I’d like to bring a little personality back to my blog. I’ve been plugging away on a lot of work these past several months, the evidence of which you can see in previous posts. But here’s to more posts, even if shorter, about what I’m up to and the things I love (besides just Twitter visualization and stats ;)). Back in October I was visiting friends/family in Boston. I had the opportunity to work out of the great co-working space, WorkBar Boston and was fortunate enough to be able to attend a Boston Young Entrepreneurs event. Matt Webster of Drink A Better Brew was presenting that night on craft beer. (That may have had something to do with my decision to co-work that day. ;)) Matt’s got the great goal of exposing more people to the wonderful world of craft beers and his passion and knowledge of the space is extremely evident. I’ve only gotten into microbrews in the past few years (living in Germany helped), but very happy that I have. Matt just sent out a newsletter with the Twelve Beers of Christmas. If you’re looking for a little something for the holidays, these all sound like great brews. Thanks Matt! ...

Dear Twitter, I urge you to please hire a CSO. A Chief Security Officer. Somebody to lead the charge and organize a security team around what is arguably one of the biggest things to happen to social media in the past 10 years. A security team to balance the risk of being completely open with our lives, happily geo-tagging our way to a billion-dollar valuation of Twitter.com. A security team to realize that we are quickly losing any privacy we have had by opting in to the great and amazing features that you’re releasing on a daily, if not weekly, basis. A security team to protect us from our own poor choices. ...

I’m mildly amused at the response of Pepsi and the negative response to their “AMP UP Before you Score” iPhone app that objectifies women and parodies off the typical male approach to dating in the year 2009. Conversations flared on Twitter this weekend after the company launched their iPhone application. Interestingly enough, the response from AMP and Pepsi at the moment is to try to cram a PR response into a 140 character tweet. ...

After posting on 2009 airline activity on Twitter, I got a couple requests that it’d be interesting to see activity from coffee brands on Twitter. (Did I mention that I live in Seattle, home of the illustrious @Starbucks? ;)) A few tweaks and 77 minutes later, I was able to put together the following graph of tweets from each coffee brand’s Twitter account from January to October 10 of this year. ...

This has certainly been an interesting year for little ‘ol Twitter. Growth has exploded, celebrities have been joining in droves and Twitter continues to expand their feature set in an amazing effort to make those 140-character tidbits all the more valuable. Brands have also noticed the value in Twitter, listening in on the thoughts of millions of people in hopes of not only improving customer satisfaction, but winning customers over with a personal touch. Fellow Twitterer Dave Peck experienced this earlier this year when Southwest Airlines tried to help him out after getting stuck in Austin. ...

Some wisdom from my 18-year-old self. I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax, I would limber up, I would be sillier than I have been this trip, I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. You see, I’m one of those people who live seriously and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had to do it again, I would travel lighter than I have. ...

Here’s the un-bit.lyfied version to download your last 3,200 tweets in one shot on a machine with curl installed. curl -O -u username:password "https://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?count=100&page=[1-32]" Replace username and password as necessary. If your password has a special character like an exclamation point or an ampersand, you’ll have to put a backslash () before it. Twitter only allows you to retrieve your last 3,200 tweets, but I’ve got more archived over at TweetStats - just email or call with contact info from the sidebar. ...

Because you should… I first tried Twilio at a Six Hour Startup event here in Seattle. While I didn’t have a specific use for it at the time, I was surprised by how easy the API is to use. Fast-forward seven months and Twilio has an ongoing contest going to win a Netbook by building an app on their API. What caught my interest is the most recent contest to build a Twilio app on the Heroku ruby platform. ...

If I’ve been a hermit lately, it’s because I’ve been hard at work in the Twitter world. Apologies to my family for not calling as often. I’ve been busy during the day doing some fun work on a variety of things. Between the hours of midnight and 5am, though, I’ve put together a few fun new Twitter tools. The first was inspired when I spoke at the first Twitter conference back in May. I got followed by a lot of interesting people, but some of them got lost in the random follows I get as well. ...

Every once in a while I revisit Twitter Spam. It’s always interesting to see the evolution of spammers as it’s happened on other social networks before and their behavior on Twitter is similar. Essentially, they get smarter. It’s as simple as that. Early spammers on Twitter would simply follow lots of people and send obviously spammy messages. Twitter put a cap on that with their follow limits. Spammers of course then gamed the system by figuring out who had auto-follow turned on and following those folks as well as following regular people and unfollowing when not mutual. Twitter is since in the process of disabling auto-follow, though other services exist and will pop up. ...