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There is a video of me at the only Twestival event I have ever been to and I lay into the event for the fashionistas that attended the event. I was so disappointed with the event as a whole that I have lost my passion for going to social media events, especially when I need to travel over a thousand kilometers. Environmental conscience is one good reason for not travelling to these events but the second is the quality of the people there. When I talked to people at the Twestival event and asked them about twitter they looked at me strangely, when I asked them about how many tweets they had written they told me from five to two hundred on average. As a passionate twitter user and having been to a lot of social media events, tweetups and seesmeetups this really dissapointed me. The event felt like nothing more than a facade, nothing more than an opportunity for people to say “look at how trendy I am, I’m on twitter” yet not understanding anything about the ethos of the twitter way of life. I love twitter, and I love those that use it well, I love how certain people use it the same way they use sms and other social means. I don’t like that in Switzerland I’m strange because I use twitter. I like it even less that over here twitter will never be popular. There is no reason for it because of social cohesion, but also a far smaller community. Switzerland is about skiing, sailing, cycling, hiking, parapente and more sports. We’re not in a city. We’re in the countryside, Europe’s playground. Why be geeky when sports would be more social. More to the point everything is current. I don’t need to wait two to five years for people to adopt the sports. That’s why I’m coming back to Twitter on Valentine’s day. (It’s also the day I got my driving licence ;-))

warzabidul - Feb 5, 2009

You can select to specify where you are by city and country if you like. You have quite a bit of control. I have found a bug though. Sometimes it displays that I’m in another city and country than where I actually am.

For a moment it thought I was in England and in Holland. Haven’t changed country though.

Google latitude is an interesting app available at least on Nokia phones that allows you to see where your friends are according to their mobile phone. At the moment it’s limited just to your gmail friends but expand to include more. What makes this application interesting in the near future is that as more of the early adopting friends of yours install this app you’ll see which city they’re in quite easily. If the friends are in a public space then you can get more accurate directions. It’s an interesting application.

Here we have @sizemore speaking about why he organised the first London tweetup. I will upload some of the other interviews soon but I’m just checking the player embedding first

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reyes - Jan 4, 2009

ooohhh I like this idea! Sounds good. Its time we got some more interesting metrics for twitter and move away from the ol’ ‘how many followers have you got’ mindset. Maybe it could delve deeper into twitter conversations by looking at replies and RTs as well.

What makes this idea interesting is that those that attract twitter users get a higher rating :-). Scoble would still do well in this model. Others would do better.

Dear developers, As the number of people on twitter increases and as people get into the thousands of followers I would like to demonstrate that those thousands of followers does not amount to much. Instead I would like to count follower mass by the absolute number of each follower, added to the number of followers. In other words if you have ten followers with ten tweets the number would be 100. If you have 1 follower with a thousand tweets then the value would be a thousand. If you have five followers each with five thousand tweets then that would give 25,000 as a value. The point of this application would be to demonstrate that your follower mass may not be as great as you excepcted it to be. The more active your followers the higher your value on this scale. If you develop this application let me know :-) I’d love to use it.

petegilbert - 29th of Jan, 2009

I agree that Twitter can often be frustrating and time wasting. I hate having to search through people’s Tweets to catch the start of a conversation. But in a way it’s strangely fascinating, like maybe you shouldn’t be reading it…

I do like Friendfeed a lot but find it almost impossible to get my local active group of Twitter people to use it. I post stuff on there and it just goes into a void. No-one follows you on Friendfeed (except yourself, maybe Scoble) and it feels a bit one sided. I want to use it more though so I’m not going to give up.It will catch on more in Europe but it’s going to take time.

Having used Friendfeed intensly for the last two days and through reading this post I believe that twitter is on it’s way out for early adopters for one fundamental reason. The re-tweet. Twitter is over simplified for anything but IRC like conversation and as a result of this for passionate users such as myself we bounce from the walls of twitter without an opportunity to escape it. We see links but know nothing about them. We see retweets but don’t understand them. We get replies of which conversation they were part of and in general twitter is a two message medium. The two message medium is the way I think best illustrates how people use twitter most of the time. Too many people worry about productivity and wasting time and because they feel guilty for having a conversation on twitter they cut it off after two messages on average. As a result the twitter user often feels that they have wasted time. In Friendfeed however you write a message, link to an article and if people like it you see how many people, including you liked the article and you can see the comments. As an effect of seeing their comments you may exchange more messages with them. It doesn’t matter when you join the conversation because the flow is still there. This saves so much time and technology that I am really thinking of moving away from twitter to Friendfeed because it has finally come of age and is more reflective of the way people disseminate and share information for at least a few more weeks. Anyone else feel the same? Let me know.

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

Did a quick search and I found this link for videos: http://natgeowild.co.uk/programmes/monkey-thiev…. Hope you find some of what you were looking for.

Monkey Thieves is a documentary about the Gulta Gang, a gang of monkeys in India wreaking havoc. What I love about this documentary is that it’s a great topic in HD. You see all the details. You see the faces, you see how they eat a grape but throw away the skin for example. You see wide shots of the city and you see other animals. It’s all about the visual wealth that documentaries can offer you. It’s just a well shot and humorous look at monkey behaviour. You see smiling faces in the background. The scene is monkeys stealing ice creams and eating them. They hold it with the stick, take little bites and more.