Twitter Lists + personal context = The future of search

In which I describe how Twitter Lists could supply us all with the power of context.

Twitter have just announced that you will be able to organise individual Twitterers into Twitter Lists.

This makes official the kind of organisation users have be doing with client applications such as TweetDeck – the kind of application anyone who follows more than 500 people has been using in recent months. Instead of seeing every update from all the people you follow, you can view just the tweets from specific groups of people.

At the moment Twitter is selling this new feature as a method of finding interesting people to follow. I might want to curate a List of people who write about post-production for example. By default, user-created Lists will be public. Once this List is known, and favoured by many people subscribing to it (as opposed to those ‘other post-production Lists’), I’ll have an incentive to keep it fresh, so the people that follow the List will have a continually refreshed list of ‘experts in a field’/'entertainers on a topic’/'philosophers of a specific school’/'fans of a given TV show’/'alumni of a school’ etc.

The first side effect of Lists will be that people who follow a couple of hundred others can now follow many more – knowing that these ‘check out their updates every once in a while’ follows can be relegated to a list that doesn’t clutter up the main feed. This will mean well-followed people/organisations will become even-more-followed people/organisations. But being followed by many people more who don’t read your updates very often might not improve your ‘Twitter Authority’ score.

Search

However, once people can limit searches to these Twitter Lists, the results they get back will probably be much more useful. Firstly, they’ll be able to search the text of the tweets of people in a given list. Then they could have the option for that search to include the content found at the site linked to on List members’ profile pages. After that the search could include the content linked to in the tweets, such as TwitPic pictures, Song.ly lyrics, text/images/videos from web links.

If Twitter then saw which link was clicked from the list of results, they’d be able to create a ‘PeopleRank’ algorithm that could stand a very good comparison to Google’s PageRank algorithm. In this case the person/organisation which supplies the best information on a subject will have their content moved further up the list of search results. A new measure of Twitter authority.

Sharing your contexts with the world

I’d also suggest that Twitter set up some default private Lists for each Twitter user that would define which sorts of updates they’d like to receive, for instance:
0. Family
1. Friends
2. Acquaintances/Facebook friends
3. Close colleagues
4. Co-workers/Superiors/Subordinates
5. Industry contacts
6. Work-related pundits
7. Entertainment/Pastime-based commenters and pundits
8. Governments
9. Everyone else

If there were default lists like these, Twitter would become very powerful in many ways.

If users got accustomed to switching between these standard Lists of Twitterers they wanted to see the updates of, Twitter would be able to infer the new context they are changing to. If someone wanted to be entertained, they’d view List 7. If someone wanted to do some background research on their field of work, they’d view Lists 5 and 6. If they were in a frivolous mood, they might view Lists 1 and 2.

Once Twitter knows your context, they can associate your context with the tweets you write, the information you give out and the searches you do. In this way context 2 would allow Twitter to act like Facebook-Lite. Other contexts could implement versions of other social network models: e.g. context 5=Linked-In, context 7=MySpace.

Also if you defined the mode you were in, then the searches you do could supply better tuned content.

It also means the day you spend searching for content associated with work would skew the searches you do when looking something up for a family member.

If users maintained these lists then different groups could get different versions of other information, such as location. When I’m in Family and Friends mode at the weekend, only they get my location information – other lists might get a ‘blurred’ location such as ‘London’. When I’m away at a conference, people in my Colleagues and Industry Contacts Lists would be able to find me on the exhibit floor (or at a specific local bar), while Family and Friends need only know that I’m away in ‘Barcelona’.

Who else would like to know what context we are in? How about advertisers? Imagine if we’d never see an irrelevant advert again. I don’t want to see or hear ads for movies when I’m concentrating on work. When I’m catching up with friends, I won’t be interested in being served adverts associated with my job. I think advertisers would get much better responses if their messages were being presented to people who were in the correct context to receive them.

Given that Google have tens of billions of dollars of cash, maybe now’s the time to buy Twitter – before someone else does…

Tube map close-up products

An entry on Annie Mole’s Going Underground blog informed me that the London Transport Museum are now selling products where you can personalise them to show any part of the tube map you like:

Men’s T-Shirt

Women’s T-Shirt

Mug

Mouse Mat

Go to the ‘RailOrder’ section of the museum site to order yours.

Map geekery: the version of the map they use is different from others: no disability blobs and no East London Line section of the Overground:

Bringing the Thames back to the London tube map

This week Transport for London have released a big revision to the tube map. They are trying to make it clearer. It is a great deal simpler than the previous version, but they may have gone too far. The River Thames has gone:

I think that the Thames is one of the cues that gives some grounding to people who have a look at the map for the first time. In fact the river would fit perfectly well onto the current map as it is (apart from moving one station) if you incorporate a new rule: station labels are allowed to overlap the river.

Here’s a close up of what it would look like:

…and the whole map:

Instead of simplifying the map too far, here’s a reminder of my design that has all the same information as the previous map and more while being clearer:

My redesigned tube map.

For a long page on my thoughts on London transport design, visit this page.

For more radical tube map designs and commentary on the current official design, follow the work of author and designer Maxwell Roberts:

See also:
100 posters celebrating the 100th birthday of the tube logo
Better art on the New York subway

Free Final Cut plugin: Inside-Outside Matte

This Matte filter gives you much more control over feathering. You set up two shapes – one is the inside of the matte, the other being the outside of the matte.

Here is the filter in Wireframe mode, where you can see the two shapes:

If you switch to Preview mode, you can see how the blend between the inside and outside shapes effects the matte:

If you change to Final mode, increase the value for Steps in the Smoothness section, and overlay on top of a desaturated, darkened copy of the clip, you get this:

Here are the controls:

You can enable and disable points on the matte:


If you enable less than three points, all eight points become temporarily enabled.

You can also only use the outside shape to form the matte:

In this mode you can choose a feathering value to apply to the outside shape:

To use these plugins, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Alex4D IO Matte.fcfcc’ file to

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

The filter appears in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

Final Cut: Mattes with differing horizontal and vertical feathering

Over at the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro users group forum, ‘debe’ asked for a differing horizontal and vertical controls for the feathering of mattes. Here are three free Matte filter plugins to do this.

This is the kind of effect that Eight-Point Garbage Matte-hv has if the feathering is vertical only:

Included in ‘Alex4D Mattes-hv‘ are Four-Point Garbage Matte-hv, Eight-Point Garbage Matte-hv and Mask Feather-hv.

Plugins are implemented using FxScript code. These can be stored as text files in the Final Cut plugins folder. If you take a look at the code you’ll see that I changed very little of the code compared with the filters supplied by Apple.

To use these plugins, download the ZIP document, copy ‘4-pt Garbage Matte-hv.txt’, ‘8-pt Garbage Matte-hv.txt’ and ‘Mask Feather-hv.txt’ to

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

These filters appear in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

QuickTime X vs. Final Cut Studio

Those of you starting to use Snow Leopard will notice the new QuickTime player.

Apple markets this as part of QuickTime X. However, it turns out that the new player is a small part of this new version of QuickTime.

As detailed as part of a 23 page technical review of Snow Leopard over at Ars Technica, as with the rest of the OS, most of the changes to QuickTime are hidden from end-users. The first release of QuickTime X is for developers to create new media manipulation applications.

The way Apple does this is through ‘abstraction’ – hiding which software is carrying out requests for applications. For the last few years developers have been asked to use a part of the OS known as QtKit instead of QuickTime 7. In earlier versions of OS X QtKit called QuickTime 7 to perform operations. In OS 10.6 Snow Leopard some operations are carried out by QuickTime X while most are still performed by QuickTime 7. As future versions of OS X are released, more of the application requests will be carried out by QuickTime X.

A wider advantage of Snow Leopard is that more of the OS is 64-bit compatible. The advantages won’t be immediately apparent for most users. This release (and the fact that it doesn’t cost very much to upgrade) is to encourage developers to create 64-bit applications and drivers. The eventual benefits will be access to virtually unlimited amounts of memory and much better processor performance.

For more on the 18 year history of QuickTime, the advantages provided by QuickTime X and how the 32-bit Final Cut Studio suite fits into the picture, read the QuickTime page of the Snow Leopard review over at Ars Technica.

For more on the QuickTime X player, QuickTime 7 player in Snow Leopard and the question of Pro feature unlocking, there’s another page of the Ars Technica review on these subjects.

Final Cut: My improved Crop plugin

This is an alternative to Final Cut’s crop section of the Motion tab.

This blog post used to host version 1 of my Crop plugin. I’ve updated it, so now you can download version 1.1.

When you blur the crop using the Edge Feather control, it only adds the feathering to the edges you crop. The built-in crop feathers all edges.

Here are the controls:

You can also invert the crop, so that the area removed is inside the area defined by the slider values. You can also choose the have different feather values for each edge:

…the result of these settings:

To use this plugin, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Alex4D Crop.fcfcc’ file to

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

‘Alex4D Crop’ will appear in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

Final Cut: Modify the Print to Video slate and countdown clips

In which I list the location of the FxScript code that implements Final Cut Pro slates, countdowns and more.

Although many people have moved over to file-based content delivery, some still need to output to tape from Final Cut Pro 6 and 7. When you use Print to Video, you can choose to display a slate showing the name of the sequence to come and a built-in countdown.

If you have the developer tools installed on your mac (an optional install found on the OS X install DVD), you can modify the way the slate information and countdown look. They are implemented using FxScript, Final Cut’s plugin scripting language.

1. Control- (or Right-) click Final Cut Pro [6 or 7]
2. Choose ‘Show Package Contents’ from the pop-up menu
3. Navigate to Contents:Resources:English.lproj
4. Double-click ‘Localized.plist’
5. In The Property List Editor (from the developer tools install) open Root:STRL:8501 for the slate, Root:STRL:8502 for the countdown.

Here you can see the script specifies Italic text, chooses a size (relative to the sequence size), selects a colour to draw the type with, and draws ‘FinalCutPro’ to the top and bottom of the screen.

If you want to risk changing the script here, it will probably modify the countdown shown when printing to tape. It is probably a good idea not to add any items in either list, but as FxScript allows multiple commands on a line (separated by ;s), you have have space to insert your alternate code.

8505 – What to display when a clip is unrendered
8508 – What to display when a clip is offline

Assigning repetitive operations to a single keyboard shortcut

After writing about using Automator to perform repetitive tasks in Final Cut, I found a post in Andy Mees’ blog about a more flexible dedicated utility.

Spark can assign your own keyboard shortcuts to play Applescripts, menu commands, and series of keystrokes. Andy gives a few suggestions – including the Avid-like ‘Top’ and ‘Tail’ commands: roll the in or out point of the current clip to the playhead.

While you’re on Andy’s site, don’t forget to check out his free Final Cut plugins.

Final Cut plugin: Text crawl

In which I provide an improved text crawl effect for Final Cut range of applications.

I created this plugin in response to a question in Larry Jordan’s monthly Final Cut Pro newsletter. Someone pointed out that the Text Crawl generator built into Final Cut Pro had a limit on how much text in can move across the screen.

[Note that generators aren't limited to a 2 minute duration. If you change the duration in the Viewer before you add them to the timeline, they can be any length.]

As well as removing the text limitation, I added more features: shadow, background and animation controls.

Controls: section by section

If the font you want to use doesn’t appear in the font menu, you can type its name in the ‘Other’ field. See a previous post for methods of finding the exact name of the font you want to use.

Note that the plugin will ignore any font you then choose using the menu until you delete the name of the font named in the ‘Other’ field.

If you set the Shadow Offset to 0 and set a value for Shadow Spread, your text is outlined.

The Text baseline ranges from 0 (the top of the screen) to 100 (the bottom). The Solid Height and offset give control over the size of the background of the text. If the Solid Horizontal % is 100, there is no gradient fill. The Gradient Centre ranges from 0 (the left of the screen) to 100 (the right of the screen).

As well as animating the text so that it is all animated across the screen over the duration of the generator (Method ‘From In to Out’), you can also keyframe the ‘% Complete’ value (see this post for how to do this), or set the speed of the text to a specific number of pixels per second.

The Shadow settings can produce results like this:

…using these settings for Shadow Angle, Softness and Spread:

Here’s a demo video:

Note that this plugin does not stop you from choosing terrible colour combinations for text, shadow and background colour.

Download: Alex4D Crawl.

Copy the ‘Alex4D Crawl.fcfcc’ file into one of two places on your computer:

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins
or
Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Plugins/

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

Restart Final Cut, and you’ll see the generator in the ‘Text’ section of ‘Video Generators’

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips