For the moment I am planning on going to Zurich for the twitter dinner. It’s the first Zurich twitter event I go to and it will be interesting whether I need to speak swiss german or whether my English and French will help make conversation a little simpler. I don’t exchange messages with many Zurich twitter users so it will be quite different from the London events where I had exchanged so many messages.
A few days ago I noticed that twitter was tweeting their programs as they were on in German and this looked like a good idea. I commented it was a shame that they didn’t have the same in French. Within a few days it’s there. This morning I saw Arte’s tweet for one program and so I’m watching a guy play some Chopin on the Piano. I spend quite a bit of time watching the twitter stream so if someone gives me their program details, as an opt in then there’s a good chance that I will tune into the program on the spare of the moment.
And in great style twitter is broken again and yet again they’ve found a new way in which for this to be evident. Today they’ve devided to block all ingoing tweets, no more posting for the next few hours I guess. They really should get a prize for this. No warning, no status.twitter.com message, nothing.
Today twitter has reminded me of why I dislike how it’s managed. With the big Mac World event and CES twitter is down, for the count. The problem is that these crafty people have decided that rather than take the site down completely they would let it lag. As a consequence of this lag the site has been rendered redundant but don’t worry. Other sites like plurk, friendfeed and facebook are still standing.
Twitterfriends is another of those interesting tools to see who you converse with most on twitter. You can see who replies to you most, who you reply to most, the sphere of influence and more. As a result it’s a good tool with which to establish who are the interesting people to continue following as well as those that may be worth dropping. In particular the second to last tab deals with inactive account.
warzabidul - Jan 3, 2009
Testing discuss at the moment.
Yesterday someone twittered about tweetgrid, a simple to use web interface that allows you to see, in real time what people are tweeting about. It filters as many key words to chose and dedicates one portion of the screen per word. If you select four words then you can watch as four topics are discussed. if you select just two then you see only two. The reason this is a useful tool is that it makes trend watching easier.
This morning whilst tweeting with Fahran Rehman we decided that we would like to organise a twitter event in London with a difference. Twestival and twinterval are great ideas but we’re thinking of doing something over a period of two days that would be like a podcamp but over two days and we need your ideas to make it worthwhile. Already we have 27 people on facebook interested in the project and another 6 so far on tweetcamp.
This morning I spent three hours chatting to people in Australia, Sweden and France via both twitter and plurk and it felt great and the reason for this is that it was personal. We hear so much and read even more about the social media and the social web but there is one fundamental flaw and oxymoron in this vision. That is that there is an utter lack of the social aspect.
[caption id=“attachment_826” align=“alignleft” width=“500” caption=“Reason for twitter downtime”][/caption] Yet again twitter hoped for the best and as a result went down for several hours. It’s a simple illustration of why I remain critical of the way twitter is run. What I love best is the “It’s a problem we knew about…”