The University of Texas, Austin has kicked off a project to study the best way to preserve the history of online worlds.
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I hope the creators are thinking beyond the 'twitterverse', as they have one cool feature that many other Twitter clients don't - they are not riding on the Twitter brand. There are no bird metaphors in the name or the design, so if they are so inclined, they could add support for Plurk, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, FriendFeed, Blip.fm, bit.ly, Kwippy and all the other services that are crying out for unification in some form or other.If you've spent even a little time on the popular website Twitter you will notice a few things about it. You may notice that there is quite a bit of downtime, or the avatars won't load, maybe your tweets don't get submitted or you can't follow people, sometimes. I am here to tell you today that these aren't even the biggest of problems that Twitter faces. Furthermore the main reason why Twitter is ruined right now, is you.
When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was a fantastic idea. For a creative person like myself it could be the ideal avenue to throw out some funny lines that I come up with and get instant feedback. It was like a dream world where I could harass people in new and hilarious ways, all the while getting instant feedback from the harassed and anyone who cared to read. Then reality kicked in.
I soon started to notice that Twitter was being used for sub-awesome ventures. I started getting attacked by a barrage of lameness like "eating food" or "I'm bored" and even the dreaded "driving to work". Uggggggh... I found that my new avenue of awesomeness was getting crowded with genuinely boring people. People with no imagination, with no vision, and apparently no fucking lives.
You have a great way to meet and chat with an unending amount of new people, and you decide the best way to befriend them is to fill them in on all the boring little details of your life? Not only that, but these people tend to have 5x as many followers as me. How can this be possible when they have the personality of an acorn and I'm the king of awesomeness? Simple. Most of these people only care about building huge follower/followee situations and upping their "tweet" count. Wow, what an ultra fulfilling and rewarding life you must live.
Being the nice guy that I am I want to help some of these people. I'm not helping the tweet count and follower count whores, they've already sold their souls to mediocrity and are forever in my little black book of hate. I will, however, help those people who tend to just be completely boring. They seem like nice enough people, and I want to follow them back, I just can't torture my mind reading their banalities on my timeline.
So here are a few examples of boring posts that I've seen, and my version of the same line. This should help you lame people spice it up a bit...
Original: "Off to take a shower."
New: "Uh-Ohs, It's shower time... Join me?"
Not only are you adding some semblance of personality, but you also see who is attracted to you and out the gays.
Original: "Eating a sandwich."
New: "I'm mouth fucking a turkey club right now."
Some people may find this comical, others may find it kind of gross, but at least you're getting a reaction out of people besides indifference.
Original: "Listening to *insert shitty band here*."
New: "Rocking out to *awesome band*, drinking Red Bull, and hitting my spouse."
Not only do I expect you to put a little more effort into tweets, but I also fully expect you to change your tastes from terrible music and movies, to awesome ones. Maybe it's the generic lines from the terrible movies and music you intake that are taking you over filtering into your tweets.
With any luck a large majority of the twitter community will read this post, realize that they're a failure to society, and then change their ways. It's going to take a lot of work to get these disappointments to turn it around, so I'll need your help. The next time you see someone getting their boring on, I want you to textually bitch slap them right in front of everyone. I feel if you make fun of the relentlessly they'll either be forced to change their ways, or they will just kill themselves. Either way it's win/win.
Blip.fm is a new micro-blogging service, from Fuzz, that has a truly brilliant unique selling point - music. Twitter asks 'What are you doing?' but Blip.fm asks instead 'What are you listening to?' You simply search for a tune, scroll through a list of results, preview the ones you like to make sure it's working. Add a message and 'blip' it to the world.
Music is clearly the killer feature here, but that's not the only great thing about Blip.fm. It's really easy to find and add people with similar musical tastes. After each post, Blip will show you a handful of others who have recently played the same song, and ask if you want to follow them. Additionally, the main page dynamically loads in new blips, without you having to reload the page. All micro-blogs should do this, but it's particularly hand on Blip as it means you can just keep listening, indefinitely.
I do wonder about the legality of this, but ultimately this could be a great tool for music discovery. Let's hope it survives!
Here, have an invite to Blip.fm, on me.
In a smart move earlier this month, Twitter bought Summize, and turned it into search.twitter.com. Now Twitter should snap up some more services to capitalise on the work others have done using the API, and really jump ahead in the micro-blog space that they created. So, what else could they add?
Twellow is rough around the edges, but it is a great way to search for useful stuff on Twitter. Want to follow some people who are into the same TV shows as you? Solicit some advice from a web developer or Linux geek? Find some news sources? Twitter could grab Twellow, or probably knock together their own directory.
TwitPic is essential. Already tightly integrated, this is a brilliant way of sharing photos through Twitter.
Twitterfeed is a core service for anyone who wants to tweet an RSS feed. (And I'm not just including this because I did the logo!)
Another service already in perfect harmony with Twitter is Tweetburner. Your link-sharing stats could be displayed on an extended profile page, along with all your shared TwitPics and other goodies. This one probably makes the most sense, as the URL shortening market thrives largely thanks to Twitter.
Another service that just needs a lick of paint is TwitterNotes. Just by using a plus sign, this can identify your tweet as a note, and keep it handy for later. It even supports tagging. Postica has a more novel way of displaying notes, but lacks for any other real selling (or buying) points.
Twitt(url)y and TweetWire both search and filter out hot links on Twitter. This could make for a pretty interesting alternative frontpage, to answer the frequent newbie complaint of 'I don't see what the point is!'
Buy TwitterCounter, mix in the Tweetburner and Summise data, and you can provide users with some pretty cool analytics data! A TwitDir or Twitterholic style 'Top 100' would be popular too. And Mood Status might be a fun addition.
Identica is already offering a tags page, but Twitter could take the lead by snapping up Hashtags (or the less sexy Twemes).
Twitter really needs to revamp the follower/following management, and it could start by looking at MyTweeple, which does a great job of showing you a summary of information on all those who follow you, and all those you follow, making it easy to spot spammers or the anti-social attention whores who seem to be plaguing Twitter these days.
There's not really any need for Twitter to spend millions on acquiring all of these new features, but I think this list does go to show how much potential there is. I'm sure Obvious know what they're doing (or at least think they know better), but they would be daft to ignore the brainstorming efforts of hundreds of smart fans. To a large extent, the beauty of Twitter is in its simplicity, but I think all of these features could be added without compromising what is already there.
C'mon Twitter, shake it up a little!
This is another of these web services that I'm usually so fond of - a simple but terribly useful tool that does just one thing and does it brilliantly. Postica, sadly, is not brilliant - but it has a couple of useful features nonetheless.
The screengrab above probably explains the concept entirely. You can add notes to an otherwise blank page, choose a colour and move them around. You can also upload small (2-5MB) files by attaching them to notes (see the pink sticky). Probably the most useful feature is the ability to add a note via Twitter, by direct message (something I actually have been finding rather useful).
Finally, you can share notes, although I was only able to manage this using my own email address, so I think it may only work for those already on Postica, even though the FAQ suggests otherwise.
I hate to say it, but I don't think Postica offers enough. I may continue to use it for the Twitter integration, but with services like Evernote around, they need to add some other innovative touches if they want any attention.
The new Joss Whedon project is a revolution in direct-to-web production, showing that a web drama can be high quality. Imagine a cross between Mystery Men and the Buffy musical 'Once More With Feeling', and you probably have the vibe.
The idea came about during the Hollywood writer's strike earlier this year, when many writers were giving the web some serious consideration. Let Joss explain in his own trademarked Whedonspeak:
... I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.
The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first. [read all]
Neil Patrick Harris is brilliantly cast as Doogie Howser, gone evil. Nathan Fillion plays his nemesis, square-jawed superhero Captain Hammer (introduced in a My Space webcomic) perfectly. Another smart move was to cast web-savvy internet kitten (and actress) Felicia Day. of YouTube hit The Guild.
If you fancy watching a quick teaser, I've embedded it below, but why not just go straight to Act I...
Read more good stuff at Wired and USA Today. This bodes well for the future...
Summize had become one of the most useful and most polished Twitter services, a fact apparently recognised by Twitter who just snapped up the technology (and the five Summize engineers). The search engine has been rebadged with the Twitter logo and moved to search.twitter.com.
The Summize Blog has a nice potted history of the site and explains some of the thinking behind the search technology. The Twitter post also includes a neat little sketch showing how they plan to integrate their new toy into their main service:
This is a great move from Twitter. I hope they are considering buying up some of the other standout uses of their API, like TwitPic, Twitterfeed and Tweetburner (and maybe Twiddict too!). Moving in this direction will quickly put them miles ahead of the competition, which has really been hotting up lately.
Tweet Scan seems to have pipped Summize and others by adding new upstart micro-blog service Identica to its search index. Confusingly, the two searches have not been integrated. To search Identica you have to enter your term into a subtly different page.
Still, it's nice to see a Twitter-centric service embrace the new micro-blogging platform. It seems certain that the open-source Laconica will inspire many other Twitter services to embrace other platforms also.
Sorry for the lack of real updates recently, but I have been spending most of my time job hunting. Thankfully, with some success. This coming Monday I begin as a Web Assistant for BBC Wales, working primarily on the Nature site. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to work for a company that gets the internet. I feel like I am a pretty capiable web designer, but there is no doubt in my mind that I have a lot to learn about good usability, accesibility, semantics and editorial skills, not to mention media production and distribution. I don't really know what the future holds, but this is one big step in the direction I want to be going.
At the moment I am organising a big move from Plymouth to Cardiff, and the first few weeks in any new job are pretty hectic, so don't expect many new posts from me. In fact, I'm thinking about shifting focus somewhat, but I haven't settled on anything yet.
In the meantime, you can catch me on the Twitter. Also, the foobot is still slaving away, keeping you up to date with the latest and greatest links from me. My Tumblelog, foomandoonian.net, is due for a bit of a revamp, but it still aggregates my content nicely. All of this is due for a revamp in the near future, so please stay tuned.
