Murmurs

Introducing Fueltweet, a new Twitter application you can talk to, it’ll tell you the best Petrol or Diesel price in your area.

If you want to know the cheapest spot to fill up in Bishopstown forexample, tweet “@petroltweet Bishopstown” or “@dieseltweet Bishopstown” depending on wether you are looking for Petrol or Diesel prices. It will respond to you a few seconds later with the most up to date and best price it knows in that area.

Its early days for this application so it may not know any prices in your area. It needs to be kept up to date too with current prices so keep it up to date if you can while on your travels. Heres an example of telling the application about the price of petrol in a Texaco garage in Bishopstown; “@petroltweet Texaco in Bishopstown 124.9”.

Cork Open Coffee

Like a lot of great ideas, the idea for this Twitter app came from Corks Open Coffee. John Peavoy and I chatted about the concept and agreed that it would be a useful App. I began using the Twitter API to play around with functionality and create the app. The look and feel, and the input syntax is still evolving, so please give your feedback, good or bad, on how it works.

We have a new site up and running to promote the application, to show people how to use it and to show the best and average Petrol & Diesel prices around at the moment, http://www.fueltweet.com. Its a great design from John Sheahan of Egg Design, a new regular of Cork Open Coffee.

If you have any feedback on the application, whether about the use of it or the information contained within it, please let me know. There are plenty of features coming very soon, the plan is to keep it simple and to give the user information quickly.

Pumps.ie API

Another site Pumps.ie, created by Jonathan Dean has been around for a few years with a great range of fuel pricing data and locations. Jonathan has been good enough to give us early access to their upcoming API so that we will be able to swap information between Fueltweet and Pumps.ie. Check out their free pumps.ie iPhone app too in the iTunes store.

Thank you to all the users on Twitter who have been sending in updated fuel prices so far, keep it up - this is a public service and will become stronger and more useful as you use it more and input more information. Finally, I hope you’re not Tweeting while driving - keep safe and only tweet when you’re stopped and it is safe to do so!

For the last week or so, I had a caption competition here on the blog. The 5 winners received 2GB USB keyrings compliments of Littlequiz.com

It was a fun picture taken of me working outside in a large pool that had formed due to the heavy rains in Cork recently.

I discovered 3 new things from running the competition:

1. A fun caption competition can bring a lot of traffic to a website
2. Facebook can bring in lots of this traffic, I thought Twitter was the king at this
3. One of my Wellies has a couple of tiny holes (which I have since rectified with some super glue)

On the graph there’s a clear hike from my usual number of visitors per day. Google and Twitter brought in the first wave of visitors.

Facebook on its own brought in the rest on the second blip on the graph, peaking just over 300 visitors on that day.

A couple of people put the image up on their facebook pages which is where this traffic came from. Thats a nice amount of traffic to my young blog. It would probably have been more or have a longer tail if it wasn’t on a Friday and Saturday.

So a fun caption competition happens to be a good source of traffic mixed with Twitter and Facebook too. I recommend trying it.

Check out some fairly regular caption competitions on Littlequiz.com

After Bizspark for Startups, Microsoft launch WebsiteSpark programme for Web Developers and designers .

Barcamp Cork the 3rd is confirmed for November 14th.

A great service for storing passwords, free online password manager www.passpack.com (Via @alexleonard)

In the wake of a blog post from Pat Phelan, James Corbett kicked off ‘OutVesting‘ whereby people on Twitter pledge to donate 50 Euro along with 99 others to give 5,000 Euro to a startup. In what I believe was under a week, 100 people have already pledged to donate 50 Euro. More on http://www.outvesting.org/

See how search engines see your site with SEO browser

Stuck for ideas for a great new web app? Find ideas for new apps, services & software to create based on Twitter requests.

A list of official Google Twitter accounts.

A study of over 300 people about how Irish people use social media.

€15k ad prize for start-up competition from 4FM.

How the Murrion Logo came to be..

Gary McGinty from Ion  came across this tweet from Stephen Crowley on Wednesday saying:

RT @murrion: RT @wubud: HELP: We’d love your feedback on our logo concepts for @Wubud -
please comment on the blog http://twurl.nl/x7f6gz

Gary checked out this blog and saw that Murrion was also designing a new corporate identity.

Taking the initiative on both counts, before signing off for the evening, Gary helped out @wubud with a design draft http://twitpic.com/5n0iy and the following morning he helped out with a draft for Murrion’s logo too http://www.twitpic.com/5ojas

The main logo is a 9×9 square - the lines represent code and an abstracted “M” & “S”.