- Currently Listening to:
- Iron & Wine — Lovesong Of The Buzzard
Daniel Sandler is experimenting with using twitter for comments, and makes some very good points about comments on the web in the process. Essentially, he pulls in the content of any tweet that references his post’s full URL, TinyURL, or even just the TinyURL hash. This has the very nice effect of forcing people who want to comment on his post to own their words. Their comments will be public to their own audience, and so are more likely to be constructive and civil.
Tying your tweet to a particular page online is awkward though, due to Twitter’s 140-character limit. URLs were designed to be expressive, but not necessarily space-efficient (compare them to DOI or ISBN codes). Twitter’s recent rise has driven the increased use of URL-shortening services like TinyURL and bit.ly, which were originally designed because of the limitations of email clients that weren’t able to correctly break up an URL that was wider than the 80-character wide text columns used at the time.
We seem to have replaced one limitation with another though. By feeding all URLs through minimisation services, readers lose all context about the page they are about to open — is it a video? What domain is it on? Have I visited it before? There are some links that I would be disinclined to click on when using my iPhone, but with minimised URLs, you don’t know what you’ve got until it begins to load in. Plus, there’s the nightmare scenario that the URL service dies, and since their databases are kept private, all that information is lost.
I think URL shortening services could be obviated if Twitter started treating URLs a little differently. There are two main audiences for twitter tweets: mobile phone users who receive tweets as SMS messages (this is the original reason why twitter has 140-character limits), and users who visit the twitter website, or use one of the myriad desktop and smartphone applications to keep up with tweets. These users are not concerned about the character limit in the same way. I would expect this group of people to be growing faster than those who get tweets via SMS.
Ideally, Twitter would disregard URL content as part of the character limit. If you think about it, the URL http://tinyurl.com/cxt59m (this page) conveys almost no information whatsoever. It could as easily be replaced with some single-character replacement in SMS messages (whose users are much less likely to actually follow links than web/applications users anyway). [On further reflection, it is clear that this wouldn't work as I imagined, as the target URL for these single character links would still need to be encoded somewhere as part of the message.]
On the web, and in applications, URLs shouldn’t need to be minimised at all. Twitter clients could truncate URLs for display, but all the URL content should stay available to be used by those clients that want it.
- Currently Listening to:
- Eddie Vedder — Society
Twitter has really taken off in the last few weeks. If you haven’t signed up yet, and are sick of hearing about it, I sympathise. I didn’t understand what the point was at all until I signed up, originally just so that I could follow a few interesting people better than I could using RSS. Eventually, you’ll see a conversation going on and want to join in.
From a web architecture point of view, Twitter is particularly interesting because it is, to my memory, the first web 2.0-ey application that doesn’t really need a website. They’ve done such a great job with their API and backend that there are dozens of excellent applications and plugins for just about every publishing platform. I read and post from a bunch of applications — Tweetie on my iPhone, and Lounge and Tweetdeck on my laptop — and very rarely actually visit the Twitter website.
I guess this is a matter of partly good timing (now that smartphones are common), and partly that tweets are perfect iPhone-sized data.
- CHI 2010 Workshop on Microblogging: What and How Can We Learn From It?
- Twitter Groups
- Conan Twitter Tracker: How Conan Met Sarah | Show Tracker | Los Angeles Times
So when Conan wrote on Twitter that your life was going to change, he was not kidding.
I thought that was being kind of dramatic but now everybody's trying to contact me.
- Topsy - A search engine powered by tweets
- Conan's Twitter Team: A Small Army [PIC]
- Why Google Pushed Buzz Out The Door Before It Was Ready
Google still wants to buy Twitter, and putting Buzz into Gmail might be enough of a threat to bring Twitter back to the table. Buzz did not launch in some Google Labs backwater. It is placed front and center in Gmail. Buzz is Google’s strongest effort yet to enter the stream. If Buzz can gain traction it would certainly help Google’s negotiating position with Twitter.
- Conan O'Brien joins Twitter and doubles Jay Leno's follower count in two hours [Updated] | Technology | Los Angeles Times
However, even while doubts about the account's legitimacy lingered, O'Brien snowballed, picking up tens of thousands of followers in an hour. Barely one hour after his first tweet, he surpassed "The Jay Leno Show's" official Twitter profile, which has been around since April 2009. In just a couple of hours, he doubled Leno's 30,000 or so followers.
- You cannot copyright a Tweet – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
Contrary to popular belief and Twitter’s terms of service, you cannot copyright a Tweet. Under US law, copyright is granted on publication to “original works of authorship” finalized in “fixed forms of expression” but this does not extend to names, titles, or short phrases (PDF).
- Twitter Blog: Measuring Tweets
Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)
- Friday Signal: What Marketers Want from Twitter Metrics - John Battelle's Searchblog
- Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity | Magazine
When it comes to your social network, bigger is better. Or so we’re told. The more followers and friends you have, the more awesome and important you are. That’s why you see so much oohing and aahing over people with a million Twitter followers. But lately I’ve been thinking about the downside of having a huge online audience. When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.
Consider the case of Maureen Evans. She soon amassed 3,000 followers, but her online life still felt like a small town: Among the regulars, people knew each other and enjoyed conversing. But as her audience grew and grew, eventually cracking 13,000, the sense of community evaporated. People stopped talking to one another or even talking to her. “It became dead silence,” she marvels.
Why? Because socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again.
- Twitter Code Swarm on Vimeo
- Top 20 Data Visualizations Mentioned on Twitter
- Twitter StreamGraphs
A StreamGraph is shown for the latest 1000 tweets which contain the search word. The default search query is 'data visualization' but a new one can be typed into the text box at the top of the application. You can also enter a Twitter ID preceded by the '@' symbol to see the latest tweets from that user. A parameter to the URL can be used to specify the initial search word.
- Google Buzz: The Big Misdirection « counternotions
According to many, with Buzz Google’s trying to kill Twitter. And Facebook. And FriendFeed. (Alright, FriendFeed was acquired last year by FaceBook so this is a double whammy.) And Yammer. And Yelp. And Foursquare. And Gowalla. And BlockChalk. And Yahoo! Updates. (Yes, I know, you can’t kill the undead.) And Jaiku. (Oops, Google already owns it.) And whatever Microsoft may introduce in 2011, or later.
However, the company that couldn’t make Orkut, Google Video, Latitude, Google Base, Knol, Google Catalog, Dodgeball, Google Answers and many other products successful may have a hard time killing off its competitors. Of course attention whores with conflicts of interest like Jason Calacanis already declared Buzz the winner: “Facebook is going to see their traffic get cut in half by Google Buzz.” Well, that settles it then.
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