If you know someone who can’t stop Twittering, maybe you should send them their own Twitter e-card?
Posted in Humour, Twitter, humor 
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Entries Categorized as 'Twitter'
Twitter gets its own e-card
May 2, 2008
TwittEarth - What a load of Twitt!
April 25, 2008
In my capacity as a tech / internet blogger, I browse through literally hundreds of links a day and I see a lot of good sites and equally a lot of bad sites. I also see a lot of sites that make me wonder what the webmaster was smoking when they made it. TwittEarth is one of them.
It’s a Twitter mashup and it is a live representation of where a Twitterer is in the world as their messages hit the Twitter public timeline (they are represented by an ugly little monster hopping about on the surface of the earth). If you’re bold enough (which is the polite way of saying “stupid enough”) to give the site your Twitter username and password, I suppose it will also track where your followers are too. But I didn’t spend that much time on the site.
So in my opinion, it’s really only nice eye candy, nothing more.
There should be a law against pointless websites like this!
Posted in Twitter, Web 2.0 No Comments »
Delicious is down? Summize to the rescue!
April 14, 2008
For the first time I can remember, Delicious is down today. This is a major inconvenience for me as I have pages piling up here that need to be bookmarked. But it also has a flipside as I got to try out Summize which is a real-time Twitter search engine. I wanted to see if Delicious was down for me only or down for everyone. So where better to check than Twitter, right?
(more…)
Posted in Del.icio.us, Twitter, search 1 Comment »
Become a Tweeting Twitterer with These Apps
April 13, 2008
A post I wrote for Make Use Of.
Being the titilating tweeting twitterer that I am, I figured it was time for another brief round-up of some Twitter tools that have been doing the rounds in cyberspace recently. Twitter seems to be going from strength to strength and web developers are coming up with even more innovative ideas for Twitter web programs and software tools. Here’s what I have found recently.
Posted in Digg stories, Twitter, Web Tools No Comments »
Did We Just Witness a Twitter Marriage Proposal?
March 22, 2008
Forget statistics and pageviews; marriage proposals, folks, are what really cements a web service as a part of our everyday life. Now, we’ve seen Twitter on CSI, but I don’t remember seeing anyone propose to someone over it.
Posted in Digg stories, Twitter No Comments »
5 Ways To Have Fun with Twitter When You’re Bored
March 19, 2008
In this post, we take a look of how you can kill a few hours playing around with Twitter.
Posted in Digg stories, Twitter No Comments »
Tools, Apps and Bots to Improve your Twitter Experience
February 12, 2008
A post I wrote for Make Use Of. Find out how to flag words, track phrases and use automated bots to simplify your life. We will also take a look at some of the third party apps out there that remove the need for you to even use the Twitter website.
Posted in Digg stories, Tips, Twitter, Web Tools, social-networks No Comments »
Twhirl for Twitter - a calmer way to twit
January 24, 2008
Well it didn’t take me long to get tired of the Google Talk / Twitter combo. I still love Google Talk and Twitter but I felt that Twitter was slowly hi-jacking my GTalk application with its fast moving updates. Despite its benefits, Twitter really is a catch-22. To keep updates under control, you need to be selective with your contacts but to get the full benefit out of it, you need to have as many contacts as possible.
This is where using GTalk became problematic - the updates were coming in so thick and fast that I had to eventually turn off the notification window - which resulted in me missing important IM messages from business clients. My girlfriend also got tired of Google Talk constantly opening flashing orange windows and she often shut Google Talk down - which cut me off from clients. Third of all, the flashing orange windows were wrecking my concentration and productivity. But I need Twitter constantly on to network. So in the end, something had to give.
For the past few days, I was testing some alternative Twitter programs and I was unsure which one to go with. But it was Amit Agarwal’s post today that made me settle on TWhirl. It runs on the Adobe AIR platform and I am a big fan of AIR. I have previously posted on other AIR platforms such as DiggTop and the Google Analytics desktop app. I also use the Pownce desktop AIR app on a regular basis.
One of the big advantages of TWhirl is that it only collects updates from Twitter every few minutes (a maximum of 60 requests to the Twitter server per hour). This means that updates come in much more slowly so it becomes easier to read each update and ponder it / respond to it before the next update comes through. This took a lot of getting used to at first (in fact it was so slow that I was convinced it was broken!) but now I am totally hooked on the idea. My desktop has calmed down and I no longer feel compelled to frantically speed-read all of the updates that come in.
Some other excellent positives about TWhirl :
- No beeping or other notification noise unless you ask for it. I currently have it set only to beep if I receive a direct message or reply.
- No flashing windows.
- TWhirl can be kept on top of all other windows. So I can work in the browser and have TWhirl updating to the right of my screen at all times.
- You can specify the size and style of the font on the interface. So if Arial doesn’t float your boat, change it to something else.
- You can make the interface transparent so you can see your browser window underneath it.
- You can see the photo associated with each Twitter account. It’s really nice to be able to put a face with a name.
- Multiple-account management. If you’re a “super-Twitter” and maintain several accounts, you can easily switch between them in TWhirl.
The program does take a bit of getting used to though. For example, normally if you want to find out the details of a Twitter you are not currently following, you would use the command “whois :”. But in TWhirl, this doesn’t seem to work too well. Instead, it’s faster to just click on the Twitter username and the details will be instantly displayed in the window. What I found neat about this is that by typing a username into TWhirl, it will show you the last 20-30 updates that person made. So you can see right away if that person is worth following. Google Talk didn’t give me that functionality.
Another thing - which will eventually become annoying - when I was using Google Talk, my Twitter contacts were basically portable. When I was at a computer - any computer - I could log into Gmail and the integrated chat window would open up with Twitter updates. So wherever I was and whatever I was doing, I could log in and keep on top of Twitter. But now that I have moved to TWhirl, I would need to rely on the other computer also having TWhirl - or use the Twitter webpage instead. So a portable TWhirl for the USB stick would be nice at some point in the future.
Posted in Adobe, Productivity, Software, Twitter, desktop, social-networks 1 Comment »
Updating Google Calendar with your mobile phone and Twitter GCal
January 7, 2008
This isn’t a new app by any means but it’s only in the past few weeks that I have seriously begun to use it in a big way and it’s only now that I am beginning to realise its usefulness.
I explained the whole concept in an article for Geeks Are Sexy but the short version is that if you have internet access, you can use Google Talk to send direct messages to Twitter bots which will then update your Google Calendar for you. No more having to go to the Google Calendar page. You can update your page using Google Talk on your PC desktop and have your daily schedule emailed to you each morning.
But a comment by one of the GAS readers made me realise something else - if you’re out on the road with no internet access and you need to update your Google Calendar, just send a SMS to Twitter with your mobile phone. I’ve just tried it and it works perfectly. It costs the same as a regular SMS to the United Kingdom.
All you have to do is add GCal to your Twitter watch list (so a bit of pre-planning is required). Then authorize GCal to access your Google Calendar.
When everything is set up, send a SMS to Twitter at +44 7624 801423 (add the number to your mobile phone book so you don’t forget it).
The SMS message should start with d gcal (the “d” stands for “direct”). Adding this to the start of the message ensures the text goes directly to GCal and not to the public Twitter page for all to see.
So if you want to add your appointment with a Playboy bunny for Friday at 7pm, just type in the SMS :
d gcal meeting with Playboy bunny on Friday at 7pm
If you then check your Google Calendar (it may take up to a minute for it to appear), you’ll see your calendar duly updated!
The only snag (to the best of my knowledge) is that you can’t alter existing calendar entries by SMS’ing Twitter (if say for example an appointment time is changed). If I am wrong and this is indeed possible, please let me know!
UPDATE :
I did some digging around and discovered the SMS phone numbers for the US and Canada :
Twitter Canada: 21212
Twitter USA: 40404
Posted in Google, Google Calendar, Tips, Twitter No Comments »
IM networks are not just for chatting anymore
January 5, 2008
There’s one thing I know for sure - instant messaging networks have come a long way over the past few years and the uses that people have thought up for them have progressed beyond mere chatting and LOL’ing.
Here’s two :
Creating link-sharing request networks : I have been approached by people very active on places like Digg and Stumbleupon, asking me to approve them on my IM contact list, and me on theirs. Not really to chat but mainly to digg and stumble their links and they would do the same for me in return. The person with the link would just open a chat window and send the link to everyone in the list with the request “digg / stumble please”.
One guy told me he had 20-30 people in his network all digging and stumbling each other’s work. There’s been a lot of grumbling about how flawed the Digg Shout system is and so people seem to be turning instead towards IM programs to do their own informal “shouts”.
I am not sure if asking someone to digg / stumble your personal posts goes against the TOS of these sites but it’s an interesting concept nevertheless. If you have a weblink you want to instantly get out there, you can quickly ask everyone on your network to digg and stumble it for you.
For such a network to be truly effective though, you would need to have some diggers / stumblers on your list that are at least a bit influential on the sites. Kevin Rose would be a good choice on the Digg side although I seriously doubt he would agree to be on any IM network that I have just described. If you have a lot of contacts who are not so high up in the site’s hierachy then the stumbles and diggs they could do would have a limited effect.
For a list of top diggers, check out this list. For a list of top Stumblers, there are two lists in existence, one here and one here.
An unique twist on the “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” concept.
Controlling web-based services from the PC desktop
I recently posted about this on Geeks Are Sexy with a follow-up today. More and more online services are setting up IM access to their services, sometimes using Twitter as a conduit.
The top ones - Twitter, Facebook (in a kind of roundabout way using Twitter as the middleman), Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and all the major blogging platforms (including Wordpress). Just see my Geeks Are Sexy article for more details.
A lot of them are controlled through IMified which is easy to set up.
Posted in Digg, Instant Messaging, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Wordpress, social-networks No Comments »
Twitter gets the jump on CNN with Bhutto death
December 29, 2007
News networks take note - you’re being scooped by Twitter. Yesterday I first found out about former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination not on CNN - but from Twitters in Pakistan.
Literally within minutes of the initial attack and then Bhutto’s death being announced, Twitters were chattering about it, linking to sources and getting the news out. In fact they got the jump on CNN so fast that the term “CNN Breaking News” is a bit misleading.
Sorry to break this to you CNN but the news has already been broken - by a Pakistani with an internet-enabled laptop and a Twitter account.
By the time the traditional news networks finally get their version of the story out, it’s already spread like wildfire across Twitter with people discussing it and linking to it. In fact it has the potential to spread so fast that a misleading version of a story can be repeated in countless places before a rebuttal can be issued. But nevertheless, this is the future of news reporting - as soon as you cough or scratch your nose, someone with a Twitter account is talking about it.
Posted in Twitter, Web Tools, media No Comments »
Me and my pet Twitter
December 18, 2007
After a long and rocky start, I am happy to announce that Twitter and I are now going steady.
It wasn’t always destined to be this way. When I first heard of Twitter, my immediate reaction was “Oh God how horrific!”. Horrific both in the terms of privacy implications (Big Brother encouraging you to monitor your every move) and also “Man, has the internet sunk to a new low?”. I was prompted to think this by reading Twitter profiles which read “just got out of bed” or “man I have an itchy ass today!”. Reading comments like that made me wonder the value of Twitter and if there was anything truly to be gained by it. I mean,who gives a flying monkey if you’re sitting there contemplating whether to eat Weetabix or Crunchy Flakes? I don’t care and you don’t have to broadcast it online like it’s CNN Breaking News! As Bill Maher once pointed out, we have turned into a bunch of manical attention-seekers - we threw privacy out of the window years ago.
So I dismissed Twitter as just JAAW (Just Another Annoying Website) and moved onto a website with videos of dancing cats instead.
How wrong I was to dismiss them.
Instead of reading over the coming months about how Twitter crashed and burned, I instead read posts about how great Twitter was. I read how it was gaining strength and attracting new followers every day. My will wavered a bit and I thought about trying again but I decided not to. I was still convinced that Twitter was on a short life-span.
So what finally turned it around for me?
A combination of things. I guess it was mostly that I was finally starting to admit there might be something to this Twitter thing after all. I was starting to see that people were using Twitter for a variety of uses and not all of them were discussing their naval lint. Bloggers were using Twitter to publicise blog posts, others were using Twitter as “flash blogs” where they made thoughts that didn’t warrant its own full blog post. Some others were posting links to news stories. Fans were building Twitter apps by the dozen. You could even do “Ego Tweets” by searching for yourself or specific subjects on Twitter posts.
But what finally started to fascinate me was Twitter’s integration with instant messaging programs and mobile phones. With the IM programs, Twitter was re-defining the role of an IM program. Pre-Twitter, IM programs were for teenagers discussing who snogged who, old ladies exchanging cookie recipes and older men hitting on younger girls for tittie pictures. But Twitter came along and showed that you can use IM for other things, more productive things, such as getting relevant information pushed to your desktop. You can have the news headlines passed to you as a basic example. Steve Rubel touched on this in one of his blog posts in which he utilises both Twitter and Google Talk to have information flooding into his Gmail inbox.
And then the mobile phone. I have always been hesitant about combining a mobile phone with the internet because huge bills inevitably follow. When you mix the net with a phone, it’s like flushing big wads of cash down the toilet. It has always been a big mystery to me why mobile phone companies here in Germany do not drastically lower the charges to get online. Instead I am paying the equivalent of $2-$3 a minute if I want to get online with my mobile phone! Why the hell the phone companies can’t figure out “OK, if we lower the cost of getting online, we’ll get more customers who will surf the net more with our phones which means more cash for us”. I didn’t go to business school but even I can see that it makes sound business sense that if you lower the cost of something, more customers will come as a result. But everyone here seems to have graduated from the Kamikaze School of Business and Economics.
So when Twitter rolled out mobile integration at the cost of a SMS message to the United Kingdom, I was sold. Before, I would sit at social events and be bored witless. I would be building towers out of wineglasses and mentally undressing the waitresses. Now I just Twitter! I now sit there with my mobile phone under the table and I Twit about anything going through my mind at that given moment (internet / tech related). I can use the mobile SMS to switch my Twitter notifications on and off, send direct private messages to contacts (and have them directly contact me back). The only downside is that my hands are now extremely active under the table keying the next SMS and my girlfriend’s 80 year old grandfather naturally assumes that I am up to something disgusting down there that will get me prosecuted under the state’s obscenity laws. But it’s easier to let him think that than explain what Twitter is! He’s still in shock over the demise of the typewriter and we’ve only just got him understanding the concept of a mobile phone.
However, there are some really stupid Twitter apps. The one that truly took the biscuit today was My Tiny Jesus in which a small Jesus figure spouts random Twitter posts at you. Which really goes to reinforce the point that some people really do have too much time on their hands.
Here are three of the better Twitter apps that I have recently found on my travels :
- Get help with crosswords and scrabble with Wordbot.
- Add events to your Google Calendar using TwitterCal.
- Read the first lines of books twice a day with TwitterLit.
I am using my Twitter profile at the moment to mainly post interesting news stories that I come across while I am online. These links appear in the sidebar of my blog and I am looking at other ways to push the content. I will also be promoting blog posts with Twitter as well as Twitting on my mobile when I am out and about.
But don’t worry - when my ass itches, I won’t inform you on Twitter.
Posted in Instant Messaging, Twitter, Web Tools, mobile 4 Comments »
Exchanging social network usernames is a smart idea
December 11, 2007
I have been spending the last hour or so going through my backlog of online reading material and I came across a post on Daily Blog Tips which suggests exchanging social networking usernames. This amazingly simple request has sparked 83 comments and it has made me realise that sometimes you don’t have to write something really sophisticated to draw in the readers - you just have to propose something mutually beneficial.
So, call me a copycat if you want but here are my social networking ID’s. Feel free to leave yours in the comments and I will add you to my lists. However, with Stumbleupon, I have to be extremely selective whom I add because of their absurd rule that you can only have 200 friends. To the best of my knowledge, Digg and Del.icio.us have no such limits.
Stumbleupon : http://camelot2302.stumbleupon.com/
Digg : http://www.digg.com/users/camelot2302
Del.icio.us : http://del.icio.us/camelot2302
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=505107042
Twitter : http://twitter.com/camelot2302
I am considering opening an account at Reddit. If I decide to do that, I’ll add that ID to the list.
Posted in Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Web Tools, social-networks 2 Comments »
Shifting the emphasis from social networks back to the email inbox
November 14, 2007
I’ve been reading some interesting posts today on how Yahoo and Gmail are planning to shift people from social networks back to the email inbox by essentially making the inbox the next new social network. Dubbed by some as Inbox 2.0, this could be the next evolutionary stage of the email inbox.
To me, email is the backbone of the internet but to others, it’s “so Web 1.0!”. People who I try to get in contact with will only communicate through their Facebook profiles and won’t give out actual email addresses. I mean, come on! Some of them claim never to check their email or even have email at all (which is a bit of a fib as you need an email address to set up a Facebook account in the first place plus you need an email address for virtually every web service available).
So this attempt to break this “Facebook culture” is welcomed by me as I really don’t see what all the Facebook hype is about. Yes I have a Facebook account but I maybe check it and update it once or twice a week. Not like the guy recently reprimanded at work for spending 4 hours a day on Facebook or the student who declares he can’t be a student without Facebook. As the Techcrunch author points out, only hard drugs has the same kind of loyalty and hold over people.
So how will Yahoo and Gmail get people to come back to the inbox? Well Google, true to form, are keeping their mouths shut and Techcrunch opines that Yahoo’s “plans” are all over the place. In fact Yahoo’s plans remind me of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot - aim for the target and hope for the best.
The plans basically involve news feeds with status messages about your friends (very Twitter-ish), profile pages for you and your friends, and the third one actually made me laugh out loud - email algorithms will decide who your most-emailed contacts are and put them to the top of the inbox list. It made me laugh because Gmail already has a “most contacted” feature and most of my “most contacted” list are people I haven’t contacted in months while people I email every day don’t even make the list. So I hope this new algorithim they are working on is better than the current one.
I am personally very sceptical of anything that Yahoo does as they tend to rush stuff out without thinking long-term. They are also rather obsessed with seeing what Gmail does and then rush out their own version to keep up. Before starting anything new, Yahoo should improve their existing services, such as their email. They claim their email is vastly improved but to me, it is still bloated with “in your face” advertising and clunky page layouts. So how can they start integrating social networks into a product which still needs a lot of tweaks done to it?
I’ve just received an invite in my email inbox for the new invite-only Yahoo social network, Mash. I’ll give it a whirl and report back soon.
Posted in E-Mail, Facebook, Gmail, Google, Twitter, Yahoo No Comments »
Tweaks to Better Than Therapy
November 9, 2007
I am currently fighting the flu so I am a little behind with posting to the blog. But I just wanted to quickly fill you in on some of the new things that I have added to the blog. A lot of you may be reading my posts only from the RSS reader so I figured I should mention the new stuff to those people who don’t make a habit of visiting the site that often.
Twitter Updates - despite my initial opposition to Twitter and its “Big Brother” image (what are YOU doing right now?), I’ve decided to overcome my reluctance and give it a go. Part of the reason for the change of heart is that I started leaving status messages in my Facebook account and so I guess I have got used to the idea.
I also found that if I posted regular status messages, I would get less emails from people asking where I was and why I was suddenly silent. So starting from today, the front page of the blog will have a small box with a Twitter status message in it. Feel free to add me to your Twitter ID or subscribe to my Twitter feed.
Go to a random page on the blog - I found this plug-in on Wordpress and I thought it was quite a fun idea. By clicking on this link, you will taken at random to a blog post on this site. It may be one of the newer posts or one of the older posts but everytime you click on that link, you’ll be taken at random to another post. I guess it is the same principle as Stumbleupon. The only snag right now is that the blog is so new that I don’t have so many posts, so you will probably be taken to the same ones over and over. But there is a box with the link on the front page for when I have built up some more work.
This is an excellent feature for recycling old work and getting fresh sets of eyes on stuff you may have wrote a year or two ago.
Buy me a beer - some people may find this one a bit cheeky but I have put a Paypal payment button on the front page if anyone wants to send me the money for a beer. Blogging is thirsty work you know! 
Subscribe to the blog by email - I initially removed this feature when I moved the blog over to this domain. However, when I signed into my Feedburner account, I noticed I had quite a lot of email subscribers so I quickly put the feature back on the front page.
Subscribe to my Stumbles, Diggs and Del.icio.us links - I set up Feedburner links for my accounts on Stumbleupon, Digg and Del.icio.us. I bookmark quite a bit on Del.icio.us, a fair bit on Stumbleupon and as yet not so much on Digg (but I am planning to step this up). If you would like to keep up to speed with what I am stumbling, digging and linking to, subscibing to these feeds would be a good idea. RSS subscribers are currently getting my Del.icio.us links anyway through another Feedburner service but I plan to switch that off soon. So if you like getting those links, please sign up to the new Del.icio.us feed. All links on the front page.
I think that’s it for the moment.
Posted in Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon, Twitter, feedburner No Comments »
