I like archeological twitter because it shows us curiousities every day of the week, several times a day. I like the image of the mosaic below because you see that it was quite deep, and hidden. Imagine digging down and coming across such a sight and site.
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.
Yesterday I decided that I would track how many tweets I receive within a 24hr period. The result is not that bad. Over that period 917 tweets transited through my timeline. These tweets are sent according to the time of day. Some of them are sent during the Australian morning, European morning and goodnight time for America. As a result there should be some visible peaks at certain times of day.
It’s an average of 38 tweets an hour, not to bad when you consider that reading a hundred and fourty characters takes only a second or two to scan over. Out of those tweets the vast majority are in English although I get Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Swedish to name those I remember off the top of my head.
The topic of these tweets is quite diverse from people’s project progress to websites they enjoy as well as to their daily lives. It’s an interesting aperçu of what all these social (new) media people are doing. Many friendships are built up as a result of this social network. It’s still interesting and I look forward to getting a higher average than a measly 38 messages an hour. Add me on twitter and I’ll follow you too.
When I started writing about the Roman civilisation in the summer of 1996 content was still new on the web. Wikipedia didn’t exist and we still relied on books and encyclopedias. We still had to visit ruins and more. Today the web has matured to such an extent that you can find tweets about the Roman civilisation every day. This means that history is not updated when books or newspaper articles come out. It is updated on a weekly, or even hourly basis. The beauty of tweets, as opposed to blog posts or articles, is that you can share snippets of information, as you get them.
I love technology, especially in the form of online communities. I’ve been part of so many online communities I have some degree of expertise. I’ve seen the birth of the chatroom and it’s evolution, the popularisation of instant messaging and through flipside and nochicktrix I’ve seen the forming of virtual communities.
More recently I’ve seen the increase from virtual communities to real communities. Over the past two years, almost everyone I know has created a myspace account and for a while, this was the best place for people to be. More recently though people have moved to Facebook. Having more than 140 friends, of which only three I do not know, is a sign of how times have changed. It’s actually fashionable to be part of an online/offline community.
All the parties I’ve recently been to have been advertised on Facebook among other places and it’s become the social networking site of choice. If you’re not there you don’t know what’s going on anymore. It’s a great shift. It’s also replacing e-mail.
Why e-mail people when all your friends are on Facebook. Why not take advantage of unlimited photo uploads to Facebook to add all those past nights for everyone to enjoy.
I love the way technology is going. It’s sociable.
If we’re not learning every day then we’re wasting our time. If we’re not up to mischief every day then we’re likely to become unhappy. In light of both of these things let me give you a quick tip for blocking Twitter and Facebook.
My motivation for doing this is the following. Twitter doesn’t trust us with the retweet button so we can take a three or four week break from them. Facebook is dormant, so experimenting with them will have little effect.
The first step is to type “sudo nano /private/etc/hosts”. The Hosts file is a file that the computer uses as a DNS lookup. It is useful to tell computers on a local network where to find the intranet site, or to give IP addresses for sites or servers that do not have a human readable address.
127.0.01 is the localhost default address. So is ::1. The long one is IPV4 and the short one, ironically is IPV6.
By adding a line like 192.168.1.1 Twitter.com we are telling the computer that the URL www.twitter.com’s IP address is 192.168.1.1 which is wrong. On plenty of networks this is the wifi router. The result is that twitter will no longer load. For additional fun I decided to make www.facebook.com resolve to 20.20.10.21. The IP address was arrived at through the highly scientific process of thinking “What is today’s date, let’s use that.”
The last step is “dscacheutil -flushcache” to ensure that DNS addresses address according to the latest host file.
For a while i was trying to think of ways to block myself from accessing these websites. I tried one website blocking plugin but it blocked access to an entire range of websites that I still wanted access to.
If for some reason one day you are unable to access a website after typing in the URL you can resolve the issue by the following:
Check www.google.com or some other URL to see whether the problem is with just one site or whether it is widespread.
Open terminal on a mac and ping the website that is not loading. If you see an IP address that does not look right then you can check the hosts file with the sudo command mentioned above. If you know that an IP address for a URL is wrong then you simply delete the line, save, flush the cache and then reload.
Opening the cache, modifying the file, saving it, checking that it works, reopening the file, removing the change takes seconds per manipulation.
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