Rox - Jan 5, 2008
Update - comments as homage to twitter I’ve been using it for an hour and no crashes with the most recent update. Carry on.
I was so going to love twhirl, but it is crashing on me in Leopard. What platform are you running it on?
OTOH, I like to colors of the interface. :-)
For those of you familiar with twitter there are a number of ways of keeping up with information and my current favourite is Twhirl. What I love about using Twhirl is how well it works. At first it feels clunky. You’ve got to download adobe air, then you’ve got to download twhirl and once this is done you’ve got to get used to the user interface. I went from twitterific to here and the transition was relatively painless. I missed one or two of the keyboard shortcuts. Since then I’ve grown to enjoy using it for three key reasons. The first of these is that you don’t need to restart it as there are no caching issues. For someone who tweets as much as I do and follows as many a lot of time would be sent reseting twitterific. Not with Twhirl. It’s got over 5500 tweets right now and no sign of slowing down. The second feature i love is how you can choose whether to @, DM, Favourite or re-tweet. Anyone using twitter is familiar with the first three. The re-tweet feature is fun. It allows you to retweet verbatim quite easily. I don’t see it used often luckily but it’s a nice gimmik. The third feature that I enjoy are the shortcut keys specific to this program. R for replies, F for friends, D for direct messages and then there are two or three other such short cuts that could be of interest. As an aside you’ve got the filter option although having not used it I can’t comment. It’s a nice package and anyone using Aero should give it a try.
Critter - Jan 5, 2008
Nice one mate. The main thing I love about it (and, of course, I am biased) is definitely the speed, but also the ability to really be doing something else /while/ doing Seesmic. keep checking www.seesmicAIR.com for updates :)
SeesmicAIR developed by Critter looks like a really fun application for those already using Seesmic. It looks quite similar in appearance to twitter but rather than be based around text content this is based around video. You see the video timeline and as you see a video of interest you click on it to watch. There are two things I love about this. First it’s built in AIR and that’s a great platform. I’ve been using Twhirl a lot over the past two days and it’s working really well for me. There are no caching issues, even after almost 3800 tweets over the past two or three hours. The second reason I love it is how fast it looks. Of course it’s fast because it’s running off a machine that’s been used to trial it before and the connection might be better than the one I’m using. That’s really the type of app that would encourage me to use seesmic far more freely than I do currently. If as Christine suggested it could be brought offine for our viewing pleasure then that would be even better. I think being able to download at least the friend’s timeline would contribute greatly. Now I’m really enthusiastic both for seesmicAIR and Seesmic and how this would improve how people interact with the too
Interesting Posts Around the Web - Jan 11th | Interesting Observations - Jan 5, 2008
[…] Ten Thousand Tweets @ […]
[…] just read a fascinating post from Richard Azia, where he described some of his thoughts having recently Tweeted 10,000 times (in under a year!). […]
I left a comment here a few hours ago; I wonder if there was a technical hiccup, since it is now gone. Any idea what happened to it?
Yesterday afternoon I arrived at a milestone point, ten thousand tweets on twitter. That’s After less than a year of using the website. To me it’s replaced the university bar for two reasons. The first of these reasons is I’m now a graduate so there’s not much point in going to that bar anymore. The second reason is the organic way in which you create a network of contacts. When you first arrive in twitter it’s a scary place. You see thousands of 140 character messages arriving every few minutes and it’s a time consuming to find the people that you find interesting. There’s the notion that you “follow” people. It’s used to describe the way in which you listen to what they have to say. As you listen to this conversation you see that one person talks with another person and over a period of time as you follow the conversations so you get to see who the participants are. Over a period of days or weeks you’ve got several dozen people you’re following. That means that you’re now able to have many conversations a day. It’s just a question of how much time you’re willing to put. In this respect it’s like university. There are two ways you can treat student life. You can be an Honours student with very few but good friends or you can be a high achieving student who’s created a network of hundreds of friends. I chose the latter option. I could go into university any day of the week and it would take an hour to walk from one side of the building to the other because of all the friendships I had established there. It’s the same with twitter. The more time you put into twittr the more you get out of it. The fact that people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan and Chris Pirillo take the time to follow and listen to people on twitter tells you a lot about the types of conversations that are occuring. The first two individuals take a huge amount of time to talk with people on twitter and it’s a really great tool to see what’s going on, in fact so great that I no longer feel the need to read as many RSS feeds or listen to as many podcasts, simply because I’m participating in the conversations before they become even blog news. There is another aspect to twitter. When you’re on twitter you may be behind your computer, having never met any of these people in person and so it’s really strange to use twitter. It’s thanks to Sizemore organising the London twitter meetup a few months ago that I started to see Twitter in a very different light. It wasn’t just a website. It became a means by which for me to create friendships online before bringing them into the real world. Jeff Pulver, Chris Brogan, Robert Scoble and many others do the same. On the lighter side there’s the flirty side of Twitter. The social media make flirting fun. Quite a few times I’ve created nice friendships with girls and as a result had 2-3 hour conversations via IM, Video webcam and more. It’s a way of life for a new age in human interaction. A year ago I would meet people in person and when they moved to another country the friendship would go online. Now it’s the reverse and that’s what I enjoy so much. That’s why I don’t feel it’s an addiction. Does it sound like I’m an addict?
For all of those privacy advocates I’m on your side for this issue. With a lot of communitis you create a profile and friends can see it. What you give them are both your name and possibly phone number but no more. When you’re building a database of contacts you must ask for it. When you add friends to outlook, address and other applications you’ve done research and the users have given their consent. That’s not the same as harvesting them direct from facebook. No one said they wanted you to have their e-mail address. No one chose to give you those details. If you want them ask for them. Taking contact details from 5000 people is unethical and wrong. That’s very similar to spam behaviour. What makes this worse is that Plaxo is associated with this. I use Plaxo pulse and you can see it on the right side of this column. I don’t mind their services but for people to harvest their friend’s data without prior consent will help increase this feeling of insecurity. We’ve had that debate on Seesmic, on Facebook and other online communities. If we want real communities transparency and trust are key. Stop abusing it.
Today I’ve been playing with Photophlow, a photo sharing and chat website that allows you to easily discuss and share pictures with friends within the interface as well as on tumblr and twitter. Among the features that I find interesting are the ability to create personal rooms and invite flicks friends in. once this is done you can look at their personal photographs, favourite pictures and more. It’s a great way for photo buffs to share photographs without having to give hyperlinks all the time. What I like about this photo sharing method is that it makes the entire process much easier. Much as you would pull out a photo album and start showing photographs and commenting on them you may do the same via this website.
Jennifer - Jan 4, 2008
So true. Well said. :)
This has to be the year where I have met the most people online before meeting them in person, which is quite amusing. It’s also the year that warzabidul as a nickname became a person in the physical world to more than two or three people. It’s the year an online person become a nickname for a real person. It’s the year where, at least for early adopters, Twitter and Seesmic both helped create opportunities for people to meet and get to know each other online before taking it back into the physical world. It’s the year I went to a Podcamp, some tweetups and some seesm’up. It’s the year many of us stopped hiding behind avatars and nicknames and moved towards creating a brand or identity, depending on whether your point of view is that of marketing or personal fun. I’ve enjoyed learning about the “social media” and all the new possibilities. I look forward to 2008 when many more such networks and events will be organised. It’s been a fun year to be introduced to the “Social Media” and I’m happy to have met so many people.