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Tuesday 7/22 - Twisney - Disboards.com Q&A

Yesterday, a wonderful user at Disboards.com started a great discussion thread about Twisney. Replies ranged from enthusiastic to... well... misunderstood. I'd like to use this post to let you know about Twisney's future and to clear up some of the confusion. Here goes.

Quotes from the thread at Disboards.com -
"Almost as if we were there!"
"awesome!"
"Very interesting!"
"Wow! How cool is this?"

It's so cool, it's hot. :) Welcome to everyone that found us for the first time. The more participation, the better it will be.

Quote - "a couple more features on twisney, and I won't need to access any other site... for all the info I like to have at my fingertips while in the park."

Yeah! Right on! This person "gets" Twisney. It's for this very reason that I'm in the process of asking developers to help me flush out all the features that will make this the application to use on your mobile while in the parks. Anyone out there willing to work for free? :) I'd like to have video posts, iPhone apps, show times, mobile maps, etc. with a goal of finishing it for MouseFest 2008 in December.

"Buzz Litebeer" thought that my comments about Disney's Magic Connection were "wrong on all counts"

I can't respond to this more eloquently than Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who posted their reply today. Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Here's the bottom line on Disney's MC - The additional hardware required for the MC (Nintendo DS) is bulky compared to a cell phone that most people are already carrying. Twisney runs on cell phones. The MC security deposit of $300 is going to scare people away. Twisney has no security deposit, it's completely free. If the MC shows wait times, and they are the same wait times as those that appear above the ride entrances, we know those are prone to error. Twisney's data will only be as good as those that participate, but with the right amount of posts, it could be more accurate than Disney's wait time info.

Buzz Litebeer challenged my blurb that Twisney is "the first and only social network of Disney fans to be sharing free wait-time information with anyone that can access a web browser".

Litebeer suggested that TipWit was the first, and I like the idea of TipWit. I'm working with the TipWit developer to figure out where we can integrate our sites. However, TipWit is not available for anyone that can access a web browser. You also have to be a registered TipWit user. TipWit isn't a social network of people sharing information since I can't find any evidence that people are actively using the site (not a knock on TipWit, just my observation). Finally, TipWit has a very narrow focus - wait times. That doesn't result in a social network. Twisney allows sharing photos, messages, replies, wait times, closures, etc. Twisney also has active users. Those elements make it a social network. So...

I stand by my statement even though some may disagree.

Quote - "As an early visitor to twisney.com, I immediately saw the potential waiting to be made a reality"

Thanks! My motivation comes from you, the community, so tell your friends and anyone else you know that is visiting the Disney parks about Twisney. By December, I'm confident we're going to have the ultimate, free toolset that will work on your mobile phone in the parks. Help us get there by emailing your ideas to twisney@mitchcast.com.

To Buzz Litebeer...

I'm open to comments. Whatever ideas you have, lay 'em on the table and we'll see what we can do.

Tuesday 7/15 - Standby, Single Rider, and Fastpass Return Times

Thanks to everyone who sent me emails requesting this feature. I hope it's what you wanted. If you have suggestions for improvement, email me direct at twisney@mitchcast.com. - Scott

 

Saturday 7/12 - Location, Location, Location

Lots of location updates have been released to Twisney.com. Most importantly, you no longer have to begin your message with the location. Just put the location name or abbreviation somewhere in your message and Twisney will try to map it. Below are some of the newly supported locations:

• MCO (Orlando International Airport)
• Yak & Yeti Restaurant
• Horizons (no longer there, but good memories)
• Odyssey (a.k.a. ghost town, or shortcut to margaritas, in epcot)
• front gate entrance (the highway welcome sign, with Mickey and Minnie)
• Illuminations
• Wishes
• Hoop Dee Doo Review
• 'Ohana

These Downtown Disney locations

• Fulton's
• Earl of Sandwich
• Wolfgang Puck Cafe
• Cirque
• DisneyQuest
• House of Blues
• Raglan Road
• Rainforest Cafe
• World of Disney

Friday 7/11 - Twisney Updates 7/11

Twisney Mobile launched today. This is a huge release. As far as I know, Twisney mobile is the largest effort ever which tries to give Disney park goers a tool they can use while in the parks, on their mobile device, to communicate with others in the parks and view _____ ______. That last part is a secret right now but it's the main reason you'll be interested in Twisney mobile. Listen in to today's podcast on Netcot.com and you'll learn what it is, or check out twisney.com/mobile right now to find out for yourself.

I'll be blogging more next Monday about the features on Twisney Mobile so stay tuned.

Tuesday 7/1 - Twisney Updates 7/1

Over the next few weeks, you'll see some a bunch of updates being rolled out to Twisney.com. To keep everyone in the loop, I'll post quick blurbs to this blog describing each update when it's done. For today, 7/1:

Sprint Photo Email Support: Most mobile providers work fine with Twisney when emailing photos from a cell. However, Sprint does it a little different. Instead of emailing an attachment or an inline image, Sprint emails an html page with links to the photo which is stored on their site. Twisney now supports this format. If you're a user with a Sprint phone, you can now email your photos to Twisney. Enjoy!
Wednesday 6/11 - Disneyland now on Twisney

The requests kept pouring in so I did this sooner than expected. Starting today, Twisney supports the entire Disneyland Resort including Disneyland Park, Disney's California Adventure, the Hotels, and Downtown Disney. Who will be the first to post their experience? Check it out by changing the park option in the upper-right on twisney.com.

Here's a refresher on how to submit posts for the Disney resorts:

Disneyland
email twisneyca@twisney.com
tweet to @twisneyca

Tokyo Disney Resort
email twisneyjp@twisney.com
tweet to @twisneyjp

Walt Disney World
email twisney@twisney.com
tweet to @twisney

If you want to follow the Disneyland posts on Twitter, follow twisneyca.

I've also started a new photoset on Flickr to store the submitted Disneyland photos.

All you west-coasters out there... start posting! Show us east-coasters why your resort is better! :)

Wednesday 6/11 - Congrats moodringtone

The first Twisney contest has come to a close with moodringtone pulling out a 1 vote victory, 24 to 23. I can't believe it was that close. Are you kidding me? 47 votes, and only 1 vote separates these two guys? Very exciting.

moodringtone wins a $75 gift certificate, compliments of our May contest sponsor Dream Come True Vacations. DCTV is a stand-up operation with great deals so be sure to check out their site when planning your next Disney vacation.

Sunday 6/8 - How To: Record your Disney Trip Report with Twisney

One great thing about a trip to Disney is looking back at your pictures and videos when you return home. When I created Twisney.com, I wanted to take that to a new level. I wanted a record of my trip with notes that I made real-time from the inside the parks.

Twisney worked perfect! For each of our five days we spent at Disney, I can look back to see what we were doing, the exact time we were doing it, and where we were when we were doing it... all 87 posts and pictures! Check it out here:
http://www.twisney.com/scottsan/2008/5/13/5.

I'll explain how you can do this too. It's simple. You don't have to be a technical wiz. Here's how...

First, you need a way to post from inside the parks. Any cell or mobile device will work. You might already have email service enabled for your cell/mobile plan. If not, you can get it enabled by calling your cell phone's customer service dept. Verizon allowed me to send up to 250 emails from my phone during our trip. That cost me $5 with them. When our trip ended, I canceled the service. Five bucks, that's it! I also have a blackberry that I used to send emails without pictures.

TIP: Enable email messaging for your cell phone before your trip. Cancel it when you get back.

TIP: Send a test email before your trip. If you have problems, email me and I'll help out.

Sending emails with the phone was simple. I clicked the picture button, snapped the picture, and hit the send button. Then I typed in a brief subject with location (i.e. "at Space Mountain, ready to ride for the first time") and clicked send. Voila! My post was recorded. All in all, 30 seconds. The more I Twisney'd the more addictive it became and the better our trip report was at the end of the day.

TIP: Add twisney@twisney.com to the email address book in your cell phone before your trip. It'll make it faster to type a message when you're in the parks.

TIP: If Twisney doesn't map your updates correctly, you can change them later on Twisney.com. Don't be intimidated by thinking you have to type full location names or memorize the abbreviations. You'll get the hang of it.

The next step was to see my posts on Twisney. My cell phone email posts were uploading to Twisney with username "Emailer7". That's what Twisney does for email posters - "Emailer" followed by a randomly assigned number. I wanted it to show a more descriptive name like scottsan. Since Twisney uses Twitter.com for usernames, I created an account at Twitter for scottsan, then associated that Twitter username with my email address by using this page: http://www.twisney.com/tools/TwitterActivateRequest.

Once this is done, Twisney automatically recognizes my old and new posts as scottsan.

TIP: Create a Twitter account for a more descriptive username.

I had to get Twisney.com to show only my posts. If you go to http://www.twisney.com/<username> it will show the posts for the specified username. For example, to see my posts, scottsan, the link is:
http://www.twisney.com/scottsan

You can take that a step further to show all posts for a certain date as in http://www.twisney.com/<username>/<year>/<month>/<day>. The last day of my trip was May 13th 2008 so I used:
http://www.twisney.com/scottsan/2008/5/13

In order to show multiple days worth of posts, one more number is needed. It's the number of days in your trip. Our trip was 5 days long, so I just needed to put a 5 at the end, as in:
http://www.twisney.com/scottsan/2008/5/13/5

To sum it up, put in your username, the last day of your trip, and the number of days. For another example, here's the link for moodringtone's trip that ended on 5/20/2008 and lasted 7 days:
http://www.twisney.com/moodringtone/2008/5/20/7

Confused? Email me. I'll help.

In writing this post I went to my link and looked at how we did on our trip. There were a lot of things I forgot about - running late to our ressies at the Rose n Crown, monorail snafu at Epcot, and the special fireworks for Illuminations. It was totally worth the 30 seconds for each post. It was neat to relive exactly what I was thinking at the time it was happening. It was also neat to watch the map slideshow and to see all the pictures (some crummy, but learning for next time) from my cell phone.

TIP: You can't take too many pictures at the parks and you can't post too much to Twisney. The more the merrier!

Try Twisney on your next trip and you won't be disappointed. You spend a lot of money for a Disney trip and it's worth recording the memories. At the very least, Twisney gives you a reason to use the hundreds of dollars worth of mobile electronics you're carrying around in your pockets. :)

Till next time...

Monday 5/19 - Tokyo Disney Resort on Twisney

If you checked on Twisney recently, you probably noticed 2 new options on top of the menu bar. One is for language and the other lets you choose a resort. They don't look like they do much right now but everything is under the hood. The app is ready to support a multi-lingual UI and in a few days we'll be receiving live updates from Tokyo Disney Resort. NETCOT podcast listeners knew this was coming since I hinted about it during my recent interview with Van.

I don't know any Japanese, although I'd love to learn. I don't even know what the image in this blog post says but it has Mickey & Minnie's pic so I figured it was somewhat relevant. Luckily, I have a volunteer helping me with the translations and resort info (more on that later).

Taking Twisney into Tokyo Disney Resort (TDR) is going to be fun for a few reasons. First, I can't wait to see pix from TDR. Second, Japan is much better equipped for mobile communication than we are in the US and with Twitter's recent release there, I'm hoping to see a lot of posts. Third, since I'm lazy, I modified Twisney so that integrating new resorts is as easy as possible. Think Hong Kong Disneyland, Disneyland Resort Paris, and Disneyland.

The changes were big so I apologize ahead of time if you run into any issues. Also, apologies to those that already ran into issues as I was updating the site Sunday night. This will be worth it. Thanks for your patience!

Thursday 5/15 - New Twisney Mobile Tool to Help you While in the Parks

During my mother's day visit, one thing I really wanted was an optimized version of Twisney to use on my blackberry while in the parks. For example, I often wanted to know the latest status for a ride or check where another "park-er" was.

Check this out: Twisney's Today Page. This new page shows you what is happening "today" and lets you quickly view all the posts for a ride or for another "park-er". It's optimized for mobile devices by using a simple format with clickable filters and a lightweight payload.

For those in the parks today, please try this page on your mobile. I'll be curious to know if you find it useful for interacting with other "park-ers" and getting the latest scoop on ride status. Once it's fully baked, I'll add it to the tools page.

More features coming! Stay tuned...

Wednesday 5/14 - Twisney on a roll, big weekend

As a lot of you know, I'm just back from an extended weekend at WDW. The trip went great and I posted steady to Twisney.

I have a ton of email to go through and very little time to do it so if I haven't responded to you yet, don't worry, I will.

The trip spurred a few enhancement ideas that I'd like to make to Twisney so keep an eye out for those soon. It also exposed a few locations that I forgot to include - boardwalk, toy story mania, and monsters inc laugh floor. They're all in now, and if you had any posts that went to "unspecified location", they're mapped now. I normally do that daily, but not while I'm on vacation at the world. :)

We topped 100 Twitter followers and blog watcher counts keep going up. I'm excited that so many people are paying attention and helping to create this next wave of Disney fan technology. Thanks!

Friday 5/9 - Exclusive Disney Preview and a "Find me (Scott)" contest

Today's the big day that me and the fam head out to WDW for an extended Mother's Day weekend. This was supposed to be my private beta test of Twisney before the big release but... :) as many of you already know word has already gotten out. No worries there, I'm glad everyone is liking it so far.

Let's try to have some fun with this - how 'bout a "find me" game? First person to find me in the parks will get a free Twisney t-shirt and, of course, we'll take a picture where you find me and post it to Twisney.com. I already know a bunch of people that will be in the parks this weekend so this could get interesting. I'll be posting Friday thru Tuesday to Twisney.com and I'll kick it off today with a picture of me (update - just posted the pic). I'm user scottsan. I'll be easy to find. Just look for the 30-something exhausted-looking guy with bags over his shoulders pushing 2 strollers or chasing after the kids. If you see me, just say "hey, are you Scott from Twisney.com?" Now, with 100,000 people across 4 parks, what do you think? Is it possible to actually find someone? I guess we'll just have to try it and see.

We'll be doing the Passholder/DCV exclusive preview of the Toy Story Mania ride so keep an eye out for my pix from that, as well as Mother's Day brunch from Epcot. Last year the brunch was amazing, probably the best in the world for Mother's Day and I'm not kidding. It's the best way to celebrate with my kids and their wonderful Mom.

If you followed my posts the last trip -- Saturday, Sunday -- you know that I'm awful sending mails from the mobile phone so please be easy on me with the typos. Ha!

Friday 5/9 - Wall Street Journal covers Twisney

A special shout-out to everyone that sent me the following link.

WSJ.com - Citizen Journalism, Live From Disney World

I interviewed with Tom, the author, yesterday on short notice. The article has an interesting slant on Twisney that I never really thought about.

Thanks Tom!

Tuesday 5/6 - In the News

I'm amazed every time I get an email about Twisney being the topic of someone's blog post or news article. Here's the latest list. Thanks to everyone that covered the site so far. If anyone sees Twisney on the 'Net, be sure to let me know.

On Twisney's potential:
http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/4248-Twisney-another-step-forward-for-mashups.html

On KillerStartups.com:
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/Twisneycom---Disney-World-Updates-in-Real-Time/

SarahInTampa's Blog (I think this one started the whirlwind, thanks Sarah!):
http://www.on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/TwitterEmailFlickrVirtual-Earth--Twisneycom/

On netcot.com:
http://www.netcot.com/thesite/2008/04/25/twisneycom-mixes-walt-disney-world-twitter-flickr-and-microsofts-virtual-earth/

Amusement Parks blog:
http://showpeople.typepad.com/amusement_parks_usa/2008/04/twisneycom-mixe.html

The Disney Blog:
http://thedisneyblog.com/2008/04/28/twisney-realtime-updates-walt-disney-world/

The Hobson and Holtz Report (download Podcast #340, 4/28/2008):
http://www.forimmediaterelease.biz/

Tuesday 5/6 - Twisney 2.0

I'm terrible with names so excuse me if "Twisney 2.0" seems like a boring way to describe the updates that have been posted to the site over the last few days:

• Much improved Map
  
• A contest - a REAL contest - with a $75 giveaway at the end; that's a lot of money just for posting!
  
• RSS Feeds for Site Updates and the Blog News section of the home page
  
• Twitter Links - if you have a Twitter account and post to Twisney, the username that appears on the map for your posts will hyperlink to your Twitter feed so that you can get more followers
  
• New home page and site-wide style update
  

Please enjoy and don't hesitate to write me if you have suggestions or feedback.

Thursday 5/1 - New Site Layout

I completely redid the site layout tonight. I'm a terrible designer so I hope it's not too hard on the eyes like the last one.

Monday 4/28 - OMG, we have users... hundreds and hundreds!!

This has me a little nervous. Twisney.com had 11 visits on Thursday, 140 on Friday, and 510 on Saturday. I really wanted this weekend to be a test run until my real vacation to Disney for Mother's Day weekend but... wow... we already have people using and visiting the site. Here's what that means:

1. I might have to make this an official blog so you can subscribe as an RSS feed for updates.
2. I have to (more quickly than anticipated) fix all the bugs I discovered in my beta test trip to the world this weekend.
3. I have to learn to take better pix than I did this weekend. For example, this ain't gonna cut it.
4. I need to hire a teenager to do my "texting". See my spelling challenged posts.
5. I need to do all of this on my personal time since I am super busy at my day job which pays the bills.

Having seen the site in action for the first time this weekend and seeing that people want to use it, I already have a list of features to add before my next trip in 2 weeks.

I want to hear ideas from you, especially Leigh and Emailer11 who posted along with me this weekend. Send me your thoughts, comments, criticism, concerns to scott@mitchcast.com. Here are some ideas so far:

- Make the post time more prominent in the map popups
- Add a "faster/slower" auto-run option for the map
- Bigger photos? not sure about this one yet...
- User managed locations and aliases?

Thanks to the hundreds out there that already visited! Look for more updates later this week once I can set aside some more time to Twisney.

Thursday 4/24 - This site has just begun, literally...

I'm amazed that you are here because no one is really supposed to know about this site yet. Here's the scoop - I built the site and never really planned to let anyone know about it until I had time to make sure it works. Well, it seems to be working and people seem to be finding it, so.. it's all yours! Have at it.

Until the word gets out, you won't see a lot of status updates. I've posted a sample set from my December 2006 trip so you can get the skinny on how it works.

The good news is that I'm going to Disney twice in the next 2 1/2 weeks so you'll see real time posts starting 4/26 and 4/27 (trip numero uno). Since my camera doesn't take pictures, I'm going to steal my wife's and will hopefully be uploading photos.

Thanks for visiting!

- Scott