I’ve deleted my Wakoopa account (sorry Wakoopa!), since I didn’t see it help me in any way besides maybe me taking a look at it every now and then to look at an abstract graph of how I spent my last week on the computer.

I am not going to all together delete my Facebook or Orkut accounts since they let me stay in touch with friends with whom I’m not in touch with in real (non-internet) life and share stuff ( photos, links, etc. ) with friends with whom I am in touch with in real life. I would instead be limiting my use of both these social networks to a trickle. At least that’s the plan.

It wasn’t until I heard Conan O’Brien joke around about the “attention deficit disorder” on The Tonight Show that I realised that I was actually suffering from a minor form of it. One of the culprits is Twitter, where one follows so many people that it actually pushes you to skip through information. I will gradually start to unfollow people who create a lot of noise and tend to feed my habit of ignoring information. I’m also going to avoid running a Twitter client in the background ( in my case, Tweetie ). On a more positive note, Twitter, for me, is useful to keep up to date with the latest news in areas of my choice ( Design and Technology ) and have conversations with interesting people on the Web. And yes, ofcourse, it lets me rant about me.

Google Reader and Friendfeed are useful and almost my main sources of news and information (along with Twitter) and since I use them in proportion, they don’t really hinder me. I like Last.fm as it allows me to listen to its radio and I’m not addicted to it so it doesn’t eat up my productivity.

So, what led me to the brink? Over the past few weeks, I had been overtly commenting on Facebook and checking my Gmail. It made me realise how much time and energy I was wasting doing nothing.
Then, I asked myself the following questions about each social app I use frequently:

• Does it generate content that is meaningful and useful to me?
• Does it connect me with people who are interesting and like-minded to me?
• Is it a time-sucker?
• Does it make me less productive?

Social Web does have a lot of Pros in favor of it, that is if you keep your usage in check.

• It allows you to have conversations with interesting and like-minded people on the Web, no matter where they may be physically located, eventually expanding your intellectual horizons.
• It lets you stay up-to-date with what is happening in the world.
• It allows you to collaborate with other people on creative projects.
• It lets you create your own individual presence on the web.
• It allows you to share content with your friends and family.

If kept under a check, the social web will continue to be useful to everyone instead of making everyone unproductive.

So, if I don’t reply to your Orkut scrap or Facebook comment, and if it is really important, @reply me on Twitter or email me.

1. Displaying user tweets in the Orkut profile page (deployed): I had to rewrite the whole code for this due the new server-side templates and data-pipelining standards enforced by Orkut. It has certain limitations in that you cannot click on any link that links to any external source. Clicking on the user’s pic or username leads you to the application page.

2. OAuth Support: Twitkut will now enable you to authorize it with your Twitter account via OAuth. Doing this will enable you to post updates from Twitkut, add your Orkut friends as your Twitter friends and many more things (listed as separate features). I chose OAuth since then you won’t have to worry about me storing your Twitter passwords.

3. Post updates from Twitkut: If you enable OAuth, you’ll be able to post updates to your Twitter account from within Twitkut.

4. Follow your Orkut friends on Twitter: Enabling OAuth will enable you to follow your Orkut friends on Twitter from within Twitkut.

5. Selective Updates: This will be similar to the “Selective Twitter Updater” Facebook app. You will able to selectively display updates on Twitkut by adding a hashtag to the end of updates similar to “#orktw” or “#orkut”. I’ve still to decide upon the hashtag. Only the updates containing the hashtag will be displayed on Twitkut.

Unfortunately, the popular demand for automatic updates to the user’s activity stream ( without the user having to visit the application page ) won’t be possible due to the limitations enforced by Orkut. If Orkut ever allows it, it’ll be the first feature I’ll add.

I cannot promise if and when I’ll add all these features. There are too many variables, time being the biggest one. You can keep abreast with the latest updates to Twitkut by following @twitkut.

You can also suggest features that you’ll like to be added to Twitkut as comments to this blogpost or as @replies to @twitkut.

Enabling Twitkut with OAuth has been/will be a complicated task. I’ll probably write a separate blog on writing an Opensocial OAuth Gadget.

I already tweeted about this but I thought this was exciting enough to deserve a mention on my blog. Also, now that I have a decent no. of followers on Twitter, I am hopeful that more people would be reading this blogpost. So, hello tweeps!

Only recently, I came across TheStatBot. I really liked the idea of twitter wordles, like mine above. It gives you a quick refresh on what the person talks about on twitter. If you look for more than a minute on my Twitter wordle above, you can sum up that I usually talk about cool apps, twitter(ofcourse), India, API’s, design, college etc. If you look deeper into the cloud, you will know that I have talked about twitkut, Internet, Mac, last.fm, coffee, firefox, etc.

It wasn’t exactly a very smooth process to come up with it, though. At first, I tried using my twitter RSS feed on wordle.net . That didn’t work, as it then only considered my recent 20 or so tweets. What I wanted was that it should span across all my tweets. Then, I came across a python script created by Yuvi Panda that simply takes all your tweets ( max. 3200 are allowed by the twitter API ) and puts them into a txt file. You can simply then copy all the text and use it on wordle.net.

I am pretty certain there is room for a webapp for this. If only wordle had an API. I believe TheStatBot is working on extending wordles to services like FriendFeed, etc.

Update:

You can checkout the script using svn:

svn checkout http://goodfather.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/GoodFather/MonaN

I use Twitter a lot. Unfortunately, almost all of my real life friends are only on Orkut. Most of them haven’t even heard of Twitter. That’s how I came up with the idea of creating something like Twitkut.

I update frequently on Twitter. So, I thought how cool will it be if somehow all my Orkut friends can also read them from Orkut itself. That will mean they will not have to register on Twitter to follow me and get updates.

Twitkut displays your recent tweets on your Orkut profile page. Besides, it also shows you which all of your friends are using Twitkut so that you can follow them. It also allows you to post updates to your twitter account from within Orkut using OAuth.

It makes use of Google’s OpenSocial JavaScript API as well as Twitter’s Search API to access the tweets.

OpenSocial is still pretty nescient, especially if you have seen the Facebook API. I was pretty dissappointed at times with the lack of features in the API. For eg., a chief functionality of my app would have been to update the status of the Orkut user with his/her latest tweet. But, the API didn’t allow it.

Also, to post an update to a user’s activity stream, the owner of the app must visit their profile page or the Twitkut application. This makes it impossible to automatically poll for new tweets and post them to a user’s activity stream. Maximum 2 updates are allowed to a user’s activity stream in a day.

Another feature OpenSocial currently lacks is that there is no way for the developer to keep track of who or how many users are using his application. I feel this should have been one of the first features that should have been implemented in the API, to allow developers to see analysis of their app usage from within Orkut.

There was one more thing that made me cringe. The Orkut sandbox allows using Opensocial 0.8 api whereas prod.sandbox.orkut.com as well as orkut.com only allow Opensocial 0.7 at this point of time. Nowhere did they mention this loud and clear. So, I ended up making the app using Opensocial 0.8. Then I got to know that I had to use Opensocial 0.7 if I wanted to submit my app to Orkut ( of course that’s the reason I am developing the app ) and so I had to make some redundant changes all over again.

On the brighter side, I was very happy with the response at the Orkut Developer Forum. Jason and others helped me along the way and were kind enough to answer all my queries. Without their help, I would certainly have been unable to develop this app. It also cleared some of my concepts regarding caching, etc.

All in all, I am pretty happy with the final result. I have received nice feedback from people who have already started using Twitkut.

So, if you use Orkut and you are a Twitter crazy person and want to share your tweets with a wider world, you can add the application by going here.

Follow updates on development: @twitkut

Follow me: @ahujaankit

Update: Twitkut is now visible in Orkut profiles. The profile view will improve gradually. This is after Twitkut was temporarily not visible on Orkut profiles as the profile view had to re-built using OPML.