Disqus - Latest Comments for briantroy

Re: The great IMAP migration…

Jonathan — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:12:00 -0000

Haha, no! The trick was that it *didn't* work with the newer version of the tool! Not sure what version you used, but the latest version seemed to remove the --sslX flag as well as the "works" feature :)

Re: The great IMAP migration…

briantroy — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:07:35 -0000

Yes, this post is getting pretty old, but I'm glad you were able to figure out how to get it to work with newer versions of the tools.

Re: E-Mail Marketing Suppliers, can you do this?

briantroy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:43:09 -0000

Your frustration is understandable... and may be the Achilles heel of many Software as a Service or "Cloud Computing" vendors. Really, this is nothing new... vendors lock you out of your data and provide you "features" to see what they've decided you need to see.

I contend that the most interesting (and valuable in terms of ROI) questions are those that are unique to you and your business. That is why my company - justSignal http://justsignal.com - is built on the principal that your data is yours.

Want to pull it all out every hour and put it in your reporting database? No problem.

Re: How to Use Twitter and Asterisk for Call Notification

briantroy — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 12:03:45 -0000

Joseph -
Thanks for letting me know. I've added a link to the script in a zip file. Let me know if you have any issues with that.

Brian

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/09/social-media-is-infrastructure-pr.html

louismg — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:55:50 -0000

Brian, I promise there will be more chances to talk about social media as infrastructure. I believe that these are tools that can be leveraged which will not replace things outright, but augment them, and speed them up. I don't believe I mentioned sentiment tools here, so forgive me if you believe that I did.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/09/social-media-is-infrastructure-pr.html

briantroy — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:36:18 -0000

Louis -

I had hugely high hopes for this post... I thought you might really address the title you chose. Here is why:
I really think Social Media IS INFRASTRUCTURE. Companies will use it to do the things they already have to do (communicate, support, service, lead gen., product management, etc) using a new valuable set of input. Where Social Media will really impact business will be from the ability to drive information found in social media into every decision making process in the company.

You can't do that with trite "sentiment tools" or vague "social index metrics". You can do that by mining out what your customers would like to see in the next product release, or the quick and easy things you can do to make flying your airline a better experience.
I know that isn't as sexy as "brand sentiment" or "share of voice" - but it is where the rubber meets the road and (I'm convinced) where the ROI for Social Media in business lives.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/08/twitter-to-embrace-retweeting-releases.html

briantroy — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:20:57 -0000

The HUGE disappointment from all of this is that it appears the search API was left out. If this fails to appear in Search AND the Search API the vast majority of the utility will be lost. ReTweets in my timeline are great... but ReTweets on topics I search for are what really matters...

Re: Mission accomplished - VoIP Softphone for Mac

Adam Wood — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:53:03 -0000

Thanks Brian- I'll update here when I hear back from them

Re: Mission accomplished - VoIP Softphone for Mac

briantroy — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:38:34 -0000

I agree... I'd assume it is a simple change. As far as DND goes my solution for that is command +q (quit the app). Amazingly effective :)

DND should be easy for them to implement as well... From what I've been told by others the DEVs are very responsive.

Re: Mission accomplished - VoIP Softphone for Mac

Adam Wood — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:32:35 -0000

Well I missed that it even said that at the top so that's a bonus - means it shouldn't be too hard to add in using the Display Name field or the like. Will definitely email the devs.

Any chance you've discovered a DND? No that that is a killer thing.

Re: Mission accomplished - VoIP Softphone for Mac

briantroy — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:25:22 -0000

Sadly, no... That is my one gripe with the applicaiton.

If you have multiple registrations (lines) it is very difficult to tell - while the phone is ringing - which registration (line) the call is coming in on. That is because is simply says "incoming call on line X" - which means I'd have to remember which of my registrations was on which line. I have not contacted the developer about this... but if it is really a problem for you that is exactly what I'd do.

Thanks!

Brian

Re: The State Of Social Media Measurement (aka Brand Monitoring and Listening Platforms)

briantroy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:15:42 -0000

I get troubled by the notion that there will be a ranking/scoring algorithm for Social Media akin to Page Rank or Nielsen - simply because that system will inevitably be mired in the mess that is authority and influence. I get that rank is what the PR/Marketing crowd wants, and I understand why, I just doubt the efficacy of any such ranking.
More to my point, we tend to seek a single "lever to pull" which directly results in revenue (sales) - but that is a myth. The reality is - what generates and keeps customers is consistent execution across a business. As you put it, it is the decision making processes. More importantly, it is the quality with which those decision making processes accurately reflect the needs/wants of the target market across the spectrum of business activities.

Understanding who the influencers/authorities are is important, but it is far more important to do the right things based on the insights gained. Doing that enables the influencers to to carry your message for you with authenticity and credibility. Putting influencers/authorities in your pocket and failing to execute the on the insight is just more top down marketing.

For my money - it is all about the insights applied across the business.

Re: The State Of Social Media Measurement (aka Brand Monitoring and Listening Platforms)

maxkalehoff — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:25:40 -0000

We agree in many ways, but when I say focused mini-apps, I'm talking about data that automatically, without questions, influence transactions. When that happens, you move closer to a currency. For example, television viewers are bought and sold off of Nielsen currency data, as are keywords on the Google Adwords marketplace. Surfacing unanticipated questions is important is important -- but those are insights, not directly tied to transactions and exchange of dollars.

Re: The State Of Social Media Measurement (aka Brand Monitoring and Listening Platforms)

briantroy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:59:56 -0000

The best part of this post was the last sentence. "It will find its greatest success by subtly integrating into the morphing DNA of numerous business and decision-making processes."

My theory is that this space (call it what you will) will follow a very similar trajectory to that of CRM. Very little of the initial hype will become real-world ROI. The ROI will come from companies - as you put it - integrating it into existing business and decision-making processes. The challenge (as I see it) is for vendors in this space to stop trying to tell them all the questions and all the answers. The only questions that matter are those that matter in decision-making processes that already exist - to the extent this "source" can help inform those processes it will be adopted and generate ROI.

So I totally disagree that "point solution" applications answering specific questions will dominate... as a matter of fact, I'd argue that success will depend on the ability to ask un-anticipated questions and extract information.

Re: Mindblowing #IranElection Stats: 221,744 Tweets Per Hour at Peak

briantroy — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:06:09 -0000

Ben - These numbers are either dramatically overstated or Twitter is limiting which results they are publishing via the API. I use my product justSignal to track every tweet for Iran - and the max volume I've seen since mid 6-15 is about 17k tweets per hour.
I'm making all the data public at http://justsignal.com/freeiran/archive - you can grab the hourly XML files there and check for yourself, but I'm 100% certain there were never 200k tweets per hour (at least not that ever made it OUT of Twitter in any way).

Brian Roy
President & Founder - justSignal

Re: Mission accomplished - VoIP Softphone for Mac

briantroy — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:06:20 -0000

Jackson -

Sorry I can't help. You'll need to ask your provider for the specific settings for them. They should be able to provide you the appropriate settings for their service.

Re: Mission accomplished - VoIP Softphone for Mac

briantroy — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:07:34 -0000

No problem. I know it frustrated me for years... I now use iSoftPhone daily and have had almost no issues with it. Well worth the what the developer charges.

Re: Social Media - Perspective and Predictions

briantroy — Tue, 26 May 2009 11:56:45 -0000

Thanks for the comments! Social Media matters (I'll be writing a follow up post this week), but the hype is significant and missing the similarities to the CRM hype is a great way to really get it wrong.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/05/twitters-real-time-search-hits-pause.html

briantroy — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:12:40 -0000

Louis - I'm afraid the problem is bigger than is apparent at first glance. It seems that (I can verify this using the data I collect with justSignal) it begins with Twitter Search mis-indexing tweets. The Search API starts returning Tweets that in no way match the passed query.
Shortly thereafter Twitter stops indexing tweets (most likely for the obvious reason - that they are doing it wrong). I'm not in the business or habit of bashing Twitter, but it seems clear to me that Search (the one seemingly rock solid part) is now pretty seriously broken...

Re: Twitter, @replies and Multicasting

briantroy — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:43:36 -0000

I understand. But if Twitter is going to be a real-time service it will have to do EXACTLY what you need to do for video (or what I've done for VoIP conferenece calls).
That is one of my fundamental annoyances with Twitter and the "Real-Time" web community - they want real-time but only if it works within the constraints of the publish/subscribe architectures they already use. We need to re-think that.
XMPP is already building in Multicast (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0033.html) SIP/SIMPLE has had it for years.
I'm not suggesting that part of Twitter won't continue to be publish/subscribe. I'm suggesting that if they really want to be real-time publish/subscribe won't get that done.

Re: Twitter, @replies and Multicasting

Brian — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:24:04 -0000

I think the part I'm stuck on is that yes, Twitter is a near-real-time system, but with the exception of the SMS gateway, Twitter is not a push mechanism.

My background with multicast is from a live video perspective. The theory is great: I have one server and thousands of clients waiting to be pushed the same data at the same instant.

With Twitter, my Twitter update doesn't get pushed to X people simultaneously. It gets saved into a database and waits until clients come by at their convenience and request/pull the data. Luckily, Twitter updates are immutable and can be indexed, cached, and optimized six ways from Sunday.

Re: Twitter, @replies and Multicasting

briantroy — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:08:35 -0000

No, I never had it on. And I didn't notice a difference, I was commenting on:
1) The idea that the change would kill Follow Fridays
2) The fact that (which isn't changed by my misunderstanding the issue) multicast is vital to any large scale real-time system.

The same situation (regarding multicast) existed with VoIP. Multicast isn't about replicating the object in the DB - as a matter of fact the "object" should only exist once in the DB. It is about propagating the "object" to 1 or many endpoints/clients efficiently.

Think of it this way, the tweet only exists once (like a packet of real-time video) - but it has to get to a multitude of "viewers". We know the efficient way to do that is multicast. Iterating through each "viewer" and sending the same packet over and over again just won't work at scale.
The content of the "packet" isn't relevant - could be status, tweet, video, audio, etc. What is relevant is that you have to send it to many endpoints in the most efficient way possible.

I'll update the post to indicate I misunderstood the @ reply feature... My Bad.

Re: Twitter, @replies and Multicasting

briantroy — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:01:18 -0000

Entirely possible. It does not seem CLEAR in any of the posts I've ready. The previous see all @ replies setting is both documented poorly and explained multiple ways by everyone. From the post Luigi cites:
What this means is that whenever you open a tweet with @, Twitter reads the submission as a reply. This:

@Sheamus is a great guy!

Is a very different message to this:

I tell you who's a great guy - @Sheamus!

Twitter absorbs these messages in different ways. The first, the reply, will be seen by the following people:

1. @Sheamus
2. Anybody who is following @Sheamus and the sender of the message
3. Anybody who, previously, had Twitter set to see all replies

That actually supports my supposition.

But hey.. If I'm wrong I'm wrong... thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Twitter, @replies and Multicasting

Brian — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:58:57 -0000

You never had "all @ replies" on? If you noticed a difference with Twitter's settings update, then you must have. If you had "@ replies to the people I'm following" selected, your stream should be the same now as it was before.

I have never seen nor heard about people seeing @ replies in their streams FROM people they don't follow. Your home screen (& statuses/friends_timeline API calls) should only show tweets from people you follow. Depending on the setting you had selected, you would either see 100% of tweets from those you follow ("all @ replies"), most tweets excluding those from your friends TO people outside of your network ("@ replies to the people I'm following"), or only non-conversational tweets ("no @ replies").

Also, it would seem strange for Twitter to implement the multicast network protocol to replicate objects in a relational database model... Are you implying each user should have an independent db or table for the tweets of those they follow?

Re: Twitter, @replies and Multicasting

dalas — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:51:48 -0000

Luigi is right. You misunderstood the issue.