Twitter, for those of you haven’t heard, is an online communication system where users broadcast their thoughts, feelings, rants, and rambles to the world. Or more precisely, to a subset of the world that wants to listen, and to anybody who stumbles upon such a result in Google. You can follow my tweets if you like; I’m danielpunkass on the service.

Twitter is an amazingly successful service in spite of a never-ending list of negatives thrown out both by people who do and don’t use it. It’s a waste of time. It’s flakey and the servers can’t handle the load. It can’t scale. It’s distracting. People use it to chat too much. People use it to rant too much. Nobody will follow me because I don’t have anything to say. I don’t know who to follow. I just don’t get it. Why would anybody want to do that?

And in spite of all this negativity, people are still using it. Because there are a lot of positives, as well. It’s a way to stay in touch. You learn more personal details about the people you admire. You have nearly instant access to a wide group of friends at once. You have an outlet for your quippy remarks. You make new friends you wouldn’t have otherwise made. It’s something to be a part of.

What I realized today is that as an indie business on the web, there is one incredible payoff to Twitter that doesn’t even require your participation for you to benefit: Twitter is fueling word of mouth marketing. Especially for services, products, and gizmos you can buy online.

I use a service called Terraminds to monitor several important keywords in public tweets across the entire system. What this means is that for instance, if somebody I don’t even know in Germany mentions MarsEdit in a tweet to a friend, I see it. Kind of creepy, huh?

When I see these mentions, I sometimes just move along. But other times, the tone of message catches my interest, so I follow up by clicking on the account of the other person, and discover the tweet that prompted such an out-of-the-blue MarsEdit mention. Often, it’s something about the flakiness of the web interfaces for a blogging system, or an outright request from a person to his or her peers: “Which blog editor for Mac? k thx bye.”

The point, to me, is that the kinds of conversation being facilitated by Twitter are exactly the kinds of talk that foster product endorsements, explicit and otherwise. While publicly blogging your affection for a product takes some deliberation and determination, it’s easy as heck to quip “FastScripts, FTW!” in a moment of delight, or “I’m really digging the new FlickrExport” as you put a product through its paces. Spontaneous declarations of truth are a major part of Twitter culture, and this works perfectly for word of mouth marketing.

You, the people who follow you, and the people you follow form a sort of virtual water cooler that is gigantic and more efficient for casual product endorsement than any other system I can recall or imagine. The fact that some of the people are your friends, and some are just “famous people” whose opinions you admire, creates a perfect storm for stimulating and validating such endorsements. When somebody you respect drops hints that they’re using a particular software or service, you’re likely to take notice. And when you try it and like it, you’ll naturally pay the favor back by tweeting the good news to all of your friends, too.

Is Twitter a waste of time? It might turn out to be the single best marketing aid an online business could ask for, so maybe it deserves to have a little time wasted on it. Like this post? Be sure to tell all your friends on Twitter! :)

MarsEdit has a little shortcoming that can cause a vexing situation from time to time. It takes what you type or paste into it a bit too literally. So if you flub up at the keyboard and make some wacky keystrokes, you might end up with a weird “invisible character” in your blog post. What happens on most systems when you then go to publish, is you get a very unfortunate error message in return.

“Parse Error. Not well formed.” How lovely!

These tricky characters are especially sinister because you can almost never see them. When you end up with one of these bad boys in your post, the only hint you might get is if you are moving the cursor around with the arrow keys, you might see it “hiccup” a second while it stops on the invisible character.

I’m sure there are a lot of different names for these unwelcome guests in text, but I like the one the folks at Bare Bones use: “gremlins”. Their fine editor, BBEdit, has a dedicated tool just for rooting these suckers and either eliminating them or making them visible: Zap Gremlins.

I’d like to add something similar to MarsEdit, so I can spare users the pain of having to figure this out when run into an error dialog such as the one above. But in the meantime, I’ve been resorting to handling the customer support inquiries by myself taking the user’s example text into BBEdit and looking for gremlins. Then I can point out the location of the offending character to the user, they backspace it out of existence, and life goes on.

As relatively painless as BBEdit’s function makes the task, it’s not really perfectly suited to what I need. It’s more aimed at eliminating the beasts than examining them. Whereas I want as much information as I can get about them, so I can effectively communicate to the user (and also so I can catalog what types of characters users are running into trouble with).

Thanks to AppleScript support for the Zap Gremlins function, I was able to whip up a pretty handy script to streamline this operation. Find Gremlins takes the text contents of the clipboard, runs Zap Gremlins on it to find the gremlins, and then displays a summary of what it knows about them.

It gives me all the details I would normally have to work hard to figure out. What is the character? Where is it exactly, and most importantly of all, shows the character in context, replaced by a bullet for easy visibility. Although adding the text to a BBEdit document and manually examining the gremlins wasn’t too much of a time waster, it was still a bit boring and tedious.

I realize finding gremlins in the clipboard text will be useful to approximately 0% of you, but I thought it was a good opportunity to demonstrate how AppleScript support for the features of an application can turn out to serve incredibly particular needs. Thanks, Bare Bones! Zap Gremlins is saving me time, and helping me get my customers back to blogging in comfort.

Update: Thanks to reader Daniel Blanken who noticed a bug in the script that prevented it from finding gremlins very close to the beginning or ends of the selected text. I’ve updated the script with his fixes.

When Gus Mueller released Acorn, his fundamentally rethought bitmap image editing app, I was excited. Partly because it filled a void in my tool belt, but more because I knew it was the start of something big.

The best thing about a 1.0 release from any skilled developer is you know it’s only the tip of the iceberg. It’s like the debut of a thrilling new television series, or the opening of a great restaurant in your neighborhood. You’re gratified by the immediate rewards, but what’s perhaps more comforting is the promise of more good things to come.

For this lovely little app, good things are starting to come. Congratulations to Gus on today’s release of Acorn 1.1! I’m already looking forward to the next episode.

Somehow I managed to let yesterday pass by without remarking on the momentousness of the day. February 22, 2007 was the day Red Sweater acquired MarsEdit. I can’t believe it’s already been a year. Time has just flown by.

It’s been a lot of work, but when I compare version 1.1.2, which I acquired, to the latest release, it’s clear to me that the work is paying off. Coincidentally, the latest release is 2.1.2. How about that? I “lapped” the odometer, so to speak.

What will the next year bring? Perhaps by February, 2009, I’ll be remarking on all the progress that added up to what we know and love in 3.1.2!