connecting*the*dots

Last year I quietly scoffed at Twitter because I couldn’t imagine how I would possibly keep in tune with my friends updates. Intra-day IM or SMS messages weren’t very sexy options (even Twitterific drives me bonkers to a certain degree), so I left Twitter on the sidelines.

Well, I’m glad to say that I’ve managed to figure out a system that works for me:

• I’ve set my Twitter settings to send direct messages — personal responses to my Tweets — straight to my cell, which so far has only amounted to two or three messages per week.
• I’ve signed up for the RSS feed of my friends page, so I now check it as often as the rest of my subscriptions in Google Reader; Tweets have literally become micro-posts from friends and I comment with direct messages via my cell
• Thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools plug-in (with John Ford tweaks), all my Tweets automatically become blog posts here, exposing my micro-posts to a different audience entirely.

I went from hating the thought of using Twitter, to loving the service.

For what it’s worth…

WashingtonWatch (feed | page)

Why? It’s about time we have a real-time feed for bills on the floor of Congress. A few early concerns with the service:

1. the methodology for generating cost/saving figures is very weak flawed
2. public incentive to participate is nil
3. if public participation is nil, Congress won’t pay much concern to the echo chamber of comments

When I heard through the grapevine last year that Adaptive Path’s secret project was an AJAXy blog analytic tool, I was psyched to see what was going to hit the market.

The alpha release didn’t disappoint. It was powerful, yet simple to understand/use and had a few features (most notably, the mapping feature) with a bunch of potential. I ended up writing a glowing review and a follow-up post with a few suggestions for improvements. I’ve been using the service ever since… well, to be completely accurate, I’ve been trying to use the service ever since.

The above is the message that has greeted me every time I’ve attempted to sign on for the past few months. I’d post the problem to the MM message board, but that thing is about as helpful as a Republican in a hurricane. If I were a jaded human being, I’d say that MM was a thesis project for Jeff to become acquired by Google and there were never plans for long-term support or development of Measure Map.

But I’m not jaded…

So, I’m now looking for another analytics tool. I’d like for it to have a sweet interface and a bunch of ways to slice and dice my readership data. Mint has always been an option, but I’d rather not install anything on my server. Does anyone have other suggestions?

UPDATE: I’ve installed Mint (with some tweaking assistance from John, thanks man!) and I’m lovin’ it! The great thing about MM was its clean interface — really simple to understand — but conversely, the experience was akin to using a ladder, as I had to travel up and down the interface categories to get to the details of my data. With Mint, all of my data is presented in one simple to understand interface. No navigation necessary. Great job, Shaun!