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Twitter and Breaking news

Byrichard

Once more twitter has shown it’s value. An earthquake occured earlier this morning and people started to twitter about it within half an hour. people like Robert Scoble started linking to the story. It took at least an hour for most of the major networks to start speaking about this news.

There’s a lag of course, as journalists have to do some research, get some reports and distribute them. I did a search on the twitter search engine flaptor and here is a little taste of the content of those tweets.

Here is another source of tweets.

Say something in 140 characters or less

Byrichard

For those of you who know me as Warzabidul you’re probably used to my incessant tweeting, when not at work.. Two days ago twitterfone came out, a service that allows me to call a number and tweet by voice.

The system is still in very early stages but works great. The idea is that you register on the site and provide your country and phone number, associate your twitter account as well and wait till your number is registered. Once the number is registered you call and speak your message.

Once all of this is done any time you can talk and want to tweet you call the number, talk and the message appears in two places. It appears on twitterfone as text and an audio file and as a tweet and URL on twitter’s website.

It’s great for when you’re driving, with hands free of course (;-)) because it avoids you touch typing messages on your phone when your attention should be on the person in front slowing down to let pedestrians cross.

So far I’ve been pretty happy with the way it works. It recognises words effectively and is quite a good alternative for those who are not touch typists.

Direct message purging the lazy way.

Byrichard

Damon Aka. Dacort on twitter has come out with a new toy which meant that Meg Fowler deleted all her direct messages. Twitter is both public and private. Tweets are the public portion and DM are the private. Dacort came out with a Firefox tool that allows you to quickly delete tweets from everyone or individuals.

I tried it earlier but I can’t bring myself to deleting everyone’s DMs at this moment in time. Maybe later.

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Mobile web apps and data transfer; Jaiku and twitter

Byrichard

So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.

The mobile Web was born only yesterday

That’s the difference between twitter and Jaiku. Twitter is an old fashioned website and application that requires data heavy websites to provide you with content whilst jaiku offers a mobile phone that requires minimum data transfer from server to phone

Another big difference is the api. With jaiku you can download all messages without needing an api’s permission. That means you can get all messages. With twitter you need to be patient. Tha api only allows sixty requests per hour… That’s one a minute. With something instant that’s stifling the conversation

Over a month of using twitter on the mobile phone I would count 300 kilobytes or more per refresh whilst with Jaiku I require just 15 megabytes of data transfer over a month to follow the conversation. As a result I much prefer the forward looking attitude that Jaiku have taken. There’s just one drawback, the community is smaller.

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Twitter as a way of life

Byrichard

Twitter is not a social network, rather it’s a way of life. The more you use Twitter the further it gets into your way of life. It allows you to follow current affairs, geek out about social media and keep in touch with friends that uses the social network. What’s more it’s a network that does not require any specific device.

At first it’s a confusing place. Look at the public timeline and it’s a torrent of junk and sifting through it will take hours a day. As you spend more time on twitter though you find people of interest to follow. In some cases it’s friends from the physical world, in other cases friends from other websites on the web and then more.

In reality what makes twitter interesting, and part of what makes people use it is how efficient it is at getting a message across. You’ve got 140 characters to express yourself. In Paris I was told I speak in 140 characters or less. That’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s good. It’s about the continual flow of information.

Imagine you’re swimming down a river but everytime you move to stay afloat you have to close your eyes. That’s what article and blog reading is. As you focus on one task so your ability to focus on anything else dissapears. That’s fine in the old media where pages are static and where airwaves are limited.

In the modern world though it is necessary to absorb many sources of information at once. How many of you have your ipod, laptop and mobile phone with you at the time you’re reading this post? I’m sure most. How many of you have more podcasts than you can view or listen to? How many of you have more programs recorded on PVR than you can watch?

That’s why twitter is a lifestyle. It’s about constantly looking for information and building an understanding of current affairs through constantly taking in little bits of information. Stop talking about the social media on twitter, rather start talking about the good old fashioned time efficient soundbyte. Want to be heard. Don’t take people’s time. Encourage interest instead.

Many people are complaining about the decentralised conversation, the notion that blogs are no longer the center of attention, that twitter, friendfeed, facebook and others are killing the conversation. In fact quite the opposite is true. If you’re in New York you’ve got one set of people, if you’re in London you’ve got another. if you’re in Geneva you don’t have much… To have a decentralised conversation means that many ideas can be explored at once and as pillars of the online community meet at various events so the conversations can once more converge.

Don’t worry about comments on a blog, think about the conversations and the people you’re having them with. That’s where the fun is to be had.

Twitter’s broken again

Byrichard

Yes, it’s happened yet again, twitter is broken again but in an entirely new way. At first it appeared that twitter had crashed in the old way, that is to say no server response. This time is different though. We’ve got the WML website version showing. The mobile version is now on the web version.

Twitter's broken again

Does this mean we’ll see the replies tab on twitter mobile? I really hope so. I want to see how people respond, no point in tweeting if you’re not listening.

Thanks twitter, for finding yet another interesting way in which to break.

—update— nothing broke, same crap mobile interface as always.

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Quotably following Conversations on twitter

Byrichard

Quotably is a new service that allows you to easily follow people’s conversations by typing in their username. It displays the most recent conversations and shows the original post as well as the discussions that have occured as a result. It appears to work by taking the most recent @ reply from one person to another and displaying.

Here are a few examples:

Warzabidul

Jeff Pulver

Fred2baro

These are examples where you can see a lot of conversation because these users are active in their responses with those following them. Take a look at certain people’s threads and you see that there’s an initial post but no response to the response. It’s quite funny to observe.

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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.