Scott Gu is easier to follow through Twitter, as is people like Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. The social media’lites also use Twitter extensively. So when you post a Tweet (thats the term used) you have a choice of ways to do it, each with their drawbacks:

• Twitter: Go straight to the source, to the fountain, to the mothership. You will need a browser for this though (Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox) and although it does the job, once you close that browser window the connection to Twitter dies and any new content coming through wont be seen. Your Twitter page itself also refreshes content, but you need to click on a UI (user interface) element to get it to show the new tweets. So this is not my favourite way of connecting to Twitter. I do like the once-in-a-while changes to the main twitter login page though.
• Tweetdeck: I have been using Tweetdeck for quite some time now and I like it primarily because it allows me to update Facebook statuses and Twitter at the same time. I also like it because it notifies me when new Tweets are made. I dislike it because the UI that appears when a new Tweet comes in can get in the way sometimes, even though it has a close buttons
• Seesmic Look: I like it because it has been written using WPF and it looks slick and pretty. It does not display notifications of new Tweets though, which I wish it had

I went to a seminar on SEO and the like last year. A company called Quirk hosted it, and at the time I spoke to one of their people and she indicated to me that they have yet to establish a way to determine the value that social media can bring in terms of monetary benefit. That thought stuck in my head and accidentally I have been a Twitter user for quite some time now and this morning I came across a website called Twendz that ‘analyzes’ trends on Twitter and specifically it listed a lot of American Idol stuff. I know this has probably been done before, but by analyzing what people say on Twitter you get an insight into their thoughts and you can develop trends on those thoughts. I use Twitter to follow developers and I generally get fresh and new articles from them. Following the thoughts of developers might give you insight into their trends. A trend I see sometimes is that a lot of developers from Microsoft are either going to presentations or preparing for them. It also seems developers are developing apps that make use of social media platforms.

Social Media provides trends which to me directly relates to a measurable value. I also think Social Media relates to things such as Cloud Computing.

I susbscribe to The Code Project’s newsletter and today I got some great news, jQuery will be supported in Visual Studio 2008. Now this is some awesome news. Makes one wonder if the Microsoft AJAX library will become redundant.

You can read the full article on Scott Gu’s website.

Ok so here is the thing right, I have been using one or more Wiki’s as a modelling tool for my projects without anyone ever telling me to use it in that way, so amazingly I found an article that gives you the do’s and don’ts of using a Wiki within an IT project environment. I agree 100% that a Wiki is of no use if articles are not kept up-to-date. Updating and maintaining a Wiki is a conscious, disciplined effort. Don’t think that by creating some content on it once you don’t have to look at it again. The main gain from a Wiki comes from going back into articles and updating them and maintaining them. By consciously updating and maintaining your wiki you not only document processes and projects but you also allow yourself to be brutally honest at all times. There are times when I read something and I think to myself whether what I wrote there makes sense or not, or maybe it is just not relevant anymore.

At the moment I use two wiki’s, a php/open source one and an open source ASP.NET version:

• MediaWiki (php)
• ScrewTurn Wiki (ASP.NET)

So there I was today trying to understand why the Script Manager code and the Silverlight Javascript didnt want to work together. I soon realised and figured out that in your Script Manager tag you have to specify all the references to the Silverlight Javascript files. After I did this everything worked perfectly, and I was relieved, because I wanted to use Silverlight as a feature on a project I am developing.

The Silverlight issue, though, was not the issue that occupied my mind the most. What occupied my thinking and strategising the most was to understand why content management for a website is so important, and particularly why it is important. The most important reason or benefit for that matter of content management on a website is that you can separate business logic and presentation logic and in so-doing alter the presentation logic more easily. That is the single most important benefit of content management. If you look at a content management system such as WordPress or Drupal it is easy to see that the presentation and business logic has been separated, hence the reason people are able to create themes for these content management systems and interchange them without losing the content. Content management systems present one caveat – the content is consistent but makes it difficult to implement uniquely designed pages without breaking the content management system.

I attended the Quirk Breakfast from Module 1 to Module 6, but sadly missed out on Module 4. Rob Stokes presented the majority of the modules, except module 5 or 6, can’t quite remember. A lot of the focus in each of the modules was aimed at everything relating to social media and Web 2.0 and how to optimise your web site or how to incorporate Web 2.0 into your current web development strategy. The lectures also had a build up towards Online Reputation Management (ORM) for which they have developed a tool called BrandsEye. They have also now released a book, an e-marketing book written by Rob Stokes titled Quirk textbook: eMarketing – the essential guide to online marketing. Its a 300 page book aimed at marketing practitioners as well as 3rd and 4th year students.

Okay so Googleness is the awesomeness and wholesomely goodnessness of the world and they have a great image of never harming anyone ever. Right. I am a great fan of GMail and all the services you get for “free”, but one thing that has been bothering me for a while is navigating from GMail to say Google Analytics. Getting from GMail to Google Analytics means opening a new tab, going to the Google homepage, clicking on My Account and then clicking on Analytics. Google Analytics is not easily accessible from GMail, but instead from iGoogle. iGoogle is a customizable page that you get when you sign in with your Google Account. You can click on Web in your GMail account and navigate from there as well. I would have liked it if I had access to all my Google accounts from GMail.

During this year I have found myself using Wiki’s in a way that seemed strange at first, but that made sense later on. I have been using Wiki’s to describe systems and processes, in detail, from which I was then able to model a solution using Object Oriented techniques and methods. I find that if I take time to write out what I want to do, hidden or vague things become clearer. From the description I can then identify objects and processes and implement those in a system or program. At the moment I am using a .NET based wiki called ScrewTurn wiki on a local Intranet. The wiki allows me to create and share articles across our organisation in a consistent manner, and the content remains as a constant reference both for myself and team members. A wiki can also act as a good knowledge management tool.

Facebook has a newish look and feel, feels like things are a bit more spaced out.

I attended the Mix Essentials 2008 event at Canal Walk (Cape Town, South Africa) today and there were quite a few things that interested me. There were five speakers at the event:

1. David Ives – Developer and Platform Strategy Group for Microsoft in South Africa – Microsoft
2. Brad Abrams – Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services Team – Microsoft
3. Michael Koester – Designer Marketing Manager for Middle East and Africa and Central and Eastern Europe – Microsoft
4. Julian Harris – Conchango
5. David Pugh-Jones – Microsoft

The event was split into two tracks, a developer track and a designer track, but it generally focussed on Silverlight, and more specifically on two software packages, Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio, and even more specifically it introduced XAML as a common way for these packages to share content between them. XAML, Extensible Application Markup Language is an XML-like language that defines graphic elements in a human readable form that can be used in vector-imaging programs as well as Visual Studio 2008. This gives designers the flexibility to design interfaces without having to worry about programmers not being able to replicate their designs in a programming environment. Julian Harris demonstrated that you can export files from Adobe Illustrator into XAML format and import that XAML into Visual Studio 2008. XAML is also used in the Expression Studio range of products which includes amongst other two interesting products:

• Expression Blend
• Expression Design

Expression Blend is, almost like Adobe’s Flash Studio, which is an IDE that allows you to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight applications. WPF is a technology that allows developers (and designers) to create applications that give users a better user experience (UX). Contemporary windows applications generally use square (often mundane) windows, whereas WPF applications allow designers to implement creative graphics into the interface. Rounded corners and transparent backgrounds for instance are used, and because Expression Blend can read and understand XAML, none of a designer’s creative flair is lost. The developer no longer has any excuses to develop interfaces that do not exactly meet the designer’s design.