Alex blogged about the casual development effort here at Big in Japan in three posts:

• Part I: The What about Egorcast
• Part II: The How about Egorcast
• Part III: The Why about Egorcast

Check out the what, how and why about Egorcast.  It was a fun little project mashingup Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress and Jott, hopefully you enjoyed it…

Nat Torkington wrote an interesting piece titled, "Six Basic Truths of Free APIs."  He made six suggestions worthy of reprinting here:

• Free APIs are not a god-given right. Businesses offer them for their own self-interested reasons. If you build on top of the API but aren’t delivering the value for the business that provides the API, your use of the API will probably go away.
• If you build your own business on top of an API, you need a contractual relationship to ensure the service doesn’t get taken away from you. These generally cost money.
• If you find a way to get something from a site that isn’t explicitly offered as something for you to build on, your use of it will probably be fought unless you’re delivering value as in (1).
• he provider of your API will find it easier to implement services on top of their API than you will. Therefore you have to add something of your own that’s difficult to replicate, something beyond a simple UI tweak or a feature like "search", so that the business that provides the API doesn’t simply compete with you when you look like you’re succeeding.
• For these reasons, free APIs are a very poor substitute for having the source and the data and thus owning and controlling every piece of your application.
• For these reasons, there’s no such thing as a free API if you’re looking to build a business.

Everyone (including us) seems to be creating fun gadgets and mash-ups using Twitter’s API.  Here is a list from the unofficial Twitter wiki:

• BBC News - Get BBC news headlines via twitter. Main news feed, and individual news channels available.
• EgorCast Now you can call in your Twitter posts. EgorCast is a mashup of Jott.com/Twitter/Jaiku.
• TweeTweeT! Now you can Twitter while watching live public Tweets as a cartoon. Finally.
• Twitterment is a Twitter search engine that also provides trend graphs and identifies buzzy and fading terms.
• MoniTwitter Monitors your website, posting updates to Twitter about load times and whether there is a problem or not. Subscribe to the Twitter account to receive updates about your site, notifications if it goes down.
• Twitterverse - a mashup and visualization project by Ideacodes which mines and archives the public timeline of Twitter and provides a visualization of the most commonly used words in a given time period.
• ServerMojo - free server monitoring system now with server status alerts sent via Twitter!
• Twitter Atlas - The twitter public timeline viewed in Atlas by Fresh Logic Studios updated every 5 seconds.
• twittermap - See current updates from Twitter users in a specific local area, and update your location in realtime by specifying L:21012 (or L: + any geocodable location) in a Twitter!
• dealtagger - Let all your friends know what your shopping for with the dealtagger > twitter update thingy!
• MyChores - Keep track of your household chores and send automatic Twitter posts whenever you complete a task!
• Manchester United News - Get Manchester United news straight to your mobile phone for free.
• GeoTwitter - This mashup uses Google Maps API and Twitter API. The most recent updates are fetched from the public timeline and mapped once every minute.
• Twitter Tube Tracker - find out when your public transport route isn’t running (London Underground and SF BART)
• twitterami - Use Frappr to see Twitter friends on a map.
• twittervision - Real-time display of the public Twitter stream on a map. Warning: dangerously addictive.
• Planypus, the place where friends make plans, now has twitter support! From any plan, click Post to Twitter to twitterize your plans
• Twitterholic: Top 100 Twitterers leaderboard.
• Twitter in 3D
• Twitter updates from Pluggd - Pluggd’s podcast player can automatically post updates to your twitter account… Let your friends know what you’re listening to!
• mibazaar - Current Twitter Posts on Google Maps
• Twitter Gadget - A Windows Vista Desktop Sidebar Gadget that helps you keep track of all the sweet tweets! Fetches tweets from twitter.com and updates them every 10 seconds.
• Twitter SpellCheck Bot - Lily program that lets you check the spelling of a word via Twitter.
• Twitget - a Twitter Gadget - This is a Windows Live gadget that can be hosted on live.com or on Spaces. On Spaces it shows your last tweet and on live.com you can use it to track up to 5 tweets from your friends.
• Twitter Planet - This is a Windows Live gadget that shows the Twitter public timeline overlaid on a Virtual Earth map. Can be hosted on live.com or Spaces.
• Viddler has some sweet Twitter integration allowing you to both syndicate your tweets to your account as well as post site updates to your Twitter account.
• Flitter: Flickr stream generated by the Twitter public timeline using this yahoo!pipe and rendered in vvvv.

Our April ‘casual application’ (i.e. an application that can be built in less than a week) release is almost ready for primetime.  We started coding the application on Friday and had our first release this evening (at DemoCampDallas2).  It works for me, but it is not ready for primetime.  Here is the scoop:

EgorCast™ is a simple web service designed to integrate the functionality of jott.com and social mo-blogging (mobile blogging) services such as Twitter.com and Jaiku.com. Jott allows users to dial a predetermined number and record a 15 second message. Jott then transcribes the message and emails the transcription to your phone or email account. EgorCast provides a gateway between the messages from Jott and social mo-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku (or both if you want). EgorCast will also send your messages to your WordPress blog with a specific category or tag.

I was reviewing a number of our previous projects (some more successful than others) and was reminded of a post from Joshua Porter titled, "Seven Reasons Why Web Apps Fail."  Joshua wrote the post almost a year ago and I thought it was worth repeating the reasons.  Check out the full post here.

• Too focused on social instead of personal
• Try to do too much, or solve too many problems
• Working hard to make someone other than the user happy
• They sell it the wrong way (i.e. focused on Ajax, tags, web2.0, soa)
• Not built to last, exit strategy is too obvious
• They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed
• Their underlying business strategy does not improve people’s lives

The Big in Japan team has been working hard on community tools for the hit new FX Network show, The Riches. Turns out the show is a hit. Check out a preview:

Robert Scoble has some great advice to anyone considering delivering partial versus full feeds. Robert and I hate partial text feeds. Lots of folks think it helps click through if you offer a partial feed. Feedburner suggests they are wrong. Robert explains why partial feeds are a bad idea even if there was a a difference in click through:

The thing that partial texters are forgetting is that the other 900 people will find out about you from an influencer. Someone who will tell them. So, your traffic growth will be far slower if you only offer partial text feeds. Many of my friends who are journalists or bloggers just won’t deal with partial text feeds anymore. You certainly see that I link to mostly full text feeds on my link blog.

John Battelle realized this after he polled his readership about this issue: “From the results of my very unscientific poll, I’d clearly be alienating at least a very vocal minority.”

LEGO is one of Big in Japan’s most important social media clients.  This 75 year-old toy maker is a great example of a company that has used social media to re-invent their business.  Bill Tompson gave a great presentation at WOMBAT3 titled, "LEGO: Using Blogs to Speak With - Not At - Your Customers.  Josh Hallett blogged about the presentation in a post of the same title.  He explains,

They have an extraordinary community. LEGO fans make Star Trek fans look like lightweights. Recently LEGO embarked on a program to update the Mindstorms product. They asked their fans what they wanted and listened. The conversation loop is an ongoing process. They ask, listen, prioritize and respond, then start again. With tools like surveys, forums, blogs and profiling they learn about their customers. With their platform they can quickly gather feedback from customers on a variety of topics. Not only do the validate certain programs they also rate/rank them. Not only can they look at overall data, the can look across segments.

[photo credit: Josh Hallett of Hyku ~ our favorite social media guru] 

Adam Darowski makes a great point suggesting that "the blog is the new resume."  Adam is dead on with this one.  Joshua Porter makes several good points including:

• Your blog represents you.
• Your blog is serious business.
• Your blog is an archive.
• Your blog isn’t the only mirror of your life.
• Your blog is your unedited version of yourself.

I have been blogging for a couple of years (Texas Startup Blog) and it has been a very interesting exercise.   I have lost track of the number of job offers or inquires I have received as a direct result of my online writing.  Adam explains:

Blogging is the perfect way for a candidate to give an employer a more detailed sales pitch—to show they can “talk the talk” (as opposed to just fill a resume with buzzwords). I can’t think of a reason for any serious tech professional to not have a blog. Not only does it serve as an excellent notebook for storing ideas and links, but it can come in handy in a job hunt where what interviewers really want to just know what, professionally (and somewhat personally), engages you on a day to day basis. How often do you look at a resume and wonder what exactly the person’s role on a project was? Well, if the person blogged about it then you would have a better idea—and you would know if the role would fit in with your team.

Good stuff… 

We are playing with a new look for the Big in Japan website and blog, let us know what you think.  The current design is beta as well as the internal pages (i.e. they are currently being written or rewritten).  We figured we could wait until everything was perfect, but decided to open source our site development.

Have you ever seen a website and immediately came up with an idea to spoof it? In the past it just took too much time to launch a spoof site, but everything is different now. Ruby on Rails allowed our team to turn a joke into a website in just a few hours. Yesterday we had a laugh thinking how it would be funny if there was an ‘evil’ version of MyCyberTwin. After three hours Scott and Jeremy launched our ‘joke’ located at MyEvilCyberTwin.com. Want to chat with Evil Mike Arrington? Just click here. Oh, and if you want you can go ahead and create your own evil twin. Thanks to Mike for the inspiration.