Tweetrush

Tweetrush is based on the rushhour engine and aims at providing information on the volume of tweets that are sent every hour of the day. At the present 800,000 tweets are sent a day. That’s an average of 33,300 an hour. I only tweet at about 86 (not 200) a day depending on conversations.

You can see user’s tweet rate as well.

It’s a fun litle app that can help picture how twitter is growing at present.

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Seesmicing from anywhere

I like to seesmic but there’s no way I want to be stuck in one place without moving around. It’s more fun when you see people aren’t in a desk situation. Here are four places from which to seesmic and make things more interesting.

Seesmic from here.

The Lake Side

Yet another nice view

The Mountains

Nice view

And where to have lunch 🙂

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GMdesk as a fun Air App

Gmail, google Calendar and google maps are part of our daily workflow. As a result of this we have them running in two or three tabs at all times. Switching between tabs within a browser can be time consuming but not between applications. That’s where Adobe Air and GMDesk come in.
Adobe Air is a multiplatform solution to make running the same app on multiple machines easy. GMDesk is an application that allows you to use the applications I have mentioned above easily. Work in your web browser, alt tab and you’re in GMdesk.

Those are the short cut keys to save on time when switching from one google app to another.

It’s an interesting idea and we should be seeing many more applications such as this in the near future.

I took hundreds of pictures today so that I could play with photosynth.

Whilst it has been over two years since I last had a windows laptop today I took hundreds of pictures to play with Photosynth, a photo combining piece of software that runs on your machine before being uploaded to the web.

The idea is a simple one. Take as many pictures as you can be bothered and have at least three pictures overlap the same detail. I tried this in three different locations. The first one was a shopping center. I set the n95 to photograph every ten seconds as I walked but soon realised that this was too slow. That’s when I went to burst mode and photographed the main hall where the elevators were, then the view from the parking lot, and finally in a field where the hay was ready for storage.

In each case I took a sequence of 30-150 images at once. I then sorted the pictures out by sequence before letting photosynth do all the crunching. After a while th result came out and I had a 3D environment in which to click from picture to picture to picture.

The link from image to image is usually quite good although make sure not to leave too big a gap between two images as they will be isolated. Time for you to try it out, to have some fun.

Hay

Architecture

Jaiku is moving to the Google App engine

Jaiku is about as old as twitter but rather than expand and get two million users it was bought by google some months ago. This weekend the service has been unavailable and the reason for this is that they’re moving from the old finnish server to the google App engine.

Pat pointed me to this blog post. Now all is clear. The question is how soon will it be until Jaiku is opened up for the masses to start using it? Will it be when Android comes out? Time will show us.

A quick round up of twitter to SMS services for Europe co.

Two weeks after twitter gave up on Europe here are a number of services you can try out.

TweetSMS
This service should be launching this weekend and some people are already testing the service

3jam
It’s up and running but requires for you to pay via paypal rather than Visa or other widely accepted cards

Twitmobile
So far not much information on the service but advertises 5p per message. Let’s see when they’re online

Hootsms
Hootsms are already up and running but as with other services you are required to pay via paypal. It allows a number of bulk buying SMS. You can buy up to a thousand sms for 50 GBP.

Zygotweet
Not much information so far.

Twittex
Appears already to be up and running.

If you’ve tried any of these services leave a comment below commenting on your experience with these services.

I miss the old twitter.

Over a year ago I started using twitter and it had great promise. The public timeline was so slow that I would refresh it and there would be no new comment for minutes at a time. The service would auto refresh from the website and the community was small. The @ feature didn’t exist and no one I knew was using it.

Over a period of weeks and months more and more people started to use it and following was all web based without any api. Eventually people would begin using the @ symbol to direct comments to specific people and with the increase in traffic so the auto refresh broke, and was later removed.

Later still Api support was finally offered. We would get thousands of SMS a month and the term twitter bukake was coined. It was used to describe the act of suddenly getting twenty to a hundred SMS at a time as you emerged from the tube. After a while in Europe this was limited to 250 tweets a week.

Then it died. No more tweets would get to our phones and twitter would no longer have the appeal that it had at first.

It went from being one of the most interesting and innovative and interesting ways to communicate between people in various countries to something that everyone would imitate and equal.

That’s why I’m so disappointed that there are no SMS, that’s why I think that the twitter managment have really missed a great opportunity. I’m glossing over the months of failwhales and server crashes.

I miss the old twitter.

For a laugh – The EEE PC and a dell desktop keyboard

I really enjoy using the EEE PC but there is one tiny flaw, the keyboard is to small to do any real typing. That’s why when I got home I plugged in a spare keyboard and mouse from a desktop and started to type. It works really well. No problems detecting the keyboard or anything.

Since we’ve all got a spare keyboard and mouse lying around why not take advantage of that when we want to do some real work on the EEE PC.

By the way I can touch type on the EEE so this is a question of comfort and playfulness.