iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

Here’s a word cloud for 2011 at MattClare.ca – mostly my blog (biased towards the end of the year):

Here’s my Twitter feed for 2011:

I think the insight there is that I use twitter to get a hold of Giulia a lot.

As my ThinkUp installation at mattclare.ca/thinkup gains way more data than my previous archives had I think 2012 will bring with it some real insight.

Here are the results you’ve been waiting for: the results of RimCount.com tracking of the Roll Up The Win Campaign from a large Canadian Coffee and Donut chain.

RimCount.com collected tweets with the hastag #rolluptherim and extracted ratios and recorded them.

The site really took off when it started tweeting back with the Twitter account twitter.com/rimcountdotcom . The site automated the awarding and notification of “badges” for different items like drinking more than one “rim” a day, or tweeting about it more than once a day. Of course the best and worst record holders were notified. I was also contacted by the author of the Facebook App “My Rollups” apps.facebook.com/myrollups to compare notes – looks like Facebook users are a little luckier.

Here they are, as unscientifically tracked on Twitter, in 2011 there were:

• 21552 rims
• 4181 wins
• 17439 losses
• 13007 tweets
• 5853 Total tweet’ers

Here’s a Wordle of the top 150 words tweeted with the hastag #rolluptherim (without that tag)

Here’s looking forward to next year!

My little hobby web site for tracking your luck with a large Canaidan coffee and donuts chain’s roll-up promotion is back!

My previous attempt was Drupal-based, and required an account. I was never very happy with the account requirement, and played with it being a facebook App but ultimately took the site down (described in this blog post). This time there’s no need for an account as it’s Twitter-based. This also helps with the promotional side of things.

I had hoped to partner with the www.rimrollerapp.com – but that Twitter based iPhone App needed a technical update, and for other reasons, it’s now removed from the App Store. It’s too bad, but you don’t need anything beyond a Twitter account to enjoy RimCount.com.

Simply tweet with the tag #RollUpTheRim to have your tweet listed on RimCount.com. The site tracks results posted to Twitter in the format of wins/rims (and unofficially, a few other formats).

You can visit the main page for the latest, the scoreboard for the best and worst ratios rimcount.com/scoreboard. There’s also a rapidly growing list of Twitter users who have tweeted with the hashtag #RollUpTheRim rimcount.com/list

The site is no longer Drupal-based, but some of the PHP from the Drupal module I wrote and the MySQL data structure were migrated to the new site which is otherwise built from scratch.

As many developers have indicated, working with Twitter.com‘s non-standard API is quite a joy. I was able to get things rolling (pun intended) quite quickly based on the simple twitter searches through Twitter’s search service’s RSS feed and looking-up someone’s Twitter details via an XML call is easy too.
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The convoy hauling six giant beer vats passed our house. You can follow twitter.com/ChallengerMF to track their progress.

This was one of my first attempts at night photography with the DSLR.

Really good blog post by Shea Sylvia about her chilling experience with a FourSquare “stalker”.

foursquare.com/ is a web site and mobile app that lets users “check-in” at locations. The social side that many enjoy is being able to discover your friends at locations, make new ones, and bring exciting elements of the internet to your physical spaces. Also, there’s “badges” like “Mayor” or “bender” people can earn for checking-in at a location enough times. People like badges.

I’m not a foursquare user, but I feel like I know enough about the service to understand its appeal and its danger.

Sites like pleaserobme.com/ made a joke to highlight the danger is publicly telling people where you are, “because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.” Their goal is to scare both users and services like enough to address this issue.

Shea Sylvia had a much more visceral scare. She’s OK, but the experience clearly had an impact on her: blog.sheasylvia.com/post/809428679

I also appreciate her acknowledgement that her mother will probably read her blog post. I know my mother’s the number one reader of my blog.

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Update: BinaryParadox ( twitter.com/BinaryParadox ) tipped me off about icanstalku.com — uses camera EXIF information posted to twitter posts to get the location of the person posting the picture.