• Read more about Twitter Search Plus: Find Replies Inline with Twitter Search

Last night after watching the Lost premiere I had a question to which I was having a hard time finding the answer. The show had just ended and I wanted to know (tiny spoiler alert) who the woman Benjamin Linus was talking to at the end of the episode was. Google was no help (the episode had finished mere minutes before) so I turned to Twitter for some real-time searching.

By searching for lost old woman I was able to find plenty of other people asking the same question I had, but no one was giving the answer. I suspected that a reply to one of the tweets in question would have the answer so a few more minutes of manually searching for replies to the search result tweets finally yielded my answer. It also showed me how useful Twitter Search could be with a built-in way to find replies to the tweets. Rather than request the feature and wait until Twitter decides to implement it, I got my hands dirty with Greasemonkey and rolled my own.

Twitter Search Plus

This userscript (which requires the Greasemonkey Firefox Extension or equivalent userscript support in another browser) will automatically add a “Find Replies” link to the actions on Twitter search results and go out, find, and insert the replies to the user in question inline, just like the Show Conversation view. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

This makes it really convenient to discover if a tweet you found while searching sparked any conversation. While I used it for entertainment, you could easily also find out who replied to a negative post about your brand, or if anyone else has already answered a question you were about to answer.

Installation and Limitations

You can install the script by following this link and see the source right here as a GitHub Gist. The script has also been posted to UserScripts.org.

Because there is no way to sort Twitter searches from oldest to newest, you will only see the 15 most recent replies to the user posted after the tweet in question. If the tweet is old or the user is extremely popular you might not get the replies you’re looking for. I’m open to suggestions as to how to make this work better.

Happy Twittering!

• Read more about Enterprise Communications Veteran Joel Postman to Lead Intridea Strategy Group

Present.ly Developer Intridea Helps Clients Make the Most of Social Software Investments With Strategy to Complement Design and Development

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Intridea, Inc., the agile enterprise Web 2.0 company, today announced that Joel Postman, corporate communications strategist, social media authority, and author, has joined the company as Senior Partner and Chief Enterprise Social Business Strategist.

Many of our clients are interested in a straight development deal, said Yoshi Maisami, Co-founder & Senior Partner of Intridea, But others want help making sure their social business initiatives complement and support their broader business objectives. Joel has been doing this for Fortune 500 companies for over a decade, in both traditional and ˜new' media. With Joel's leadership, we can now provide our clients with Web 2.0 business software design, development and strategy, which is a powerful differentiator.

Postman, author of the new book SocialCorp: Social Media Goes Corporate, and founder of Socialized, is responsible for supporting Intridea clients with comprehensive social media strategy development, as well as providing supporting services like policies and procedures, measurement, risk assessment, competitive analysis and training.

I became aware of Intridea through the great coverage Present.ly was getting, Postman said. More and more, large companies want to give their people the benefits of things like social networking and real time status updates, but in so many cases, public social apps like Twitter and Facebook aren't the answer. Intridea has a suite of Web 2.0 applications, and extraordinary development capabilities, putting them front and center among the companies that are leading the latest wave in enterprise social software. Yoshi and the rest of the people at Intridea have built a remarkable company, and I'm privileged to be joining them.

Prior to founding Socialized, Postman was EVP for Emerging Media at Eastwick Communications, and held senior communications positions at Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems.

Intridea will be at this year's South By Southwest (SXSW), March 13-17, in Austin, Texas. Present.ly has been chosen as the event's Official Micro-blogging Platform.

About Intridea

Intridea, Inc. develops high-performance Web 2.0 applications and services to help enterprises realize the power of cloud computing and social networking. They include Present.ly for enterprise micro-blogging, the SocialSpring social networking platform, MediaPlug media appliance server, and the CrowdSound social feedback widget. Intridea solutions are based on Ruby on Rails for agile development. Intridea actively contributes to Rails directly and through open source plug-ins, and it hosts the Acts As Community social network for Ruby developers. Intridea is headquartered in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.intridea.com

• Read more about Scripting for Web Designers

This month, I started teaching at the Washington, DC campus of Boston University's Center for Digital Imaging Arts.

Specifically, I am introducing aspiring web designers to HTML forms, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL — the technologies that will make their websites do something.

The consequences of techies not understanding design are humorously well-documented.

Less well-known, though, is the equally unfortunate phenomenon of web designers who don't understand the underlying technologies that make websites possible. It may not receive the same mockery, but I know I am not the only engineer who is frustrated when designers hand off a Photoshop file, instead of HTML/CSS.

CDIA believes this sort of cross-training should be part of every designer's education, and I wholeheartedly agree. Here's a partial list of why web designers really should know how to code:

• Curiosity: The first reason is probably the most obvious — education is, in and of itself, a worthwhile endeavor. Software development requires a certain mindset and will teach you to approach problems from a new angle.
• Communication: A great deal of the perpetual conflict between designers and developers can be attributed to a communications problem: the two groups often don't "speak the same language." By understanding web technologies, you will be better equipped to understand what your techie colleagues are saying, and more able to communicate your needs to them.
• Respect: "Wait ... you're a designer, and you know how to hack?" Rest assured that engineers will feel more confident you understand their concerns.
• Self-Reliance: Often, it's quicker (and cheaper) to do some things yourself. Adding a "contact us" form to your website shouldn't entail hiring a software developer.
• Career: It's important to differentiate yourself from your peers, especially in a down economy. By being a designer with scripting skills, you will stand out from the rest of the pack.

And, who knows? Maybe one of the students will be inspired enough to change their focus from design to development. (Hey, a man can dream!)

So, when offered the opportunity to teach web designers some client- and server-side scripting, I jumped at it.

And I'm similarly excited for the upcoming training Intridea will offer in 2009. Stay tuned.

• Read more about Sort Your Files By Date

Others have talked about people being "searchers" or "filers" when it comes to e-mail. I think the same thing applies to hard drive organization, and I'm definitely a searcher. I don't have much in the way of organization in my folders short of basic overarching functional categories (Documents, Pictures, Rails, etc). Right now my Documents folder has 365 items in it and absolutely no canonical organization strategy. However, it rarely takes me more than a few seconds to find what I'm looking for at any given point. The secret? I just sort my files by date.

• Read more about The Importance of External Downtime Resources

Back in the days when Twitter was going down early and often, the biggest complaint by users often wasn't that Twitter was down but rather that they didn't know what was happening or when it would be fixed. Thus the Twitter Status Blog was born, an externally hosted Tumblr that would be updated when they were having issues. GitHub did similarly after a recent bout of outages.

Why are such resources so important? Because ultimately it's not the fact that a service you want to use is unavailable that's a problem so much as the feeling of helplessness of something you want/need to use being unavailable with no hint as to why or when it will be back.

Case in point: today is Black Friday and Live.com is offering a 12 hour 40% cash back promotion with HP. I've been trying to get through for the past six hours with no success (the entire Live.com cashback section has been down for most of that time). This would be fine if I had any idea what the problem was, how I could ensure that I can get the cashback even with the site being down, or even a "sorry, you're out of luck." A call to Microsoft support simply directed me to an e-mail support form with no promise of resolution before the deal expires. Instead I'm a slave to my refresh button trying to get the deal during brief bouts of uptime.

So if you have a product that people depend on, make sure you have some ways to let people know what's happening without depending on your app itself. Present.ly, for instance, employs both a Twitter account that we monitor to quickly respond to any questions about service interruptions and a support site that is externally hosted and will continue to work even if Present.ly is down. It is only in the case of three independent services going down simultaneously that we will be out of luck.

Ultimately all that matters is that your customers are happy. You can keep them happy even in times of outage by making sure that they know that you're working on it, you know about it and you care about it.

• Read more about Engines/Slices Support in Edge Rails

As of commit 5fa0457 (on Thanksgiving Day 2008, nonetheless), Edge Rails is getting work done on having plugins as engines. An engine (as of now) is defined as a plugin that has an app/ folder, which includes controllers, helpers, models and views. There’s also support for plugin routes at this moment.

As of the commit mentioned above, Rails engines are not yet app slices. A slice, at least in my opinion, contains its own assets (public/) and its own migrations. In essence, a slice would have the same structure as a regular Rails app. Not sure what the core guys have planned, but also having support for these two would greatly improve on the value of writing engines.

This replaces the old components framework, and paves the way for a new way of writing re-usable Rails plugins. For example, the 15-minute blog screencast can easily be reworked to be an engine and re-used within multiple apps. You can also write engines for audio, video, maybe a wiki engine and so on.

We’ve been working on the problem of sharing code between multiple apps for quite some time now at Intridea, and I’ve also been talking about it a lot at RailsConf Europe with Michael Bleigh and at Bay Area Ruby meetups. The commits I’m noticing in core are great, hopefully soon there will be some more relevant work into officially namespacing the new code so that engines are distinct from plugins externally; storing them in vendor/engines or app/engines would also be good — a clean codebase is always something to look forward to.

Interesting fact: Merb’s had this for a while :)

• Read more about Industry Approved & Enterprise Certified - the Computer Security Institute (CSI) promotes Present.ly

Intridea, Inc. is pleased to announce the Computer Security Institute (CSI), a prestigious community of world-renowned security experts and professionals, has chosen Present.ly to be their official Micro-blogging technology provider for all their web and mobile-based collaboration and communication needs.

At the forefront of security trends and research, CSI provides a forum for security professionals to learn, share and debate the latest thinking on security strategies and technologies.

In September, at the O'Reilly/TechWeb Web 2.0 Expo, Robert Richardson, the Director of the Computer Security Institute, handpicked and dubbed Present.ly the "safe and secure business alternative to mainstream social media tools Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter." Robert, who had evaluated a number of different social media vendors, and is extremely familiar with the space, immediately recognized the positive and distinguishing characteristics of the Present.ly design, including: advance security & permission controls, group functionality, Twitter interoperability, file sharing, an open API, scalability, and an appealing interface --- all of which are of great value to his audience.

Starting on Saturday, November 15th, members of the CSI organization will gather for their Annual Event, where registered attendees, corporate guests and other interested parties, will have a full-access-pass to their very own customized instance of Present.ly. The week-long event, which will be held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center (just outside of Washington, DC), is expected to draw 3,000 people, from over 40 countries, and will offer an opportunity for CSOs, CTOs, CIOs and alike to gain an understanding of both the technical aspects of security, and how security fits into their overall business and strategic plans.

The CSI Present.ly community will be used to assist individuals with finding like-minded people, relevant information and materials; tracking topic sessions, speakers, and exhibitors; as well as fostering continued conversations after the event is over.

Team Intridea is very excited about this project and looks forward to our continued relationship with CSI.

Please contact csi@intridea.com if you have any questions or feedback.

More details to come in the days ahead.

• Read more about How big companies use social media

Yoshi, Viq & I just returned from BlogWell, an event we proudly sponsored and was organized by our friends at GasPedal in San Jose, CA. It was an amazing event where we had a chance to meet with senior execs from WalMart, Home Depot, Cisco, Intel, Wells Fargo, and many other large companies. These execs shared their experience with managing their brands in the new social media world. The general theme was that these early adopters (often mavericks) overcame legal/regulatory concerns to establish corporate blogs, engage external bloggers, create a presence, and engagement in consumer social networks (e.g. twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube, etc.).

WalMart has launched several initiatives for external communication including a site called elevenmoms. They are also doing some really cutting edge stuff with internal communication tools for their 2.2 million associates. Another compelling use of social media was how Home Depot uses twitter and weather micro-site to help consumers during severe weather conditions.

More and more enterprises will use social applications (such as Present.ly and SocialSpring) to better engage with their customers, partners, and employees.

• Read more about Kicking the Email Habit for Internal Communications

As a CEO, I have to interact with our team, our strategic partners and our clients on a day-to-day basis. Effective and clear communication tools are a non-negotiable requirement of my job and I have been noticing that recently my email inbox is a mess and quite unusable! Too many emails from my staff, too many CCs and threaded discussions that are not relevant to me, very distracting. So, I have decided not to use any email for internal communications (which is not easy). From now on, I am using present.ly, our micro-blogging tool, to communicate my status, request help from my colleagues and also get their status.

So how is it going so far?

- Surprisingly, really well. Now my Inbox contains mostly client communications (the good kind).

- I post updates about once an hour (takes 10 seconds) so my team know exactly what I am up to and how the company is doing.

- Every once in a while, I do a quick scan on the stream, I get quick insights into what the rest of the team is doing. No more meetings, no more emails, no more phone calls, no more voice mails.

- I am so much more efficient and productive (and so is my team), I focus my attention our clients.

• Read more about 48 hours, 12 developers, 3 applications - Intridea at the Rails Rumble

Last weekend the 2008 Rails Rumble took place; the Rumble is a 48-hour competition in which teams of developers must build complete web applications from the ground up using Rails and available open-source tools. Intridea was a sponsor of the competition this year and we also fielded three teams of four developers. It was an intense weekend but in the end we all launched our applications. Below is a short summary of the three applications and the teams that built them.

Love+Loathe

Run1Mile

Lyricist

Overall it was a great weekend and our teams put together some fantastic applications. In the next few days we’ll be posting more about lessons learned and the process from each of the teams’ perspective (you can see Raymond Law’s thoughts here), but for now we all need to go catch our breath! Thanks to everyone organizing the Rumble and to all the other competitors for making it a great and memorable weekend.