Fri, 22 May 2009 21:39 UTC
Another php|tek come and gone. I’m saddened by leaving, but, as usually happens, I’m reinvigorated and reenergized to go back to work. It seems I need these events to get together with other developers to raise me up out of periods of burn-out. I’m sure the same goes for others.
I gave my talk this morning on “Making the Most of HTTP In Your Apps.” There was so much material to cover and so little time to cover it in, so I hope people found little nuggets of value in it for their own applications. I’ll be revising it in the future to show more actual code examples.
For your reference, I’ve provided the slides below for you to enjoy and download. Here’s the abstract of what the talk is about, and please don’t forget to rate my talk:
“200, 404, 302. Is it a lock combination? A phone number? No, they’re HTTP status codes! As we develop Web applications, we encounter these status codes and others, and often we make decisions about which ones to return without giving much thought to their meaning or context. It’s time to take a deeper look at HTTP. Knowing the methods, headers, and status codes, what they mean, and how to use them can help you develop richer Internet applications. Join Ben Ramsey as he takes you on a journey through RFC 2616 to discover some of the gems of HTTP.”
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Tags: http, phptek, rest, rfc2616, tek09
Sat, 9 May 2009 17:15 UTC
As a Twitter user (@ramsey) with over 700 followers, a good followers-to-following ratio (4 followers for every 1 I’m following), and over 4600 updates, I think I have a valuable perspective on the use of Twitter. I throw these numbers out there not to brag, and I’ll be quick to point out that this is certainly not a high number of followers, and a certain percentage of them are probably spammers, but the numbers tell that I obviously have something to say that some people find interesting and engaging.
I also manage the @phpc and @atlantaphp Twitter accounts, but you won’t find me talking about myself on them because the point is not to promote myself but to promote things going on in the greater PHP community (for the @phpc account) and to promote things going on with the Atlanta PHP user group (for the @atlantaphp account).
First and foremost, many people use Twitter for many different reasons. I could list a variety of reasons, but I won’t do that because the list would grow fairly long. Instead, I’ll tell you why I use Twitter and how I think it works best.
To me, Twitter is both a micro-blog and a conversation. If I have a thought that I think others will find interesting, I’ll tweet it. It could be about technology, politics, beer, or life in general. These are the topics I tweet about most. That’s the micro-blogging part.
The flip side is that, once I tweet something, it becomes part of an organic and open conversation. Others are free to respond or even pass it along (re-tweet) as they wish, and I can’t ignore the conversation. So, I take part in it. Some will agree with me; others disagree. As a result, we all learn from the conversation and develop connections with each other.
Since we’re talking about having a business tweet as an entity, I’ll shift the focus to that of a business using Twitter. I’ve seen businesses tweet in three basic ways:
- Corporate communications; tweets are only news and PR items like press releases.
- Customer support; someone follows a list of specific hash tags (i.e. #product) and other search terms to see what people are saying about their products and services, and they respond and try to help resolve those issues.
- As a human entity, micro-blogging and joining the conversation; the company employs an “evangelist” to be the face of the company, tweeting informal messages about things going on in the company and responding to other people’s tweets, taking part in the conversation. As an evangelist, their role is to give the company a human face and personality that people like and relate to, developing relationships with the public, hoping to get them excited enough about the company that they also become evangelists for the company’s products or services (though they might not even know it); essentially, the evangelist wants to build a community of fanboys and fangirls for the company.
In my opinion the third option is the best for a company using Twitter to build a community and an excitement around their brand.
A fourth option that I have heard proposed (and that some companies have even attempted) is to ask employees to submit tweets that will then be posted on a regular basis through the corporate Twitter account (somewhat like a corporate blog). The idea being to showcase thought-leadership from the company’s employees. However, I think this approach misses the conversation aspect of Twitter, thus limiting how far the company can go to build a community of people excited about the work they are doing.
Having multiple employees submitting tweets will give the company a kind of schizophrenia. It will be a collection of disjointed voices, who, while they may have interesting things to say, aren’t taking part in the conversation. The signal-to-noise ratio will be perceived as having not enough signal and too much noise. The company won’t get many followers, and if it does, the followers-to-following ratio will be near parity (1 to 1), which means most followers gained are gained through follow-backs.
My recommendation would be that a company that wishes to take part in the conversation on Twitter needs to find someone it can trust with the power to tweet his or her mind in an informal and engaging way and to take part in the conversation with its followers, and it would be best if this is only one (at most two) people, to give the impression of a unified voice with a unified vision.
If a company wants to share cool ideas from their employees and showcase the thought leadership in the company, then the company’s Twitter account should follow its employees on Twitter and re-tweet their personal tweets when they provide value to the conversation that the company wants to create.
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Tags: business, company, enterprise, tweet, twitter
Thu, 7 May 2009 3:39 UTC
A couple of months ago, an e-mail thread went around the company discussing “Web 3.0” technology. Naturally, I felt the need to put in my two cents, and I thought it would make for a good blog post. Let me know what you think. Do you agree? Disagree?
Marketing speak aside, I like to think of these labels in terms of “eras” of the Web.
So, Web 1.0 represents the first decade of the Web (1990-1999), which is characterized primarily by a read-only Web.
Web 2.0 represents the second decade of the Web (2000-2009), which is characterized by a shift in the use of the Web to not only connect to a company’s or product’s constituents by giving them information but also allowing users to connect to the company/product and to each other. This is often called the era of the read-write Web. I think this era is also characterized by a counter-cultural shift in views regarding ownership of data and privacy. This cultural shift will continue into the Web 3.0 era and will begin to affect the mainstream culture, as well and (I think) lead to changes in copyright law.
Web 3.0 represents the next decade of the Web (2010-2019). It will be characterized by a read-write-execute Web, and we will see a proliferation of SaaS and Software + Services models. Software that lives primarily on the desktop will become less and less important as the desktop serves primarily as a client to reach services in the Cloud. I think that we will see rich clients proliferate on the desktop, but, in the end, they will really be using the Cloud for storage/retrieval, and the creation and use of rich clients lends itself well to a REST architecture as rich clients are used to maintain all application state and the messages sent back and forth contain no state at all and are cacheable at every layer of the network… but I digress.
As more and more people become accustomed to storing their data in the Cloud and sharing it with others, our cultural concepts of ownership and privacy will dramatically shift. There could be a widespread backlash as this begins to affect the mainstream culture, or perhaps the backlash will not occur at all as Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers have already begun introducing their parents and grandparents to Web technologies, and they’ve embraced them as a way to keep in touch with their friends and family. I suspect that, by 2015, we’ll have a clear idea of how this shift will play out.
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Tags: cloud, copyright, culture, ownership, saas, web, web20, web30
