Here's this month's Thinkup Talk with Gina Trapani, Andy Baio, Sam Rose and Aaron (one of the Thinkup mentees) contributing their experience from the development point of view.

Thinkup Talk #8 August 2011 by Thinkup

Yesterday marked our fourth edition of Thinkup App Talks, a growing community I'm proud to be a part of. Among the core developers are two people I've followed for a while, Gina Trapani @GinaTrapani and Andy Baio @waxpancake, but there are many others I've met in the past few months who are bright, interesting, diverse people, excited to be a part of this effort. We all gather on the IRC channel #thinkup on irc.freenode.net which you can join via the web at http://lnx.so/tuirc.

Thinkup is an application that is installed on a server. Thinkup has a plugin architecture which will allow many new possibilities, but the first and most basic thing Thinkup does is monitor your Twitter feed, saving all posts you make. It then finds mentions of you and replies, calculates and displays interesting statistics about following and follower numbers and how they vary over time. Thinkup also has displays of posted photos, Google Maps display of replier locations and retweets and much more. There is a Facebook plugin that will follow activity on multiple Facebook pages of which you are a fan. If you are a fervent user of Twitter, be sure to take a look!

Information on how to install, configure and run Thinkup is here. There is a plan brewing to offer hosted Thinkup, which is in my opinion, a very good idea for those who don't run servers. This is the equivalent of using Wordpress.com for your blog. All the setup, management, housekeeping, updates, etc. are taking care of by this managed system. Here is our latest chat with Gina and Thinkup Community:

Thinkup App Talks, April Edition by Thinkup

It showed that one typo can become a funny theme.

Thanks to AG Projects, Counterpath, Squarespace, Phone From Here and all of those who participated including @mjgraves, @kfife, @steely_glint, @darrickhartman, @e4voip, @cypromis, @FredPosner, @civeljahim, @AusTexVoIP, @akant, @StevePerich, @MaximCH, @saghul, @packetman, @daveac, @worldmikel, @voipaware, @qxork, @vbhoj74, @teleku, @wintermeyer, @jasonwert and countless others! If you are interested in VoIP or the Voipathong concept, follow these and @voipusers of course!

Sifting through 24 hours of recorded live podcast is time-consuming, but there will be some excerpts posted on VUC and on Disrupt *This*!

Voipathon(g) brought together over 500 people from America, Algeria, China, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, England, France, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland, Bermuda, Arab Emirates, Czech Republic and a bunch of other places, probably.

The VoIP component got to hear some rare Allison Smith (@VoiceGal, not the singer) and discussed aspects of VoIP, telephony and motorcycles as usual.

More geeky VoIP stuff - tying two bridges together

Experimenting gave us results on three interesting softphones: Blink (AG Projects), Bria and Eyebeam from Counterpath. I've used the commercial version of Eyebeam for thousands of hours on my conferences with perfect stability on Windows XP. During the Voipathon, I had two conference servers bridged for over ten hours straight with no problem. When the connection broke, it wasn't Eyebeam that crashed, but Vemotion, and when this happened, I lost the entire local recording as well.

It's important (for us geeks) to understand the bridge between ZipDX and Talkshoe. Talkshoe is near Pittsburg, PA. ZipDX is around San José or Palo Alto. The bridge that stayed up for ten hours was from San José to Bordeaux, Bordeaux to Pittsburg and the return leg, Pittsburg to Bordeaux, Bordeaux to San josé.

During another part of the Voipathon, we bridged two Talkshoe shows. Michael, host of World Mikel, connected to Talkshoe from Detroit. I connected from Bordeaux. I was connected to Talkshoe twice, once for each show. People in the two shows were able to converse normally, from all over the world, bridged together from France. The unusual thing about this bridge was that it was done on my three year-old Macbook running Blink and connected to the same DSL connection I used for the Voipathon via wifi.

After 24 hours, of which I slept about three, I won't be ready to do this again for another year or three, but it was an amazing, worthwhile experience that proves you can do alot with a bit of perseverance.

I discovered and joined Talkshoe in late 2006 along with Twitter and many other new web sites. While I was on a web site spree, I discovered http://Kiva.org, which is more important to me than most. Kiva is a subject I can go on and on about so I happened on the idea to do what I believe was the first 24-hour live podcast, called the 'Kivathon'.

 One of the great things about many companies on today's web is how easy it is to contact them. (The notable exception is Ebay, who has the absolute worst contact system ever devised.) I emailed Talkshoe's CEO, Dave Nelson on a Saturday morning and he answered saying I should call him right then on his cell. Dave was on board immediately with the idea of a 24-hour live Talkshoe for Kiva and we set the date as March 18th, 2007. I believe the name 'KivaThon' was his idea. We then recruited enough hosts so each would take about one hour around the clock. Chris Brogan gave us a push from his corner: http://tr.im/kivacb and I was able to get some high Google visibility in press releases, etc. Most of the hosts blogged about it.

  
One small incident marred things for a few minutes when some MLM jerk went into a long infomercial about his show. A quick mention would have been fine, but this went on to the extent that we had to cut him off and take control away from him. If you're doing a podcast for a cause, the cause is the main subject, not self-promo.

 The whole effort went very well and a lot of people, including myself, learned about how Kiva was started. We interviewed some people from Kiva, notably founder Matt Flannery (his Kiva blog: http://tr.im/30b3). Awareness was raised and a lot of us put more money in. Talkshoe also invested in the fund. At that time, Talkshoe was revenue sharing, and all funds from all of my Talkshoe activities went into my Kiva account. As of May 2008, that was suspended, but I've continued to add funds when I can, and spread the word.

 Awareness of Kiva.org got two big bumps later that year: a mention in Bill Clinton's book and the biggie, Oprah. Oprah's reach is like about 10 Twitter memberships so when that happened we started seeing the situation as it is today. There are currently times when loan requests are not available at all. Follow 'microactions' on Twitter to get alerts on available loans, mostly Kiva but apparently they do other things as well.

 I know that all of us who participated in the event are proud to have been a part of it. Nothing is more gratifying than paying forward some of the benefits of the new connectivity.