Twitter Cycle

Have you heard just enough plaff about twitter the 2007 web love child? I have experienced and seen enough others experience the twitter cycle:

“That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard of… who in their right mind would be doing that?”
“Okay… if Xxxxxx and Yyyyyyy think this is cool, I will give it a try.”
“I’ve added a few entries, but I don;t get it”
“Woah.. now that I have a set of friends, I am tapping in to all kinds of valuable cross conversations… like when I found a link to X”
“I cannot stop tweeting. I am obsessed. I need a therapy group.”

Maybe not, but twitter is something that only reveals its value in use, and it is not the first casual uses that make it sink in. No, its not the next Great Web Tool That Will Save Education… but there is something there…

I have tried two rather half baked Twitter Experiments for the mere curiosity of trying it…

At yesterday’s CNI closing plenary, rather than conference blogging, I tried conference twittering [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] , [6] – trying to catch useful 140 character snippets. I do not know how long those URLs will last, they were copied from the timestamp link which points to a referencable past tweet.

it would be helpful to be able to reference a collection of tweets within a given time span, like a set of tweets,

Today I started reading the book Dreaming in Code, and I was wondering what it would be like to tweet highlights of the book as a plowed through it. 140 char micro comments like http://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/32365031.

What I am lacking is a good, brief way to reference the book in subsequent tweets – should it by the tinyurl link? some cryptic abbreviation? I put the book title and page in brackets (“[Dreaming in Code p4]”, but that eats up 15% of my tweet-space!

So here is something else that would seem tweet-obvious — providing users an ability to tag their tweets. This way I could develop my own organziational scheme for things I tweet, allowing them to be grouped, RSS-ed by URL to the tag, and in the grand del.icio.us/flickr tradition, to expand out and se everyone’s tweets using the same tag. Tweet. Rip. Mix.

Also on the new tool front– TwitThis provides the cut and paste code to allow visitors to your web site / blog to post a tweet via a button click. I’ve been using the Twitter Tools wordpress plugin that nicely automatically tweets a new blog post, but added the template code that should put my tweets in the sidebar. I have not got it yet to successfully update my latest tweets, but in addition to sidebar-ing them, it provides a tool for posting tweets (only the blog site author sees the form).

And in searching yesterday for a coilleague’s twitter account, I fell back into twittermap which aims to geo locate your tweets. You need to provide it some location info (see the faq) otherwise it uses (I think) a location based on your ISP. I just put in my home location, and fortunately, it did not locate me exactly on my house (a few blocks away), but what is cool is that it shows as other pins, nearby tweeters — zoomed out, see the Phoenix Tweet Society and hover to see their latest: