Reid Beels has transformed Twitter searching into an art form—matching Twitter search results with thoughtful Web design that allows users to easily keep track of certain topics or hashtags in an aesthetically pleasing setting.
But Reid couldn’t keep all this to himself, so now he’s open sourced those files as TweetScope, allowing anyone with a few Ruby chops to pick up the code and begin creating dynamic pages of Twitter search results themselves:
I’ve recently cleaned up and improved the code that powers these sites and am releasing it as an open-source project: TweetScope. It’s all written in Ruby using the Sinatra web framework, both of which make me happy.
Setting up your own site with TweetScope is pretty simple.
Adam DuVander writes “Other Open Source projects could stand to learn from this. Heck, so could any technology that requires documentation. This stuff isn’t just for marketers.”
Via AboutUs “Yesterday in Part I of our series on five ways to improve an AboutUs page, we gave a tutorial on how to add a Summary. The next step is just as easy.”
Andy Baio writes “So I’m making my yearly pilgrimage to Austin for SXSW Interactive again this year. No crazy Worst Website Ever antics this time, but I will be speaking at a couple events, if you want to get together.”
Via Steven Frank “In 2002, I wrote a very simple program that would overlay a WebKit browser over your desktop. I haven’t worked on it in a very long time, and occasionally I get emails asking what happened to it. So, here it is, if you’re still using it and have an itch to scratch!”
Via JanRain “We have just released the first version of our RPX plugin for WordPress. The plugin adds RPX based authentication to WordPress user accounts, as well as for blog commenters.”
Cami Kaos writes “Friday night we were joined by Ryan Snyder and Dawn Foster of our friendly local Shizzow! We had a great time with them on the couch talking about Shizzow going global. Listen to (or watch) the Tech Edition to find out more about Shizzow and get info about SXSWi!”
Another cool iPhone app from Raven Zachary and team “Fight global warming on your iPhone by making an informed choice about where to ski or snowboard. Too warm for snow? Freeze over your iPhone screen with a single breath.”
Via AboutUs “In all types of wikis, we often see folks who have something of value to contribute but just need a few ideas to jump-start their efforts. If you’re feeling that way in regards to our community, here are five things you can do to create a more comprehensive, effective, and attractive page on AboutUs.”
Via The 451 Group “This is the one thousandth post to have been published on the 451 CAOS Theory blog, three years and six days since Raven wrote the first post, describing the blog’s raison d’être. It’s interesting to look back at Raven’s first post as a reminder as to why the CAOS Theory blog was launched and how it continues to add value to what we do and – we hope – the open source ecosystem at large.”
Amber Case writes “In a global, ever-connected economy, it is finally possible to rely on citizen media outlets to receive news almost as soon as it happens, however, people often have a limited basis on which to determine validity. Online, time and space for information gathering is compressed. This also means that time and space for decision making is also reduced. This is why online social networks try to use online metrics to establish validity in as short amount of time as possible.”
Dawn Foster writes “This afternoon, Katherine Gray (aka @thiskat) asked me about my strategy for keeping up with everything at sxsw, and I realized that I didn’t really have one. Here’s a start of one, but I would love to hear what tools other people are using.”
Portland-based Jive Software has been relatively quiet as of late. And that generally leads me to assume that they’re working on something new, but I didn’t really have much to go on as to what that might be.
Today, it all became much less clear. (Pun intended.)
Jive has announced that—for their newest release—they have abandoned the distinct Clearspace products in favor of launching a suite of tools entitled “Social Business Software.” And I’m sure it’s no accident that it just happens to be “version 3.0.”
For our customers, SBS is the new enterprise category. The enterprise has been devoid of a new application category since CRM, and they see the advent of social software as the biggest change to happen to the enterprise in fifteen years. It’s now spanning every major vertical and the visionary leaders are seeing the gains that can be made by opening up collaboration and focusing on the people. This is especially true in a downturn, where throwing more money at business process software is not going to lead to huge value increases — you have to look to the areas where there is the most to gain, the white spaces in a company: the people.
Few companies have had the foresight of Jive to understand that—due to both external and internal forces—corporations would be dragged kicking and screaming into becoming much more social beings. This gives them an edge on insight, but they still have several goliath competitors with whom they compete, namely Microsoft and IBM.
Now, Jive is hoping to deliver the platform that helps enable this growing corporate predilection toward more social business management.
How is the market reacting to the news?
While there hasn’t been much from the enterprise-focused pubs yet, the tech blogs have taken a gander at Jive’s Social Business Software. Here’s what they had to say:
“With the downturn, you might assume that Jive was part of a fad that has passed…. But after talking to Chief Marketing Officer Lawrence, it sounds like that would be a mistake—Jive added 200 customers last year, bringing its total to more than 2,500, and many of those newer customers are paying for more expensive tools, so its revenue actually grew 70 percent. In fact, Lawrence says Jive is hiring. And a recent report from Forrester identified Jive and Telligent as the leaders in the ‘community platforms’ market.”
“Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, the software combines computing with social collaboration. The Clearspace app helps businesses hold collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. The Clearspace Community app provides a platform that allows businesses to communicate effectively with customers and the broader community.”
“‘Enterprise software has been a boring category for 20 years, and Jive is here to change that,’ says Sam Lawrence, Jive’s chief marketing officer.
“You’d expect to hear something like that from an experienced marketer like Lawrence. Yet in this case, he is talking about a bold strategic move by a small company that has its sights set on becoming something like Facebook for the office, putting it on a competitive collision course with Microsoft, IBM, and a slew of startups that aim to help employees get better at collaborating. Jive has evolved to this point from its founding in 2001, before the days of social networking. Its early forays into social software involved online forums and instant messaging, and were focused on support— things like getting customers to help each other rather than call a company with time-consuming questions.”
“IBM’s Lotus Connections, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other players are approaching enterprise social-networking, but Jive Software wants to take some market-share of its own with its Social Business Software (SBS) platform. Jive claims that its software’s collaboration and profile features could make it ‘Facebook for the enterprise.'”
“I’m not sure you can announce your leadership in a category, but that’s what Jive has done with the announcement of its Social Business Software application suite—Jive SBS 3.0. The product does bring a deliberate focus to the logical organizational interests of a social enterprise– namely, Employee Engagement, Marketing & Sales, Customer Support, and Innovation. With that segmentation, along with an overhaul of its Jive Clearspace 2.5 released last summer, the software has been reborn—perhaps in the original image of its founders, according to Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer. With this new release, Jive is stridently targeting IBM and Microsoft customers with what could prove to be a superior solution.”
“From origins as a forums and instant messenger vendor, Jive launched ‘Clearspace‘, a single application with wikis, blog, discussions, instant messaging, rss, email integration and files into spaces organized by topic in 2006. This in turn morphed into internal (’Clearspace’) and external (’Clearspace Community’) focused versions.
Jive have now taken the industry segment phrase to rename Clearspace ‘Social Business Software’ (SBS), and are making a play as an enterprise class, company wide backbone for all facets of business collaboration.”
“The concept is fascinating — Jive’s software uses a social networking interface to draw in and connect a company’s employees with one another, and with customers. At first blush it looks like Facebook, a format Jive hopes will help engage companies’ younger employees….
“Dave and the folks who started Jive, Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, had lots of other thoughtful things to say about Jive’s outlook and Portland’s startup scene. I’ll have more on that, and more from them, in an upcoming article.”
What’s next?
Jive will be rolling out the new Social Business Software suite next week—but existing customer already have access. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception this latest iteration of Jive’s tools receives. Here’s hoping they get a positive response from both current customers and those potential customers waiting in the wings.
There are a number of folks from Portland and the Silicon Forest headed down to Austin, Texas, this week for SXSW. And while I’ve heard about a number of those folks anecdotally, I thought it might be helpful for all of us if we compiled a definitive list of Twitter accounts, so you can keep tabs on who’s doing what.
(Of course, to keep tabs on who’s doing what where you’ll want to sign up for Shizzow, too.)
So here’s who I have so far. Please comment if I missed you, if I missed someone you know is going, if you just signed up for a Twitter account, or if I added you thinking you were going but you’re not. I’ll make sure to update the post as comments dictate.
The current list of Twitter accounts for Portland or Silicon Forest attendees at SXSW includes:
It’s this Wednesday, March 11 from 12-2 at their relatively new digs at 1636 NW Lovejoy Streeet. Look for this sweet plaque.
The last time I was there, they were putting the finishing touches on a conference room, and I think that may all be done by now. So, come on, come all and chow down with us. Just please make sure you RSVP over on Upcoming so they know how much food to get and drop a comment there if you’re a vegan or vegetarian.
This coming Wednesday is shaping up to be another busy one here in Portland, right before a horde of locals head off to SXSW.
I say this every time, and I mean it: big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.
I’m sorry to have to report that Eugene-based OsoEco—a site focused on socially responsible shopping that was in the running to win Angel Oregon last year—has announced it is closing its doors and shutting down its site at the end of this month.
The site never made it out of beta.
Community members received the following email on Saturday:
Hello OsoEco Community:
I’d like to start off this e-mail saying how much all of us here at OsoEco have appreciated your time, insights and patience over the last 18-24 months while we’ve worked to continue building our “healthy social shopping” community. We had been diligently trying to raise more funds from investors to enable us to finish building our Web site; however, we were not able to secure any additional funding. As a result we will be disabling osoeco.com on March 30, 2009.
This deeply saddens all of us at OsoEco. We realize that if it wasn’t for each of you joining our community/adding valuable content that we would not have gotten as far as we have.Your belief in creating a community of people that enjoy helping each other find the healthiest solutions is the real reason why we started OsoEco. Thank you for the the time and energy you put into adding content to OsoEco. We know that OsoEco would have become a trusted source for people to exchange healthy ideas and solutions.
We’d like to take this opportunity and suggest a few online communities that we feel share our values for fostering a business that focuses on personal and/or planetary wellness. If you’re not already members of these communities I encourage you to consider joining them:
Greenlane (Lane County, OR)
“A business network providing education, resources, networking, and marketing for sustainability. Join our community of Lane County businesses, non-profits and individuals and share sustainable ideas and practices.”
Sustainlane (Global)
“The web’s largest people-powered guide to sustainable living. SustainLane.com is filled with personal accounts of how-tos, news, and local business and product reviews for sustainable living.”
NOTE: Our former (and amazing) Community Manager, Cris Bisch <mailto:cris@sustainlane.com> , is now on the SustainLane team. I highly recommend you connect with her if you’d like to talk about “green” products and services. She is a wealth of knowledge!
EcoMetro (Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Minneapolis/St Paul, MN; and East Bay, CA)
“EcoMetro guides provide great resources and several hundred coupons for products and services that have reduced environmental impacts.”
Helia (Global)
“Healia is the premier consumer health search engine for finding high quality and personalized health information on the Web. It serves as an independent, unbiased gateway to the highest quality health information resources.”
Thank you again for being a part of this exciting ride with us! We look forward to crossing paths with each of you out there in both the real and virtual worlds of sustainability/health & wellness.
Enjoy life!
Sincerely,
Caroline Cummings | CEO/Co-founder
(please feel free to connect with me on Facebook – search for “Caroline Cummings Eugene”)
Katie Wilson-Hamaker | President/Co-founder
(please feel free to connect with me on Facebook or GreenLane
<http://www.greenlane-sbn.org/>
Rick was kind enough to handle the driving duties, which left the rest of us free to chatter and OH all the pearls of wisdom on Twitter. After about 20 minutes, Rick went into shock from being surrounded by people tweeting, but unable to do so himself.
This spawned a discussion about a steering wheel keypad with a heads-up display that would finally allow Rick to see all his TweetDeck columns without scrolling.
But you already knew that because you were following our road trip on Twitter.
What? Oh.
Even though we started off a bit slow, we arrived with plenty of time to spare and then quickly wasted it looking for a coffee shop with a restroom.
Josh Maher, the organizer of the Seattle Lunch 2.0 chapter, holds happy hours as well as lunches, and Friday’s was a happy hour. Since we were on a diplomatic mission, and it was a happy hour, Rick brought a gift, Portland beer. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and that’s such a Portland thing to do.
Axios Law Group hosted the happy hour at their offices in downtown Seattle, and TalentSpring, whose office is in the same building, co-sponsored the event. Dawn wasn’t there to get a count, but I think there were about 30 to 40 people spread throughout the office. Then again, I’m not very good at counting, so it could have been more.
In classic Portland style, we included our Twitter handles on our name tags, which drew attention from several Seattleites, many of whom were just making the jump into Twitter. There were also funny references to how happy were were to get out of depressing Portland, alluding to that recent Business Week article.
We mixed and mingled, and as always, Kelly’s LED name badge garnered a lot of attention. I’m pretty sure John DeRosa wants one of his own. I chatted with John, Matt Woodward and several other people. My pea brain doesn’t do well with names, so apologies for not calling out all the good people who chatted with me.
After about an hour of mixing, Josh introduced the gracious hosts, Adam from Axios and Bryan from TalentSpring. Then I stumbled through a “hello from Portland” and threw Rick under the bus to talk about Open Source Bridge, the other reason we headed up there. As usual, he did a great job despite the tire tracks.
Brian Westbrook and Danielle Morrill streamed the event live to Seattle 2.0, and I’m hoping to get the recordings of the interviews he did with Selena and Rick. If/when I get those, they’ll be added to this post.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get many pictures of the event. All we had were our iPhone cameras, and Rick’s nice camera took a header into the CubeSpace parking lot before we even got on the road. In hindsight, I guess we should have brought Aaron or Mark along to snap photos.
After the happy hour ended, it was back on the road; six hours in the car for a two-hour event. That’s dedication.
May 20 hosted by WebVisions at the Oregon Convention Center
As always, big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.
Via def euler(x); cos(x) + i*sin(x); end “If you live in or would like to visit beautiful Portland, OR, consider signing up for the Open Source Bridge conference. I will (probably) be giving a talk on RubySpec and Rubinius 1.0. There’s lots of interesting folks giving great talks. This is an opportunity to hear how people are developing the open-source community.”
Today, the traditional lines dividing “creatives” and “developers” is becoming exceedingly blurry. And I, for one, welcome that blurriness.
I mean, all of those folks are creative (and always have been). Because some of these folks whom you would traditionally throw in the realm of non-creatives—aside from being brilliant and creative developers—are also amazing photographers, knitters, designers, and writers.
Likewise, there are any number of drool-worthy graphic designers who have stepped into the realm of development. To finely craft their own CSS. Or churn out application code that would make traditional “developers” swoon.
Long story short, “creatives,” in my opinion, is a nonsensical moniker. The concept of creative is completely outdated. An unnecessary silo.
We’re all creative, people. All of us. (Well, except for me. I largely just regurgitate stuff I hear.)
Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t even see that soapbox. I just happened to step up there.
Long relegated to the world of graphic design, I believe that the term “creatives” covers a much broader spectrum of creative professionals, like Web app and mobile app developers, for example. Like bloggers. Like Web designers. Like wiki developers. Like so many other technology pursuits that require a great deal of creativity.
So, when I see documents designed to speak for the “creatives” in the Oregon, I think it’s really important that you’re involved. Because you’re doing amazing work. And you’re—in many ways—leading Portland and the Silicon Forest.
Oregon Creative Industries (OCI) is a trade association being created to provide a voice for Oregon’s Creative Economy participants, working to champion sustainable economic growth for the sector.
Why do I think you should review this effort?
Well, for one thing it’s going to affect you. For another, it’s an effort in which a number of people we know and love have been involved, including Legion of Tech, DevGroup NW, and Social Media Club of Portland. And finally, because I know there are a big chunk of readers out there—incredibly talented creative developers—who live in the part of the Silicon Forest that isn’t Portland proper. So when people around Portland start talking about things for “Oregon,” I start getting a bit edgy. Then I start thinking that more of Oregon needs to be involved. To, you know, speak for Oregon.
So what are you commenting on?
I’m glad you asked.
After several months and hundreds of volunteer hours reaching out and listening to the community, OCI recently published a draft document for public comment that defines the Creative Industries economic cluster in Oregon and proposes several objectives and initiatives for sustaining and growing Oregon’s creative economy.
The document outlines a number of benefits of the creative industry, including:
Creative Industries provide Innovation strength. In an ever-increasing global economy, one comparative advantage we have is our ability to innovate. Successful innovation comes about by commercial use of new ideas as a result of market and technology know-how, coupled with design and creative talent. This ultimately delivers new or enhanced products, processes or services that increase individual business profits, which contribute to the overall health of our region’s economy. Knowledge generation and sharing is the key to fueling Cluster growth and competitiveness and this can be achieved by the uptake of innovation through the Creative Industries Cluster.
Now, it’s in your hands. The document is a rough draft. And it could use your input. It could use input from all of us. Because while it’s a good start, it could use fine tuning. Hence the call for public comment.
If you choose to comment on this document, I’d encourage you to focus on the following areas:
Cluster Description
Cluster Strengths
Recent Accomplishments for the Cluster Organization
Please download the document, review it, edit it, and submit your feedback to info@oregoncreative.org. Even if you don’t agree with the basis of the document—arguing for the formation of a trade organization—I’d still encourage you to read it and comment.
In fact, I’d especially encourage you to participate in the public comment if you disagree.
Whatever your opinion, comment. And please feel free to cc: siliconflorist@gmail.com. I’d love to see your thoughts.
Once I’ve formulated my response, I’ll be publishing my comments here. And with your permission, I’d be happy to include yours so that we can publish a joint response to the public comment.
It’s been a while since it was 
Friday, 
It’s no secret that I have a