Quick thoughts after day 1 at Chirp

I was at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, yesterday in San Francisco. 

First, let me say I fully recognize the tireless effort the folks at Twitter put into making such a great event. It showed in so many ways. 

The team announced a number of things like some metrics and the new ad platform. 

It was great to meet so many developers at once and in one place like that. The diversity of applications and creativity was inspiring. And so was the energy level. 

I’m most excited about where the platform is going and all of the new capabilities of the platform, namely Places, Annotations, User Streams and @anywhere. These are all important things that will give developers a more exciting canvas to build highly differentiated applications and richer user experiences. 

We have a number of portfolio companies that build stuff on the Twitter API. I’m looking forward to see what they will come up next. 

I’m also looking forward to investing in new startups that have a vision for new apps based on Annotations. So drop me a line if that’s what you are doing! 

Here’s my Suggested User List

I’ve been using the new Twitter List functionality over the past month and I’m already addicted. I’ve created a few lists for my benefit including some super close friends which I made private and a bunch of other lists that are public. It’s a simple way to filter my stream.

Now that more users have access to Twitter List, I took some time and created a new one called bijanisfollowing. This is a list of everyone I follow on Twitter.

I guess it’s my very own Suggested User List.

I love getting tweets from the folks on that list. Check it out and if you like what you see you can follow all of those people with a single click.

Some thoughts after a day at 140conf

Yesterday I attended Jeff Pulver’s 140conf in Los Angeles.

(btw that’s me, ron conway and howard lindzon)

I ran into a bunch of friends and familiar faces. It was also plenty of fun meeting a number of new entrepreneurs.

Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect from the conference. But I have to say, I was really impressed. Jeff Pulver has organized a fantastic event and I’m really glad I was able to participate and attend many of the sessions yesterday.

The coolest thing about the sessions was the range of topics and ideas about the real time web, Twitter and where media is going.

To give you an idea of the diversity of topics, the speakers covered everything from venture capital, television, news, music , law enforcement, public diplomacy and mom communities. And that was just Day 1. Day 2 is today.

But the most powerful session yesterday was led by Mark Hovarth. Mark talked about his experience being homeless and his tireless work as an advocate for the homeless. He shared intimate photos and stories about specific individuals that were beyond moving. He uses his blog & Twitter to tell the world what is going on.

Mark brought a woman on stage that he met in Chicago that is homeless. She uses Twitter at public libraries and SMS (publish only) to share her experiences about her life (I missed her twitter username so I’ll have to ask Jeff to send it to me). A number of us in the audience gave Mark a standing ovation after his session. And for good reason.

Thanks Jeff for putting on such a great event. Thanks for inviting me. And thanks for your passion.

Update: I just got a tweet from Mark. The woman’s name is Ann and she tweets at @padschicago.

(found these 140conf pix on flickr from george dearing)

The difference between social flow and broadcast

Earlier today Steven Johnson and John Borthwick were on CNBC talking about the real time web.

At one point in the discussion the CNBC guys ask how can users handle this constant flow of data. They were wondering if all of this real time data was beyond what users can handle or manage.

Steven and John gave great answers but I thought it was funny question because at the same time the CNBC screen was filled with all sorts of streaming data that doesn’t have any filter on it whatsoever. Just look at that screen: tickers, news, “breaking news” etc coming in all over the video.

Twitter offers a flow that is quite different. In fact it’s the opposite of the CNBC broadcast. It starts with following people you think are interesting and it takes off from there.

Btw, here’s the actual video, it showed up on my Twitter feed :)

Tagging Flickr photos via email on the fly

Okay, maybe you all knew this already but I didn’t.

I often email photos from my phone to flickr

I created a default tag for all of these photos that come from my phone. It’s called, wait for it…..”cameraphone”.

Then I have Dave’s Flickr-to-Twitter do it’s magical thing

The only problem is that now every single photo i email to flickr goes to Twitter.

Solution?

You can tag photos when you email them to flickr on the fly. In the subject line, enter “tags:[space][tagname]”. Example “tags: cameraphone”

You can have several tags in fact - just separate them with space. Now I have Flickr-to-Twitter still do it’s thing for pictures tagged “cameraphone” and I’ll have photos tagged “tumblr” for photos I want sent here.

Life is good.