So it’s obvious that Twitter is a phenomenon. Everyone’s been signing up for one (or many) accounts. It doesn’t really matter that only a handful of those who sign up actually use it. It’s clearly been the top-of-the-shelf buzz maker for the last year or so.

Yes I have an account. But I don’t use it. Not yet, anyways.

I may not be the best “statistic sample of one” to measure the trend against, but the fact that I’m not a daily user of it tells me there are others who’ve done the same thing, and it makes me wonder why.

 I think it’s mostly because it is really at a plumbing / foundation concept at this stage, rather than a full fledged “ready-to-use” service, albeit a very popular foundation.

There are so many writers on twitter, so many different categories / areas written about at any given second so it’s becoming quite difficult to find your crowd to hang with and follow. However, it has great potential, as soon as someone figures out the services to build on top of it.

Obviously, there are a number of subsets of user types that are already making great things happen for them via Twitter. Jeremy Schoemaker for instance, uses it as an announcement tool for many of his online marketing adventures and is probably raking in a lot of money that way. Smart move. Kudos to him.

Others are using it to announce their actions in the financial markets. As you may know I’m nerdishly interested  in the financial markets, and a couple of services has already popped up out there acting as financial filters to Twitterers around the world stepping in and out of the market so you can follow the guru of your flavor without having to “know of him / her” beforehand.

I think that’s basically what’s going to happen around Twitter – or any other “mini-broadcasting” engine that will be available; it’s the services on top of it that will make the real hay.  

This poses a lot of questions around the business model for Twitter, but at least they have the attention of a lot of people now (traffic), so they’re in a great position to leverage upon their foundation concept and offer these services themselves. The only question remaining is how to go about making it happen. This is the area to follow for the coming months. I wish there was a Twitter channel for it that I could follow.

S&P 500 June 17, 2009 - Weekly Chart

The trading / finance / guru-wannabe blogosphere right now is 99 to 1 certain that we’re on the brink of a major correction. Downwards. Of course. Because anyone who’s a serious blogger on the markets is a perma bear.

So, everybody and their dog too is absolutely convinced that we’ll be – at least – revisiting 880 on the S&P500 which usually means that you’re discounting a visit to 850.

Just about here is where it gets kinda spooky. What’s that old contrarian trading rule again, “You can’t make money going along with the general conception”…

What to do then when the whole community seems to be sure that we are about to fall off a cliff. Well, why not go all in? Be the contrarian you’re longing to be. Be the contrarian that average Joe is already by not knowing better and just following the crowd.

The crowd right now is moving money into the market, and with such a downperiod behind us, my guess is that it’s going to take a little more than some 50 bloggers thinking that we’ll go down to move us in any other way than up.

That doesn’t suggest that we can’t see 880 on the S&P. But that’s small movement stuff that you couldn’t possible hope to catch / time if you are not a very active trader, which I am not.

So let me say that I’m continuing to be long the market. If not for anything else than to satisfy the uber-contrarian within me.

Ever since I gave up on Netscape Navigator as my default browser sometime in the late nineties (read: since IE came bundled with Windows), I’ve just not cared that much about checking out other browsers. Frankly, there’s just so much you can expect from a browser.

Or so I thought.

I’ve known about – and used – Firefox from time to time when I wanted to check some stats from a plugin or so, for a long time now. However, I never felt compelled to make it my standard browser since the plugins alone didn’t make it worthwhile. IE was there. It’s easy to start and has felt faster (or rather have had another style of loading images that appealed to me more than that of FF). All until now.

So what has changed? Well, mostly the really nice CSS 3.0 (or whatever flavor it is) tag support became available AND generally picked up by the developer community. Just look at the latest version of Wordpress – the admin interface that is – and compare it to IE8, which btw was a step down from IE7 which is still my favorite browser due to its light feeling.

Anyways, this is me saying I’m moving over to try FF as my default browser for a while. It’s finally worth it as the web is a more beautiful place with it, and NO Chrome just doesn’t cut it. Not yet anyways. It’s display of moz-radius and the rest is just awful.

I was interviewed about PurposeGames and the story behind it by a Journalist from El Periódico which is a daily paper in Barcelona.

Today it got published. You can read it here. (only in Spanish)

I’ve been developing an End-Of-Day (EOD) quote updater for my charting program Trader’s Workbench. I have the basic update functionality available from within the workbench, but as I felt that this might be something that other people could use, I would like to hear from YOU. What do you think about it?

Are people using this kind of tool (end-of-day quote updating tool) anymore or does every charting application out there now, come with a more or less obligatory quote update service?  Is there anyone left doing their analysis on End-Of-Day data?

I do, and I need a reliable quote source so I developed Quotes Library.

I went with the development paradigm of less-is-more. I wanted a software that did one thing really good, and that had an interface that consisted of as few buttons as possible.  I’m pretty happy with the result. Let me tell you about the characteristics.

Quotes Library does the following:

• Update your MetaStock Formatted Quotes from any source
• Recalculates stock quote when split occurs
• Export/Import from Excel
• Ability to create new files from scratch, filling them with data from any source

That’s all. I think that the most important part is in the first bullet above. Ability to update from any source. This means that if you live in India and are interested in your local markets, you can use this tool just as well as someone in the States interested in Nasdaq quotes or in Sweden.

How’s that possible?

I’ve developed this tool with a plug-in architecture where the structure of any webpage can be described in order to get the tool to work with the web source YOU prefer. So for any new source I need, I just add the rules to read the quotes from that webpage, and apply it to the already existing application, without recompiling the main application. Just releasing a new .DLL for the source in question. Pretty neat I think.

For instance, I use Yahoo when I add a new stock to follow. But the daily update of Yahoo is usually a little slower than my local source that only keeps today’s quotes. Then I can use etrade, Avanza, Nordnet or whatever source keeps today’s quotes, to get fresh quotes right at the close of the market, instead of having to wait for Yahoo to get today’s quotes.

So, the brilliance here is that without having to re-distribute the whole application, it could be used for any market, anywhere using any provider. You don’t even have to have an account with that provider which means the cost of using the Quotes Library tool is zero.

I don’t think it’s an immoral thing to do either, since Yahoo is distributing their quotes for personal use for free, and the other sources out there does the same but for today’s quotes. Not historical. All this tool is doing, is to make the collection of the already free quote data more efficient and automatic, instead of manually having to collect it.

That’s it. I’d really like your impressions of such a tool, and if you think it could be of interest to you. I appreciate it. Thanks.

I’ve been following Joost for a while (who hasn’t?). If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s the new venture of Skype and Kazaa entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, where the latter of the two may just be the winner of this year’s weird-name-award.

They’re brilliant. Of course they are. I, like so many others, envy them for a gzillion reasons. They realized early on that if you get enough users of your product you can give it away for free and still make tons of money.

The ad revenues along with the 0,01 percent of users that pay for a premium version made eBay pay them the equivalent of a third world country’s GDP to let go of Skype. They did.

Enter Joost.

Where Kazaa and Skype fulfilled a need that, at the given point in time, was not available anywhere else, Joost comes up short. TV for everyone via the net. Sounds cool enough but here’s where they lose me.

1) Content is King. On TV more than anywhere else.
The content of Joost is near non-existent. The content you want on Joost is House MD, CSI, ER, Grey’s Anatomy etc. If you want user driven content, watching Joe Neighbor teaching his dog to yodel, you go to YouTube and the now endless piggy backers of the aforementioned pioneer site.

2) All TV-shows worth watching end up on the net’s torrent sites fast. Very fast.
Most of the time before they’re even aired in the US, mainly because the Australian schedule is ahead in time.

3) The technical issues are plentiful.
Streaming via peer-2-peer may be an excellent idea but so far it has yet to impress someone who’s used to 1080p on their TV/Computer.

Joost clearly has some terrain to cover still, to prove to us – the users – that it’s worthwhile downloading and browsing i.e. spending time with their product and the brands they want to push via it. Right now Joost isn’t there.

I think Joost need to figure out where they want to be in the market and what supply vacuum they should be filling. Perhaps producing their own content is the only way, because relying on users to do it for them won’t work. We got so many options that are easier and frankly better for that purpose.

Scene 1

JD, looking nervously at the janitor:

 - Hey man, how’s it going?

The Janitor, on a ladder fixing a light-bulb, looking down at JD:

 - I’m 37 years old. I’m a janitor. How do you think it’s going?

With many other TV-shows, they get really good season 2 and can last to maybe season 3-4, when all the characters have found their jargon. With Scrubs it’s almost the other way around. Season one is a total blast. I’m laughing out loud.

Whatever Internet once was, it is now an advertising arena where links have become a highly valued commodity.

Companies have been started around it (blogvertising etc.) and nowadays everyone and their dog knows that nothing is more valuable in terms of ending up at the top of your favourite search engine, than a link from a trustworthy source.

You can have all the H1, H2 and TITLE-tweaks you want, but nothing brings you faster to #1 SERP than a bunch of good links.

The more trustworthy the source, the more valuable the link. I don’t think that it has truly caught on for everyone in schools and other governmental or federal institutions exactly how valuable a link from them really are.

A link from an .EDU or even better a .GOV source, is today something that many would pay a lot of money for. For sure.

Ultimately, if you don’t watch out, it can start to change how you think as a publisher for the worse. You start writing about subjects you know contain high paying keywords, or worse, you write about a subject just to be able to link to someone who’s further down the food chain than you, and get paid for it. Reduced credibility inevitably follows.

Anyway, it’s not all bad. I like advertising, and I like the game it comes with. Trying to stay ahead of the herd. Internet is more business than ever, and the ways to monetize from it is really beginning to become clear.

Sooner than we think it will be clear to everyone, and that’s when the early adopters can begin to cash in big, and the followers need to think about what will be the next big thing.

Where are you going to be?

First of all, let me say that I like social communities and I’ve been a proponent of it for a long time. Back in the 80’s when I was around 12-14 years old I used to call Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) with my 300/300 baud modem – yes that’s correct 300 bits/s – connected to my Commodore 64 and doing basically the same thing that drives people to Facebook and other social networks; communicating with friends.

My problem is not with the idea of Facebook but with the implementation of it.

Facebook will crumble and be replaced by other communities in the future for a couple of reasons, one of which is spelled FBML. That’s the reason Textpattern was succeeded by Wordpress and if you don’t know what Textpattern is, you’ve more than proved my point.

Much like Textpattern – which had equal market share with Wordpress a little over a year ago – Facebook decided to go with its own Meta Language. That rarely sits well with developers. Spending time learning something that is likely to be a fad is not something that anyone likes to do. You do it because you have to. You do it because there’s no alternative.

Now there’s an alternative.

OpenSocial by Google is about to be launched, and if it has the hallmarks of any other Google product, it’s likely to be good. Very good.

OpenSocial is an API in standard code that hooks into a variety of social networks i.e. you will be able to re-use your already existing PHP code and not tweak it half as much as when writing your Facebook apps.

There are other reasons that Facebook eventually will fade away, such as the fact that it has no original idea behind it (easy to switch to another network more close to home, whenever such network becomes available), and that it’s gone totally overboard already with media coverage, which is usually the tell tale sign that something’s passed its peak.

No matter how many other reasons, I believe the main reason is the fact that grass roots will leave it whenever a viable option becomes available to spread cool apps and get to show the world how great you are using standard code languages. That time is approaching fast.

I’ve been developing a couple of websites now and thought I’d share some of the observations I made along the way. Feel free to state your opinion as well.

First of all, I’ve never ever seen the meta tag “keywords” ever matter. Never. The “Description” tag matters, in the sense that Google will pick it up to describe what the page or the website you have published is all about.

When you have a couple of ad-based websites, you can easily get obsessive over how to best drive quality traffic to them. By quality traffic I mean visits from people that was actually looking for what you had to say or the products you sell/services you offer. In pursuing this, we’ve all come to realize the importance of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag, and of course the off site elements; the quality back-links. The latter being the most important of all.

Anyways, in all of this I have played around with changing/tweaking the keyword meta tag but it has never given me any visible benefits. On the other hand, it has never given me any grief either so for most of the sites I manage, I keep them there. Nice and clean.

Except for this site. This site has no meta keywords, and if you got here via Google or some other search engine looking for information on what to do with your meta keyword tags, then all the better. It proves my point.

I’d be more than happy to hear from anyone who have had similar or opposite experiences in this area.