by Calvin Robinson on October 3, 2009.

Yesterday was the second and final day of  ‘Future of Web Apps’ 2009. Hosted by Carsonified, FOWA is one of the biggest tech events in the UK. You can read about the event itself on Sporkings.com over the coming days. In this post I want to talk about a new app launched by the Carsonified specifically for the event. Helloapp.

The idea behind Helloapp is absolutely brilliant. When you sit down in the conference hall, you ‘check-in’ to your seat, by tweeting @helloapp with a code attached to your seat and giving a few hashtags to describe yourself. Then if people want to approach you, they know where you are. Whenever you meet someone throughout the conference you tweet “@helloapp met @cr” for example, and then if the person tweets helloapp back, you both get 10points. This is where the points system comes in.

Whoever collects the most points throughout the conference wins a prize. You can earn prizes through several different means. If someone Hi5′s you (@helloapp hi5 @cr) that’s a one-way shout-out that’ll earn you 20points. There are tokens hidden around the venue, that once claimed will earn you 5 or so points. Certain vendors also have their own selection of tokens to hand out as they see fit. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (Sun Start-up Essentials) were handing out a code to anyone who would sign up to their program/newsletter.

The reason this app is so cool, is because the whole purpose is to encourage people to network and make more connections. I’d love to see it being used in more events, not only Carsonified hosted. No to mention everyone loves a bit of competition, and as the gaming industry is demonstrating lately; everyone loves a sense of achievement, however small.

Of course there are a few tweaks that need to be made to this app. The biggest two problems I faced over the last two days were these;

• Finding your own profile page is not exactly self-intuitive. There was a UX lapse here. The only way to view your profile, or that of other people’s is to know the URL (http://hello.carsonified.com/Profile/cr) or to click someone’s thumbnail photo on the seating plan. It’d be  nice to have a ‘Go to user profile’ search, where you can type in the name or twitter handle of someone to view their profile.

• Special codes that were hidden on tokens around the venue not only gave users tokens but they added badges to your profile. There were some rare tokens (for this event they were Star Wars themed, i.e. Millennium Falcon). The system *should* have a mechanism to stop users simply searching “@helloapp claim” and copy & pasting the codes themselves. The idea was that you share (or trade) the codes with other people around the conference. So maybe only allow these codes to be used a certain number of times or something.

I was lucky enough to find a couple of tokens downstairs in the Sun Start-up Essentials Chillout Lounge (with the help of @scoobeesnac). If you search the codes for these, you can see people claiming the code, who I’d never even met – cheeky!

So I managed to get to about 200something points by claiming the codes I found, other people had found, and the ones vendors had handed out, then my score was practically doubled when my friends started Hi5-ing me, bringing me up to 570. It’s at this point people started telling me to check Twitter, because Ryan Carson had called me out. Brilliant, I had won! I got to take home the excellent remote control car – but not before charging it up and rampaging around the venue with it . I also got to quickly pimp my company (SRCLDN.com) on the stage. It would have been a nice prize to do a short 3 minute pitch – maybe something to think about for the future.

Anyway, here’s my HelloApp profile. Check out my pro badges . I’ve been playing around with the system a bit more and by exploiting I managed to get over 1,000 points. A good job nobody figured this out during the event!

I want to end on a quick ‘props’ to Elliot Kember for Tweets From FOWA – this live twitter stream monitoring the #FOWA hashtag made for huge fun during the Gary Vee and Kevin Rose show at the end of the final day.

by Calvin Robinson on August 25, 2009.

I whipped up another Twitter app over the weekend. Or rather I upgraded my current Twitter app.

Now you can browse your TweetDeck groups via RogerThat. From here you can copy/paste the contents of any of your groups – for backup purposes. The TweetDeck client itself offers very little group management.

I’m going to work on integration a little more too, so you can follow/unfollow directly from the list, instead of having to copy/paste back to RogerThat’s mass follow tool.

Got a few more ideas to add to my little Twitter project. I’m loving the Twitter API, it’s fun! Last time I used Python, this time I used PHP – a little reverse engineering of TweetDeck’s database files.

If you have any ideas of features I could add to my little Twitter project just let me know ^_^.

And yes… I will add a design to the page at some point! I know it’s ugly. It’s like pure code right now.

by Calvin Robinson on August 22, 2009.

Everyone I’m following on Twitter.
Get your twitter mosaic here.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

by Calvin Robinson on July 27, 2009.

So I spend all my life on Twitter (according to my boss at least ) and there are certain tools that I need.

I explained in my last post how I have a separate account setup specifically for following people who I want to follow, but who don’t follow me back. I beleive Twitter should be a 2-way communication tool, but there are still people that use it as an RSS stream.

To transfer all of these people from my main account (@calvinrobinson) to my 1-way stream account (@calvinscat) I needed a tool to mass-follow ~200 people at once. Adding them individually would simply be too long.

I tried NinjaFollow, but this just wouldn’t work for me. It seems very temperamental these days – I was just receiving error after error. So I decided to just make my own.

I’ve played around with Python a little, and so I knew how simple it was, but oh my gosh… what a sexy language! With practically no experience with either Python or the Twitter API I was able to bang out an application that did exactly what I needed. The only problem was, my program required me to run the script manually each time. That’s when I had the idea of turning it into a web app. This way, other people can get some use out of it too.

Thus RogerThat was born.

At the moment it’s a really easy, if not ugly, tool for following multiple twitter accounts at once. I’ll expand it later, but right now I’m just really happy at how easy it was to get using the Twitter API. I will expand this in the next few days, I’ve got some interesting ideas ;D

by Calvin Robinson on July 25, 2009.

I really don’t think I could get by without TweetDeck. I manage quite a few Twitter accounts for my company, but for my personal account(s) alone, I think TweetDeck is my saviour. Here’s why:

So I have two personal accounts, @calvinrobinson being my main actual Twitter account, that I use for communicating with people. But I feel Twitter is a 2-way communication service, so for the people who use it as a 1-way RSS stream I have another account altogether. @calvinscat follow’s people like Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, TechCrunch, Mashable: So Celebrities and News Streams basically.

So on TweetDeck I have

@calvinscat ‘All Friends’ stream, for my celebrity and tech/news streams
@calvinrobinson “People 2point0″ is the London2.0 scene, people like Marc Flores, Mike Butcher, Swannny etc.
@calvinrobinson “Chiefs” group, is my close friends column, Ruk Cooray, Aaron Sullivan and Aryel Abrahami etc.
@calvinrobinson ‘Mentions’, to see messages sent to me, obviously
@calvinrobinson ‘Direct Messages’ for trying to manage that nasty stream of DMs (please turn auto-DMs off folk!)

^ So that’s my main 5 TweetDeck columns. The ones I couldn’t do without. I used to have TweetScoop too, but that’s just one too many columns without going ‘thin’ style.

After the scroll I just have ‘Mentions’ columns for all my other accounts (mainly business related), to monitor conversations/references.