March 13th, 2007 @ 07:29
Posted by: John
here’s a live feed. Or live enough, you have to refresh this page by clicking on the header to see new stuff in the twitter window.
Pull that scroll bar on the side down to see it all. Here’s the link to get a free account. It’s something that could be used on any website or on MySpace or wherever. You choose who does and doesn’t appear on it and that becomes your “Twitter network”. A group of people can use it to stay in touch without a computer at all, just using cell phone text that’s routed through the Twitter servers. I added the SXSW group as a friend, that’s who the strangers are. I can deselect them and their “twitters” will stop coming into the feed. I haven’t figured out what the selection “leave” means – I guess that’s if you have a girlfriend you don’t want anymore. It would be cool if John Unger was using it, he could text message updates in from his phone of what he was seeing at the conference. We could send back into his cell phone from the computer. Feed him a question to ask a panelist. You would see it all happen in this blue box above. People in the group using cell phones would see it all in text messages on their phones. It could happen between two or ten or a thousand people at once. Cell phone compatibility is the main reason for the 140 character limit. Seems like there’s got to be something good that can be done with this thing.
Maggie, I tried to make a comment under your post but the database is a little wigged out and it wouldn’t take it. GoDaddy has been funky for days now. I’ve been backing up the database every week but there’s a little itch in the back of my mind that says it’s time for another complete backup of every single file.
Anyway, here’s a couple of links: Twitter is the new Flickr and has Tipped The Tuna. It’s so fun to say “Tipped The Tuna” that it may not have or need a logical meaning. I’m going to see how often I can use it in conversation today.
John Unger is staying here this week and has been given us some reports from the SXSW interactive media conference that he’s been going to everyday. He says that Twitter is the big buzz. He hasn’t gone so far as to say that it’s tipped the tuna but he said everywhere you turn people are using it to try to intersect (is that the right word?) with the people from the blogging world that they’ve come there to meet. I don’t know exactly how they’re using it but I’ve heard that SXSW has put up monitors where you can track what people with active accounts are doing from moment to moment. Evan was in the conversation with us and he said “it’s stalking”.
For those that haven’t looked at it, it’s like an instant messaging thing where you enter a one sentence answer to the question “What am I doing right now?”. It then makes that available to everybody who just happens to be wondering what you’re doing or did during various points in the day. Instead of blogging whole paragraphs by the day this is like blogging a single sentence by the hour. What made it take off is that you can either do it from their website site, from instant messaging or from your mobile phone using text messaging. I think cell phone text messaging needed a “killer app” to make it more interesting and Twitter has fit that bill. Everybody has a cell phone and Twitter can incorporate your cell phone into your computing experience.
I got an account when it first came out just to see what it was. My user name is JohnWhipple. Add me to your list and we’ll see how it works. I doubt that many people will have time to use it on a day to day basis but it would be a great way for someone on a trip to share what’s going on and let people become a part of it as it was happening.
March 19th, 2007 09:53
Whippleworld tired of Twitter pretty quick. But check this mashup of twitter and Google maps:
http://twittermap.com/twittervision