Anyway, Google’s unreliable and hyperbolic schpiel apart, will Buzz be the “game changer” guys like Mashable’s Ben Parr say it will? It certainly has the backing, obviously, to make it big and a great plus point – for some anyway – for it is that it’s linked to gmail accounts.

One of the really interesting things about Buzz though, is that it seems to be somewhat of a chameleon network. It seems to change its skin to suit how you access it. Use it from the desktop and it’s a Twitter style aggregator of content from all of your contacts, use it mobile and it’s a location based realtime network generator more like FourSquare or Gowalla.

It’s largely irrelevant to me though, as I’ve never been a fan of gmail it doesn’t really work for me in any real sense. I have no network to contact with. Sure if I want to import one from Windows Live I can but why would I? Everyone I would connect with through Buzz is already on Twitter, my hotmail account only really contains legacy addresses of people I’ve not emailed in the years since I’ve had my own domain.

I’m sure Buzz will be great for some people but not those without gmail accounts and are also not already on Twitter, I’m no fan of ven diagrams but just draw one in your head and see how big the intersection is there.

Alex Payne, an engineer at Twitter and head of the API Team no less, put out the following Tweet:

“If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)”

It might not sound like much but there’s now such a flourishing, healthy industry that has built up around Twitter clients that it has a lot of people fearing for their livelihoods. Twitter’s back house team are rumoured to have all manner of cool tools they use to develop things with and it seems that they might have now reached a point where they are able to integrate these into a more coherent stream, one that’s able to actually be deployed onto the site.

The Tweet was later clarified

“Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.“

and

“I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.”

But it seems as though the genie was well and truly out of the bottle as the rumours spread far and wide across, ironically enough, the Twittersphere. The jungle drums appear to be beating louder and louder when you consider that they have just hired UI Specialist Bryan Haggerty from LinkedIn and API Evangelist Taylor Singletary who all but confirmed his next port of call is but this rather lovely cryptic tweet.

Expect everything to be clarified at Twitter’s Chirp Conference taking place in San Francisco on April 14th. If anybody fancies getting me a plane ticket I’ll be eternally grateful.

Though it may only seem like a little change at this point but throughout their meteoric rise Twitter have been almost wilfully ignorant of the user experience through twitter.com barring some recent small, incremental improvements. Twitter’s main tactic has been one of instead opening their API up early and well and this has allowed a healthy ecosystem of third party apps, among them clients, to flourish instead. Now with lists, something that’s obviously outside the core functionality of Twitter, comes the time to ask whether this move is just a user experience upgrade of if this is a concerted effort to regain some of the territory lost to Twitter clients.

I’ve blogged a couple of times before about Twitter clients and the fact that they are absolutely essential to make using Twitter an enjoyable experience. The latest statistics indicate that roughly only 25% of people actually use twitter.com, it’s an incredible statistic if you pause to think about it for a minute. Three quarters of people using your services dont even touch your webpage actually never visit your site, using an API and third party client app. As someone with a fair bit of background in web1.0 (where traffic is king and driving traffic is an art form) it’s just impossible to fully rationalise that stat, at least without a little shake of my head and a roll of my eyes.

From the traffic side alone it would make sense to improve the “in browser” functionality of Twitter but also, even though Twitter is booming the current state of play isnt exactly ideal. People I know have tried Twitter and been turned off by the basic functionality (or lack thereof) and subsequently have not been enthused enough to bother with downloading a client. Could it therefore be the case that Twitter want to up their conversion rates for sign ups? Are they planning to advertise and want to funnel more traffic through the service? Maybe they just want to mature a bit as a service and taking back a little control helps to do that. Either way, a reliable web based client would be great.

It’ll be interested to see where they go next from here.

Slightly ironically for a web-centric conference though, the wi-fi was a real issue. Ryan Carson promised us “Weapons Grade wi-fi” but sadly I could barely get a connection, either on wi-fi or my iPhone, for the whole two days. There were also some grumbles from those who had been before who objected to the slightly heavy-handed presence of some of the title sponsors Microsoft, Vodafone, Sun and Paypal. It was a great conference though and rather than go through speaker by speaker, theme by theme, I thought I’d just quickly run through some of the highlights for you all.

Francisco Tomalsky, 280North

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications

280North are a fantastic company formed by Francisco Tomalsky and two college friends, all of whome were former employees of Apple and worked on iTunes and iPhone development. You may know 280North’s work, they are the guys responsible for Cappucino, an open source application development framework for developing web applications that look and feel like desktop applications and 280Slides, the presentation software that works in your browser.

Probably one of the stars of the whole show, Tomaskly gave a simultaneous talk and live demo of Atlas, another wonderful Cappuchino tool which makes creating web apps an absolute doddle. Without going into too much detail or giving too much away, if you can resize boxes then you will be able to create web apps in Atlas. The presentation was so well received that they called him back the next day to show everyone more of what Atlas can do.

Bruce Lawson, Opera

The Future of HTML 5

Bruce is a big personality and has a passion for the internet and within seconds of him taking the stage he lets you know it. This was probably the most eagerly anticipated talk of the whole two days with many people staying glued to the good seats through the afternoon interval.

Bruce’s style borders on that of one of my favourite all time comedians, Mark Thomas, and whilst peppered with jokes and witty asides the stuff that he talked us through was pretty mouth watering. HTML 5’s dynamic graphics capabilities alone were worthy of an entire lecture and the demo of the new feature “canvas” took the form of a first person shooter game (ala Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein etc) which impressed the audience. Bruce, claiming claiming he was “not of a militaristic bent” decided to rejig this and instead showed the audience a first person flower giving game instead.  The bad news about canvas is that it isnt yet accessable (for the visually/hearing impared, that is) but it can be worked around if you use .svg graphic formats as the text is still treated as text.

We were told that we should “think of HTML 5 as a broad form, rather like AJAX” rather than like anything that went before. There’s tons and tons of other very cool stuff that HTML5 can do as standard, multiple file uploads, local and session cookie storage, and a wonderful facility to embed (and thus tinker with) video right in the browser window. There will also be no more calling in of javascript libraries to validate forms as they will be automatically validated in 5 and there are also all sorts of nice things like calendar widgets which should make your designer and developer’s lives a lot easier.  Very exciting indeed.

Aza Raskin, Mozilla

How people will use the web in the future

Mozilla are great, firefox is great, all of the add ons are great and rather unsurpisingly Aza’s presentation was great. Rather than talk about specific technology he chose instead to look into the future to see what we should be expecting from our browsing experience. Aza asked us to think of the browser “as a broker of trust, as an insanely smart butler”.

He also intruduced us to Ubiquity, probably the most forward thinking add-on available which acts on an intuitive command system based on wants and requests, Aza took us through the many steps that we go through to do what in reality are small, simple tasks online. Ubiquity is an impressive concept, far too esoteric to describe with any brevity, and Aza probably summed it up best by saying “with google you type what you want to fine, with Ubiquity you type what you want to do”.

Ed Anuff & Mike Malone, Six Apart.

The Future of Social Web Apps

Ed and Mike from Six Apart, the company that brought you Barack Obama’s MyBo social tool, took us through some of the developments around Motion, their new tool for the Movable Type platform and Typepad. Motion promises microblogging features which replicate Pownce, Tumblr or Twitter. Activity streams like FriendFeed and really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect. I also attended the product pitch on this and it’s a really great tool that I’ll be fiddling with in the future.

Bonus video section:

Kevin Rose, Digg

How to get your site from 1 to 1,000,000,000 users

Cnet review of FOWA

Anyway, so with my melon twisted and my mind rammed full of the knowledge of those much smarter than me I headed off into the night and back up north to Yorkshire. But first there was one little thing that I had to settle before I could jump on the train, my little girl had asked me – perfectly reasonably for a two year old I suppose – for a pink dinosaur. The only place I could think of that would even possibly have a pink dinosaur would be the Natural History Museum. I was in luck, one pink dinosaur under my arm it was back off to Kings Cross and the train north.

Thanks to the guys at Carsonified for a great few days.

Anyway, Twitter is not great in and of itself. What makes Twitter great is the fact that the code and content can be molded and shaped into any number of different things and presented in a myriad of ways. Anyway, what I’ve attempted to do here is bring together my five favorite Twitter apps, there are probably about another 10-15 that I’d reccomend people to use for specific purposes.

Number One

Tweetdeck:

Simply wonderful application that allows me to segregate my pretty large band of followers into manageable groups, I use this on my own account and even though you have to download it it’s pretty robust and easy to use. It also has a lovely search facility and shortens your urls for you quickly and easily. Oh and it also shows your facebook friends status to boot.

Number Two

MobyPicture:

Mobypic has been around for a fair old while now, essentially it allows mobile phone camera users to upload their photos and videos and tweets a link to your tweeple. It also works with facebook, youtube, blogger, wordpress etc etc. It’s pretty simple to use and a great way of enhancing your tweeting experience.

Number Three

Autopostr:

This service lets your friends in Twitter know when you post a new picture on Flickr, similar to MobyPicture but obviously flickr based.

Number Four

Twitterfeed:

If like me you run a blog then you’ll find this absolutely invaluable, TwitterFeed checks the RSS feed to my blog every hour (or whenever you like) and if something new has appeared in the feed it takes the link and tweets it for me. It allows me to customise the tweets so I can add a little message (”new on Totaal:” for example) so followers know what the link is.

Twitterfox:

Twitterfox is a great little firefox extension that turns your Firefox browser into a twitter client. It isnt in any way obtrusive, in fact it goes out of its way not to be. It notifies you subtly when your friends update their tweets and allows you to tweet directly from your browser. Great for work based twittering with unsympathetic bosses.

So there you have it, like I say it’s by no means an exhaustive list, just a quick run down of the apps which I find most valuable. Before anybody starts, I wouldve added Seesmic but to be honest I prefer tweetdeck and the assumption I made was that early twitterers would have enough on their plate without multiple accounts to juggle.

(Phil, Sue, Dale) This post is for you BTW