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The twitter colour wars and sheep mentality

Byrichard

As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.

I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.

As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.

When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.

That’s why I won’t participate.

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Increase your surfing speed

Byrichard

Is your internet connection slow, do pages take a long time to load, do you visit certain sites more than others? If your answer to any of these is yes then I suggest that you download Netsonic, a program I have tested which works well, since I’ve installed it my browsing is much faster.


At first it’s normal for the netsonic program to seem a little slower but once you’ve started using it and it some files are cached the surfing speed will be far greater since pages which are constantly visited load faster. There is also another function on it which allows you to pre-fetch pages which are kept in a cache file


What is pre-fetching and what are cache files?


When you visit a webpage there is sometimes a lot of text meaning that you will spend some time reading this text, as you spend time reading the page the modem and the line aren’t been used which is when netsonic comes in. This program is designed to follow the links on different pages and download the pages without you feeling that the connection is slower because it does it when you’re not using the modem, for instance when reading a long text.


When does it’s usefullness appear?


If you have had a hotmail account such as I used to use before you visit this page and you begin to be frustrated at spending quite some time online. What netsonic does is cache pages such that the login page for example loads immediatley as well as certain frames load as soon as you get into the account.


Another way it’s worth is shown is when you’re looking through the school’s online magasine, for example coming to read new articles, if there is a page which you like then as the structure of this magazine will remain the same you can get to the page you want in thirty seconds on a 26,000 modem. This means you have more time to enjoy the page and ultimatly a lower phone bill.