When we first launched Twittervision in early 2007, Twitter was still a pretty small community of users (around 200,000) and only the press and the digerati were paying much attention to it.

Today, with just over 1M users, Twitter is still pretty small by Internet standards, but a lot of people are paying attention to it.

Our API was designed to allow individual users to use the Twittervision location features. A lot of people are using it. We also had a fair number of people who were using our API as an alternative to the Twitter API and trying to harvest vast amount of data using our free API.

Sadly, this was restricting service to others, so we are making some changes to the API that make this kind of use no longer possible. Those of you using the API for your individual projects or in support of client-side apps will see no changes for now — keep doing what you’re doing.

We do sometimes engage in licensing agreements, however, so if you are interested in licensing our data, please contact me at dave at twittervision.com.

Last year our family spent most of the summer in Berlin, and we decided to return this year as well. Coincidentally, we arrived the day before Barack Obama was scheduled to speak, and were eager to be a part of this historic opportunity. We just returned and I have a few reflections.

To be fair, it was a bit odd: a presidential candidate seeking to speak in Berlin, before a column that had been relocated by Hitler, to a group of people who for the most part could not vote for him even if they wanted to. It was a presumptive end-run by the presumptive nominee to take on a speaking gig that was all but presidential. Realistically, his only standing here was as a private citizen, and even less coherently, as a Senator from Illinois.

Yet, Berlin and indeed Europe seemed eager for his message. And his message was strikingly simple: the nations of the world share a common destiny, and we need to start to act that way.

America needs to listen to its allies in Europe, and America needs to start acting in a spirit of cooperation with them. America needs to pay attention to what it’s doing to the environment, and start leading the push for sustainable energy rather than acting as the last defender of an unsustainable legacy of foreign oil. And the world should “look at Berlin” as an example of what happens when freedom is allowed to flourish in the context of responsibility to the world and the environment.

All in all, if you really take the substance of the speech item by item, there was nothing not to like. He was calling for a restoration of common sense and unity in our relationships with Europe and the world, and this is impossible to argue with. The only reason why anyone would argue with his message is for political or partisan reasons, and anyone has a right to do so.

However, this was a message that Europe and the world needed to hear. When America has walked around with swagger, spouting platitudes about spreading freedom, about curing our addiction to oil by drilling for more oil, and pretending to listen to allies and ultimately ignoring their input, we have eroded our credibility around the world, and ultimately made America its laughing stock.

Fortunately, America and the ideals it represents still have some value in the minds of free people; and free people, people of reason, are willing to give second chances to a country that was founded on laws and ideals.

Whether Barack Obama is capable of restoring the America we once knew — a “can do” America, an America of ideas, an America of laws, an America of cooperation, an America that doesn’t resort to torture and war crimes, no matter the perceived threat — is impossible to say right now. What we can say right now is that the world desperately wants that America back. For it’s that America that freed Europe (twice), wrote the Declaration of Independence, won the revolution, and welcomes immigrants. It’s that America that orchestrated the Berlin Airlift and the Marshall Plan and founded modern Europe.

Today’s America — hobbled by its energy policy, fettered by Chinese imports, ignoring geopolitical facts in favor of political ideology, burdened by the housing crisis pyramid scheme — is not inspiring much of anyone. We’re succeeding in spite of all this. But one thing is telling: when you walk the streets of Berlin (or any European capital) the symbols of American culture are everywhere. New York Yankees, the Washington Nationals, University of Virginia, LA Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, and countless other icons are represented repeatedly. New York in particular looms large in the mythology of the culture of the world. Why?

Because New York welcomes everyone. Because New York is the crazy-quilt of diversity that everyone believes America stands for and can be. If you see references to Berlin, Paris or Rome in other cities it is because of culture or history or art; all valid, but New York conveys a sense of freedom of the human spirit that is present nowhere else. And it’s that America, idealized by New York, that is our proudest and most resilient export. The world will never tire of it.

The Germans here were giddy for Obama, and acted as though he were already president. They just want to see America return to its former self and be an honest partner as we face a very challenging future together. Everyone wants that so badly. It’s a big burden to put on one man’s shoulders.

As the crowd of 200,000 dissipated after the fairly short speech (30 minutes or so), we attempted to return down the avenue between the Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate, through the center of the Tiergarten park. Everyone was stuck. But, off to one side, the crowd started to pour forth through the fence, into the trees of the Tiergarten.

The fence was pushed open wider, and at first police resisted it. But, the fence opened again, and this time it was not repaired. We poured forth through this breach in the wall, and people took turns helping each other over the 3-foot jump they had to make to the path below. We escaped the mass of the Strasse des 17 Juni into the calm, quiet green of the Tiergarten.

It just goes to show you: in a fight between a bunch of Berliners and a wall, bet on the Berliners.

Yesterday I met up with Jeff Pulver to discuss some business ideas, and one of the topics we touched on was, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

The new iPhone 3G and the imminent release of the App Store have created an amazing amount of buzz and speculation about what the next generation of mobile apps might be.

While I am unable to comment on any of my iPhone development efforts or the details of the iPhone SDK, I thought it might be interesting to ask here as well, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

So, simple as that. What is your ideal “killer app” for iPhone? Write your idea here, and maybe we’ll build it!

I enjoy learning new skills and technologies on my own, and it occurs to me that there isn’t a lot written on the subject.

I’ve been developing this approach for about 20 years and here’s a brief summary of what I find works for me.  It may not work for you, and that’s OK.  But give this a try, refine your own technique, and share what works!

1. Choose a topic/technology outside your comfort zone.  This is self-evident; you can’t expect to learn anything new if you’re working in a sandbox you’ve already mastered.
2. Make time for yourself.  Lots of it.  You can’t expect to dig into a topic deeply if you’re distracted by email, phones, tax deadlines, bills, dinner, family, friends, and bathing.  Seriously, these things have to take a backseat, you’ll come across as a recluse, and people will hate you.  Accept it.
3. Set a goal.  It might be as simple as a “Hello World” or something more complex.  However, it should be something you think you can attain and which will make you happy to see completed.  So, choose something reasonable and within reach.
4. Code until you get stuck.  Keep pushing small, obtainable goals until you get to a point where you are baffled or sleepy.  This is the time to take a nap.
5. Before you take a nap, read something.  Your brain runs threads in the background while you’re sleeping.  Don’t waste that CPU power thinking about Angelina Jolie.  Instead, search for guidance on the thing that’s got you stuck (either with a colleague or online), or read (or re-read) a chapter in a coding book that’s relevant.
6. Sleep until you wake up.  This might be 3 hours, 6 hours or 8 hours; your brain will sleep for as long as it needs to process the information you’re trying to absorb.  NOTE: At this point the thought of having a regular sleep schedule should make you giggle.  You should sleep and code when you feel like it, which likely will not be on any particular schedule.
7. As you fall asleep, meditate on the questions you’re trying to answer.  The intense concentration available to you as you are nearing sleep will enable you to define and isolate the problems at hand, and this will provide a kind of “normalized grist” for your brain as it prepares to do your heavy lifting for you.
8. When you wake up, you will have some answers.  You may not have all the answers yet, but you should have some fresh insights that will enable you to blast past your last impasse (wow).  This should give you some encouragement and allow you to repeat the cycle (3-8) again.

I’m presently employing this technique to learn Objective C and Cocoa Touch for the iPhone, and it’s working great.  This is the sort of thing that society will not allow you to do continuously (unless you’ve evolved a significant number of support mechanisms) but you should be able to get away with it at least some of the time.  It delivers great results for me.

And for those of you to whom I owe emails, bear with me; I will get back to you shortly.