Obama, Twitter, and Timing
March 25, 2009
“I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak,” claimed President Obama at a recent press conference. The claim has drawn a lot of coverage, including a Christian Science Monitor article focusing on the reaction on Twitter.
I had to laugh. It occurred to me that, of all media with which I’m familiar, Twitter is the one that has least to do with delaying speech until one knows what one is talking about.
Should I tweet this thought? It’s probably too late, by Twitter standards.
Happy New Twitter
January 1, 2009
I’d say that the biggest social media successes of 2008 were Twitter and Facebook. I’m not a big fan of either service. But I decided to start 2009 with a chirpy new year tweet.
I was delighted by what I saw when I signed on to Twitter: our old friend, and my favorite feature of Twitter, the fail whale.
Now, let me see what delights await me at Facebook…
Web Week on Wednesday
August 14, 2008
Looking back over the past week (i.e. Thu to the Wednesday that finished an hour of so ago), the last few days seem to have been particularly busy. But representing the latter half of last week here is Jeremiah Owyang’s account of the many challenges facing the social media industry. Jeremiah starts with the lack of profits. He goes on to mention the cutthroat competition, and that’s one of the things driving profits down; I’d say the customer expectation that stuff on the web should be free of charge is another.
Gmail was the big story on Monday. Gmail Goes Down – Twitter Survives, as Frederic@RWW nicely put it. Many were tweeting about their lack of Gmail, but Twitter held up. The following day, Merlin Mann gave a good getting things done without Gmail (GTDWG?) tip.
As you can see, and as John at All Things Digital remarked, Apple (AAPL) has eclipsed Google (GOOG) in market value.
The blog comment service Disqus is high on many “I wish we had this at WordPress.com” lists, especially after its recent update. Mashable Adam wrote that Disqus has a shot at owning the commentsphere. But please don’t let its absence stop you from commenting on this post.
My Favorite Twitter Feature
July 21, 2008
Well done if you guessed from the image that my favorite Twitter feature is the Fail Whale. It’s the work of Yiying Lu. She’s not a one-hit wonder; as pointed out on Drawn!, she has an impressive portfolio. Here are some of the spades from her playing card set, Natural Symphony.
I don’t see a link to buy a set of these cards. If I did, they’d get strong consideration as presents for my card-playing parents.
Sarah Perez recently told The Story of the Fail Whale.
The Fail Whale story is one that shows the value of open content. By making the art available [for free], Yiying is now going to profit in more ways than if she had simply made the art available for purchase. She will be earning profits from merchandise at both shops and from the sale of her prints and she will certainly win some future design work from this as well. Of course, her successes come from more than just the work itself, but also from the power of the community who embraced it.
Yes, the Fail Whale is my favorite feature of Twitter. I tried to tweet to that effect, but of course, when I tried to, I saw… this time you get no congratulations for guessing what.
Two Remarkable Things
May 29, 2008
A platypus called Frankie just left a comment on this blog. I found this so remarkable that I broke my Twitter silence to tell my legions of followers about it.
As to the second remarkable thing, I’ll leave it to you to decide which of the following best qualifies.
- The platy is called Frankie. That’s a very unusual name among duck-billed mammals.
- An Australian (Frankie) complimented a pom (me).
- Twitter was up.
Neither a Twitterer Nor an Appler Be
May 15, 2008
Were I with it, I’d have spent much of today Twittering with excitement from the line to get in to the Boston Apple Store (Terribly Attractive Rad Design). But the BASTARD doesn’t appeal to me, and Twitter was down.
By the way, do you kids today say “with it”? Thought not.
Twitter: Last Year’s Thing?
April 10, 2008
Some people are over Twitter: Hugh MacLeod and Misha Cornes, to name but two. So perhaps I should abandon my efforts to get into it, but I just installed twhirl.
To try to get myself interested in Twitter, I tell myself that it’s like the internet itself. What it does is very simple, and it provides immense scope for interesting stuff to happen at the edges.
But come on people, its 2008. What’s this year’s thing? Adobe AIR applications, such as… twhirl? D’oh!
Twitter Airlines
March 2, 2008
Russell Beatie asserts that everyone else seem to be missing a core – and maybe the most important – feature of Twitter: No spam or trolls. Thanks to engtech for the link. Russell is right that this feature is remarkable, given that Twitter has a million users.
However, Twitter also seems to be the web service of a million outages. So Russell’s post reminded me of the Onion article from 2000 about bad service deterring terrorists from using airlines.
His flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia delayed more than six hours, Hamas militant and would-be suicide bomber Nidal Hanani vowed never again to fly United Airlines.
If you think that jokes about terrorists and airlines aren’t funny, I have too responses. One: shut up Rudy. Two: if we can’t laugh, the terrorists, trolls, and spammers have won.
Two Tales of Twitter
February 29, 2008
One of these feed reader items tells us about twittermeter, a tool that might offer a more robust feature set. The other item reminds us that robust isn’t a word that belongs in the same post as Twitter, even though the “service” is coming up on the one year anniversary.
Prologue: Sort of Twittermattic
January 29, 2008
Interested in something that resembles Twitter for groups? I wouldn’t normally be, since I don’t really get Twitter.
But Prologue comes from Automattic, an organization I’m interested in, so I did see Matt’s announcement post, and I did read posts remarking on the announcement. Here’s the enthusiastic Allen Stern: “if you have multiple bloggers on your WordPress blog, you can now use Twitter-like short messages to chat internally… With WordPress the dominant player in blogging, this could be a game changer.”
Duncan at TechCrunch responds: Nah. It’s a reasonable enough idea, but… But he does seem to agree with Adam that the most interesting part of Matt’s post is:
Some folks have suggested that using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. This isn’t something we’re personally interested in, but we’ve made the theme available as open source under the GPL so if you want to hack around it yourself you’re welcome to.
I think that Prologue is a smart move by Automattic. It apparently took only a few person-days to write. It’s implemented as a WordPress theme, and hence can be used at any WordPress site (including WordPress.com, right away). So for a fairly small investment, Automattic demonstrates WordPress as a platform, and opens (GPL-related pun intended) the possibility of something like Twitter, but more business-friendly, being built on that platform.
It has also generated a lot of Techmeme fodder. By the way, my favorite Prologue post so far is the one from Mashable Mark, who describes Prologue as “a re-invention of the wheel… that has legs.”
Finally, Prologue demonstrates that someone at Automattic can spell.
