I really hate how spammy this sounds, but it’s a good use of Twitter to drive traffic to a product, in this case Mahalo.

Jason Calacanis, a master technology marketer, has announced that he will be giving away a MacBook Air to one of his twitter followers when he reaches 20,000 followers.

If you haven’t used Twitter before now is your chance to give it a try with a little incentive.  You might even want to check out Mahalo, a human powered search engine.  To follow Calacanis on Twitter just go here @JasonCalacanis

This is not an advertisement.  I just thought a clever idea deserves mention.  Besides who doesn’t want a MacBook Air?

I love these short video’s. This is a great way introduce clients to the possibilities of new applications in a clear plain way that a non-techie can understand.

Dave Winer began posting about sending a photo from his iPhone to Twitter via flickr recently. (here and here are just two of them)

I thought this was a great idea so I decided to write an application and possibly offer it as a service. Well the service thing fell to the wayside rapidly because you have to have the Twitter username and password to post the Tweet. I didn’t like that idea, so decided just to give the app away. Use it, don’t use it, complain about the coding style, or whatever you like.

The application is fairly straight forward. It doesn’t depend on the iPhone, you can post photo’s anyway you like. You tag the photo’s so that the application knows which photo’s to upload. Run it from a cron job on your server and away you go. The parameters necessary for all this to work are fairly well documented. You need things like a flickr api key, flickr username, Twitter username/password, the tag to grab and a couple others.

One thing to not is I had to subtract 900 seconds from the timestamps that I send to flickr otherwise I would miss photo’s. It seems from my tests that flickr tends to indicate that a photo was uploaded before it was taken. Without subtracting that time I would miss uploaded photo’s due to the time I last checked was after the time reported by flickr’s api for the photo. You can adjust that time if necessary.

I hope it works for everyone, enjoy. I have only tested this in my environment so your mileage may vary. And thanks to Dave Winer for the terrific idea.

This application is written in PHP and should work in PHP4 or PHP5

Download Photo2Twitter

I am just beginning to warm to twitter. I live in Wisconsin (go ahead find it on a map) and technology seems to lag here. Twitter is useful if you are exchanging notes amongst a group of people, but up here cell phones are just gaining popularity. I think of it like charity work amongst the technologically challenged.

This post at 0xDECAFBAD blog has an interesting thought one how to tag in twitter. He has come up with the idea of sticky tags or persistent tags. Basically you tag your message and those tags persist across every message until you remove them. Then to follow a thread you simply use http://twitter.com/yourname/tag or http://twitter.com/yourname/tag+tag. I like the idea of keeping it simple. So if I want to follow only your tweets on barcamp but am not really interested in the rest I could use http://twitter.com/yourname/barcamp