Posts Tagged: twitter

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17
Aug 09

Tr.im-ming your way to sainthood

When I was 16 I ran a simple website listing free stuff available on the internet. Free stickers, free webspace, free e-mail. My site wasn’t the only one doing it, there were many others. Of course, I borrowed stuff listen on other sites, which was not always appreciated. One of my competitors felt threatened, and started a crusade against me. Wherever he could he badmouthed my websites and removed links.

This made quite an impression on me. I was about 16 years old. Somebody actually cared what I did. I felt important. I needed to act!

But eventually I folded my website, because I realized that neither I, nor my simple website wasn’t all that important.

I was 16.

I was reminded of this when I read the latest installment of the tr.im soap oprah, going on their blog and around it. In case you were on holidays, don’t care about twitter, or, frankly, have a life: tr.im is a URL shortening service. Long URL in, short URL out. Why is that interesting? Good question.

A week or so ago, tr.im decided it would fold, because the big bad twitter and tr.im’s competitor bit.ly were out to get it. Twitter decided bit.ly was the chosen URL shortener and pushed tr.im into a corner. Tr.im, would fold, all existing tr.im shortened URLs would continue to work until the end of the year. The blogosphere went wild. Why? Because everybody realized that URL shorteners were in fact a single point of failure. If a URL shortener goes down, all of a sudden thousands of links, in particular on Twitter break.

All the attention clearly gave the tr.im people a warm feeling inside. People cared about them, they concluded. They must act! And they did, they brought tr.im back. But it didn’t make that much of an impact, so today they took it a step further.

“tr.im to be community owned”:

Therefore, starting today, tr.im will begin its migration into the public domain, becoming 100% community-owned, operated, and developed.

This whole announcement is full of pledges, and stories about how bit.ly tried to buy them for only $10,000 and that this was clearly a PR stunt, and even if bit.ly would eventually get to them the shortened URLs would be freed. Because tr.im is going to save the Internets, by giving its most valuable asset to you: itself. Its data and its source code, ensuring that you can enjoy the tr.im, forever. Guaranteed.

Tr.im, seriously, you are just an URL shortening service. There are dozens more like you. You are not special. Do not think what you do has that much of an impact on the world, even if you get a  little bit of attention. Just run your little service, or shut it down, but don’t keep making such a big deal out of yourself.

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20
Apr 09

Slumber party

It’s been quiet here. That’s because the overhead of this place is just so much lower. And less is more, people talk too much anyway. And it’s even accessible if you’re not on it, by subcribing to this.

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29
Jan 09

Anatomy of a Twitter message

RT @scobleizer: having lunch with @jasoncalacanis @TechCrunch and @ev at http://tinyurl.com/2fqbe http://twitpic.com/18ne5 #lunch #lifestream

– dramatization of an actual twitter message

The simplicity of twitter is often mentioned as the key factor of its success.

Slate magazine (April 2007):

Twitter is the newest assault on your attention span. Once you’ve signed in, the Twitter site immediately prompts you with a question in bold type: “What are you doing?” Below, there’s a blinking cursor and a blank white space where you have 140 characters with which to answer. That’s basically it.

<

p style=”clear: both”>But 2.5 years after its inception, is that still “basically it”? We now have @replies, #hashtags, tinyurls, twitpics, RT retweeting and other protocols that we fit into those 140 characters that pollute messages.

Creating something new by taking things away is an interesting idea, but if its users start to re-add all the features that were intentionally left out by encoding it into the messages, does it really work?


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26
Jan 09

Mr. Digg on how to be #2 like him

kevinroseMicheal Arringtong was nice enough to give some room to Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) to share his insights into how to become popular on Twitter (Kevin is currently the #2 most followed person). The highlights:

  1. Let your followers retweet you. Retweeting is copying somebody else’s twitter message on your own twitter stream. Personally I think retweeting is fairly annoying the way it’s done right now. Often you have to pay attention to notice if somebody’s retweeting or has these brilliant thoughts him or herself. Also, as somebody who has been retweeted a few time, retweeters are really good at slightly altering the retweeted message (notice the difference?).
  2. Fill out your bio. Makes sense. Updated mine.
  3. Link it up. i.e. spam your twitter username wherever you can. Mine is zef by the way.
  4. Look at the top twitter users and watch how they tweet. For instance, talk like the #1 on twitter.

And there’s 6 more gems. Thank you Kevin.

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24
Jan 09

New Twhirl: now with 400% more spam reach

twhirlLoic Le Meur on the upcoming new release of Twhirl (a populair Twiter client):

Post your messages from Twhirl to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, WordPress and a gazillion services with Ping.fm integration. Why keep your updates only for one social software while you could reach all your friends on all of them?

i.e. why only bother the people on twitter with the fact that you’re taking a dump, when you can share it with everybody you know on facebook, myspace and especially LinkedIn too!

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13
Jan 09

Pico Blogging

I’m on twitter. Twitter is cool, but it still leaves too much room for junk. Some people just shouldn’t get any space, or as little space as possible. Clearly this does not apply to me and you, we can handle it. I have a blog on which I can write page-long thoughtful articles. If I wanted to. But I don’t. So I won’t. But people like Steve Yegge, who suffer from verbal diarrhea, could use some lessons in conciseness.

For those people there’s pico blogging. They get 16 characters per day. Here’s what Steve Yegge’s last few picoblogs would look like:

Fable II=awesome Mario kart=cool

Much better right? Not sure if it covers the content, but come on, I’m not going to actually read these book-length posts to find out.

People tell me they love twitter because if its restrictiveness. You only get 140 characters so it’s a challenge to fit your thoughts in. For this type of people pico blogging is great too. It’s like twitter++ (or twitter– depending on your point of view): even more restrictive than the original. And because you can only post once a day, you better think twice before posting “taking a crap” as your message of the day.