Twitter

Over the past three days I’ve been testing twitterpod and so far I’m quite happy with it. It’s an efficient way of keeping track of twitter conversation. What makes this application different from others is the way it archives all tweets you’ve received. Over the past three days I’ve received over 8400 tweets and i can search through them to see my conversation history with all those I follow. Another feature I like is the drawer feature that comes out when I browse over a tweet that has a hyperlink. The Drawer is great because you don’t need to go from one application to another in order to view the hyperlinks. Simly scroll down the list of tweets and find the relevant links. If the link is worth visiting properly then you can view it in another browser window. It’s effortless and that’s why I love the feature. Another feature that’s useful is the way you can choose to see all tweets, only those tweets that are related to you(me) and all tweets with URLs, in other words hyperlinks. There are some keyboard shortcuts like apple 2 to send an @message and apple 3 to open the person’s profile page in browser. The final thing is more of a gimmik. if you’re just watching twitter without contributing many comments or adding to the conversation then the visualisation tool allows you to have twitter running as a screensaver of sorts. I don’t see the appeal but some people might. Overall it’s a nice little package and so far it’s been able to cope with my tweeting style which is always an advantage. I’ll continue using this for the moment.

Valentine’s day is a day both dreaded and feared by most for two reasons, as a couple because of the pressure you’re under and as a single because you’re single. In the social media though it can be one of the most amusing times. My social media valentine consisted in two parts. The first on twitter and the second a net2meet (From online to offline meeting) with a fellow seesmicer. The first one was fun thanks to it’s simplictiy. When you write @ username <3 it takes this to mean that you heart the other user. With maggie a fellow seesmicer we filled each other’s timelines as well as that of many others with this electronic sign of affection. It was amusing to see what a good mood it put both Maggie and I in as a result. The pressure Valentine’s day usually puts on people dissipated entirely. I reached my 17,000th tweet yesterday and I dedicated it to all the girls I have frequently tweeted with. They’re what made valentine’s day so much fun. I love the idea that I have so many conversations on a daily basis. We’re a community based around twitter and our love of new methods of communication. It’s a good community and I’ll spend many more ours there. I flew back to Switzerland and that’s where I met Pioupiounette a fellow seesmicer and within a few seconds we already felt comfortable with each other. That’s because in the social media we spend so much time chatting with and seeing people that when we meet in real life we’ve already got a collective experience. In french it’s “Un vécu commun”. As a little bonus I got to see the projection room of the cinema and the reels there. It was fun to hear the whirring away of the machine, seeing two arc lights, the cinema from another angle and such. In other words it was an adventure. The socia media are a fun place to spend some time and this year was one of the most relaxed valentine’s days because technology meant that I had some good friends to have an enjoyable time with. Keep in mind that Valentine’s day is the day I got my driving license so whilst others celebrate love and relationships I celebrate mobility and frienships. Yesterday was a pleasure and I hope next year will be just as good.

Mostly Lisa - Feb 2, 2008

looks pretty cool. i’ll def check it out. ooh, BBC world has a twitter? that might help me get better informed on the goings on of the world more than engadget…

If you don’t have much time to see what everyone is doing then twitter100 is a really interesting option. It allows you to see what up to 100 people you’re following are doing at that moment in time. It allows you to see who you’d like to respond to. It’s easy to use, all you need is your user name. As you see the layout is good when you don’t use the full 140 characters. It displays better when not in full screen at full resolution. It’s not something I’d use all the time

Rox - Feb 6, 2008

This accomplishment begs for a new type of institution to house it in but you are so deliciously un-institutional that I will simply say “Hurray!”

Congrats on 15,000 tweets! I’m flattered that I was one of the contenders for the dedication. Maybe you can dedicate your 30,000th tweet to me :D Well done, Richard!

I was going to dedicate my 15,000th tweet to Maggieconv, AmandaGravel, Starrgazr, Shanzan and a few other twitter friends but Shanzan won the price. She said goodnight and as a result my 15,000th tweet was dedicated to her. If you’ve got any questions about how to use twitter just let me know and I should be able to help. I’ve been spending enough time on the site to give recommendations on how to use it as well as to it’s purpose.

I went to the Social Media Coffee event this morning and met quite a few of the usual people including Deek, Sizemore, Londonfilmgeek and others. I got to know a few more twitter users a little better and that’s where I stayed for part of the morning. I’ve been networking a lot over the past few days and I think i need some time to think about all the new options. It’s good to get to these events and talk to people. Quite a few people are interested in twitter and because I’m edging so close to the 15,000 tweet mark they’re quite curious to know my thoughts on the topic. People are actually interested both in what twitter is and how twitter works. Over the months I have acquired a respectable amount of knowledge and people are starting to seek it which is great. That’s just one aspect of the Social Media cafe I saw today but there is one thing that’s going to change. If no one objects to it I will begin to record the conversations as they go on and edit a summary to make available both via the London Social Media Cafe website for people to consult and keep up to date. I am in discussion with Jeff Pulver of PulverTV to see about covering the London side of Social media so if you know of any events that may be of interest let me know so that I may organise coverage if it’s relevant.

Richard’s blog » The Social Media Morning - Feb 5, 2008

[…] went to the Social Media Coffee event this morning and met quite a few of the usual people including Deek, Sizemore, Londonfilmgeek […]

It’s a bizarre sensation - you get so used to it and then the morning Twitter is down you find yourself both supremely productive and wondering quite what to do. I’m trying to work out whether my reluctance to migrate to either Jaiku or Pownce is simply because Twitter is where my friends are, or because the interface is unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable - like standing in a room you don’t really know. Will we migrate? I don’t know - it depends who parts the waters and makes that first, dynamic move :)

Yet again Twitter is down for far longer than anticipated due to yet another server upgrade and I wonder about something. I can I recommend anyone use a service like twitter when it’s got such a poort uptime record. It’s not that complicated when you think of it as instant messaging so why all the downtime. I can’t help but feel there’s poor managment. I miss saying Good Morning to my World Wide audience.

Dacort on twitter has given me access to a site (I am not yet free to disclose the URL yet) where we can see our twitter activity in graphic form. It gives us a nice overview of how strong our twitter habit is. (click image to see full graph) When I started using twitter in May you can see I was very quiet and it progressed quietly over until August. In August I started to tweet. In December and January I am at the peak of my tweeting habit. This is due to the change in how twitter is used by many people. It went from being a status tool to being a conversation tool around the users activities. As you can see from this graph my activity on twitter is constant throughout the week. With some people you see a clearly defined trough during the weekend. Not with me. You’ll know about me via twitter than any other means of communication as a result. It may not be intimate but there is a lot to be gleamed. Some people believe that I never sleep, that I am constantly at the computer tweeting but that’s not quite the case. As you can see I tend to tweet constantly throughout the day from the moment I wake till the time I go to sleep. Apparently I sleep four hours a day ;-) I’m not quite that bad. Here are some of the people I’ve atted most during my use of twitter. of course I’m sure this has evolved over the months and it is not representative of who I have talked to most. In some cases many instant messages and direct messages have been shared instead. I have used four interfaces in particular, the web interface because that’s what everyone uses initially and with recent api troubles it has become the easier option. Twitterific I used for a long time but because of the volume of tweets I receive I had to find another alternative which was in the form of twhirl, an adobe air client that works far better. The final tool is instant messenger. Instant messenger makes interacting with those you tweet with a lot far easier because you see their messages as soon as they arrive, rather than have to refresh constantly. Of course occasionaly you feel the need not to get all their updates so you rely on the web interface. So as you see these are my usage states for twitter and it’s thanks to @dacort that I can show them to you. This is a peak as you will also be able to see your usage stats in the near future. Happy tweeting.