We're Moving!

Hey, glad you could find me here. I'm keeping this site running but it will no longer be updated. You can find new stuff from me on tumblr and twitter.

I'd like to thank you for reading all these years. It has been a blast! See you at the new place, all right?

Cheers!

Colbert Report with Biz Stone, Twitter Co-Founder

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Biz Stone
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Hilarious.

TechCruch (rumour): Google in talks to buy Twitter

This is great. I hope the marriage happens. I also hope Google doesn't turn Twitter into another Jaiku.

Made the Switch to Tweetdeck

I'm a long time Twitterrific fan. It brought the simplicity of twitter to a twitter app. And I love it because of that. I love simplicity. Then came the challenge of missing @ messages and dms.

Enter Tweetdeck.

I must admit the first time this got installed on my mac, I hated it. That was in its alpha stages. now, even I, can't cringe on it being an Air application. The difference between twitterrific and tweetdeck, the first is simplicity itself and the latter is a command center look. i heart both, but the latter is my primary twitter app now.

Where in the World is the Fail Whale?

odd. i sort of miss the fail whale.

Twitter versus FriendFeed: With or without the straw, does it matter?

Do you drink your milkshake with or without the straw?

Was it Rome that fell to Barbarians? The war that is being waged isn't Federer versus Nadal. It isn't Macs versus PCs. With what seems like several Internet years (just a few months in real life), the barbarians are banging on Twitter's walls. Like Rome before it, Twitter is the victim of its own success.

The Digerati--- i'm looking at you early adopters, have swarmed on Twitter. And why not? Twitter in a blink of an eye covered the China Quake as it was breaking. It was most engaging to be on it as an Extra-planetary landing of Mars Phoenix probe was happening. Twitter was instrumental to helping a guy after he was arrested. It has been used to cover Macworld and WWDC, holy of holy days for the Mac Faithful. Let's not forget how invaluable it was in such events as SXSW.

I just named a few instances. There are, I'm sure many more days when Twitter was very valuable to you. It has been such a useful service that I check it first before I go look at email.

Twitter's reliability has been so bad, like addicts we were all suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Enter the barbarians at Twitter's gate, out to challenge the reigning champ. It was after all inevitable.

Jason Calacanis' Twitter's Milkshake meet FriendFeed's straw is an awesome characterization of the differences between those two services. I encourage you to read through it, if you haven't already.

He asked several questions:

What do you think Twitter should do to fight off FriendFeed? Can they? Is it too late for Twitter to fend off FF?

why should twitter fight off FriendFeed? To me, FF is an aggregator of information. much like Google Reader (and every other newsreader), it consolidates feeds into one place.

Without the infrastructure on Twitter, what's FF? I think they both compliment each other very well. Much like what Twitterric and twirl is to twitter.

When there are myriad of vectors--- FF, I must say, is a better way to aggregate, parse comments and thus send out replies. Yet, for all the rave FF is getting, I find it rather difficult and a bit more complex than Twitter.

The beauty of Twitter for me is its inherent elegantly simple interface. I reply as much as possible to tweets sent to me, but there is no pressure to read every tweet, to respond to every tweet from both followers and following alike.

no one can. no one is expected to.

And yet, I must say, people rise to do just that and it is amazing. just look at the conversations happening, even ones that you just lurk in a corner listening to.

That's the difference, I think. People like @scobelizer and @jasoncalacanis have so many followers that it is inevitable that they get drowned in @ replies. They have to parse all that information, parse all that noise to get that one diamond--- and an aggregator like FriendFeed must seem like a Godsend.

If you're on a mac and use adium and growl you'd know how the screen goes and when i turn mine on, twitter flows like the rain. I don't mind. It is just a couple of hundred tweets. If i ever get tired of it, i'll just turn IM devices off.

People like me, I'm perfectly happy with twitter. if the whale makes an appearance, i've got other things to look into. I'll miss the conversation on twitter mind you. I miss the company and it is an awesome resource. the brain trust is simply one of the best places on the web to be on. FriendFeed, plurk, bk and others--- they're backups, to keep the amazing connections alive, you know just in case.

There are many reasons why Empires like Rome rise and fall, Barbarians by the gate notwithstanding, like being victims of their own success. Twitter has been a victim of its own success. The faster they can bring the service to full health, the better to keep the addiction going. They don't even need to fail. Twitter's been different since the outages began. Then again it doesn't matter because what's happening is that twitter's becoming an infrastructure and all these other services are forming around it to add value. Twitter's the OS and FF and the like are Apps. Calacanis put it better: Twitter's the milkshake, FF is the straw. Drink it with or without the straw, does it matter?

Minimum Fuss is 1 of many Reasons Why Twitter is Awesome!

LOL on the zero zombies (which was funny for about a week).

Rands in Repose: We Travel in Tribes:

"I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss."

Exactly.

The Multitude Aspect of Twitter

I love twitter. For me it's more than just microblogging. i meet the most interesting people and get the most interesting pieces of information on twitter.

Some days, it's like one huge digg like service with lots of link love. Then there are days when Philippine politics flows through my feed--- it doesn't hurt that a lot of those i follow are locals with political interests of their own. Some days it's all about the Tech and the art of being geek. And there are days when the financial wizards who i follow spread word. Where else can i catch the story of Bear Stearns live?

Ars Technica talks twitter. How Twitter is breaking down barriers in the classroom:

Most users come to microblogging through a similar path, because it seems so useless on the surface. When I first signed up for Twitter and Jaiku, the benefits weren't particularly obvious at first. Do I really care what anybody else is doing or thinking right at this moment, and can anybody really say anything profound in only 140 characters? It isn't until the pieces come together that it really starts to make sense. With a sufficient number of users, unexpected advantages begin to manifest themselves in surprising ways. It's a textbook example of the network effect in action.

As an experiment, Parry made Twitter a class assignment and got his students to engage in microblogging as homework. He observed how Twitter became the link that connected conversations inside and out of class. "Because the students had the shared classroom experience, when something came up outside of class that reminded them of material from class time, it often got twittered," he notes. "This served as a reinforcement/connection between the material and the 'real world.'" He also discovered that it changed classroom dynamics in a positive way, encouraging more respectful and productive interaction between students by turning the class into a community.Microblogging has many uses outside of the classroom as well.

During widely-followed events ranging from SXSW to the Academy Awards, users can express their own perspective on the shared experience and engage in a distributed, collective dialog. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone posted a blog entry after SXSW with a graphthat showed the volume of references to the event in Twitter messages. The number of messages peaked during major keynotes.These services are also a great way to get quick answers to questions. If I'm looking for a program that has a specific function and I don't know what is available, I can ask on Twitter and Jaiku and sometimes get quicker and more relevant responses than I would get by punching it into Google. This works for everything from restaurant recommendations to computer programming advice. Microblogging can even save you money if, like me, you have friends who post messages about the latest deals on computer hardware at various online retailers.

Clearly, Twitter is different to many people, as much as it is a different beast during some days. Sometimes, I feel Twitter is becoming the mainstream version of IRC--- the very backbone of communication on the Interwebbie.

Tweet Scan: A Google for Twitter?

Interesting. Ran across Tweetscan while reading A VC: Tweetscan. This little twitter app is a tool for searching through twitter's volumes of messages.

Care to know who's twittering what for Superbowl? Simply search for it. Want to stay updated with that search? They've got an RSS feed for your searches.

Interesting, isn't it?

*image is a screen capture for tweet scan.