As promised, I went almost 24 hours without blogging about twitter.
Today again, revealed some gems – a FireFox plugin that allows submitting tweets from the search bar; Rob documenting some real time action that were spawned by twitter exchanges… A bunch of colleagues plunged on board, full of their predictable twitter recidivism.
Most people tend to describe it as “people writing about what they are doing” as if these are just things people yell out into the void, like the guy screaming from a corner post about the end of the world. Experience shows this is not the case, as people are being conversational, not just blandly saying, “I am eating a bagel” (well there are those). So in some sense to me, in terms of it being a way, each day, I have discovered a new blog, a new technology tool, that its more like RSS, with some noise and static, but it is like socialized RSS, with a human element, not just machine generated snippets.
And that is what I find intriguing- it is human behavior, warts and all.
And as I was IM-ing last night with Brian, we both get charged from the sense of “play” there- you get backchannel like banter, humor, wisecracks, mixed in with the more serious or factual exchange. Why is it deemed less worthy if there is an environment has a strong element of “play”– isn’t that the key factor in first stage learning? engagement? do any infants learn to walk and talk from listening to PowerPoints?
Some things I’d like to see emerge-
* It might be interesting if tweets could be tagged. You have fixed ways to “aggregate” tweets now- all public ones on the front page, the ones from your friends, and your own. I’d like some ways to cull different tweets together, like the ones I have been doing by tweeting abut the Dreaming in Code book I am reading. Or a way to gather all the ones about a conference. With tags, there could be infinite ways to aggregate tweets. Tweet clouds. Sweet.
* Some way to tie an automatic tweet when someone posts new photos to flickr. Not one tweet per image, but maybe a daily tweet with “New photos …. [link]
* Some way (greasemonkey) to autolink when someone uses the @dnorman notation (to indicate the tweet is aimed at D’Arcy) to go to his twitter page.
And coming down the road- in 2 weeks I am on stage at the University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy, and am counting on my “friends” to engage in some live tweeting.
Okay, nuff said, except….
Right now I am scratching my elbow.
Funny, like D’Arcy had noted in a recent post, now that I have been twittering somewhat regularly, I find myself less frequently at the blog. It has seemingly had the opposite effect on you! I am excitedly waiting for twitter and the fine folks at UMW to collide.
Motto = Stray from the Norm
I’m getting a little intrigued, I admit, but anything that takes Jim away from his blog is Not A Good Thing.
I’m trying REALLY hard to get it, but man – I just haven’t seen that ONE awesome thing that has convinced me to join the twitter bandwagon. Social Networking is totally sweet, but man do I not want text messages about people riding the bus – it sounds like livejournal all over again, only more mundane.
Dear Alan,
Many, many thanks for your feed2js prog. I am learning it and using it at the same time. It is truly a most beautiful gift to the world of web design. Very exciting to find something this good for free. I am in awe of your prowess. Again, many thanks.
Best,
Mark Sevi
Just noticed that tweetbar, a firefox plugin that brings twitter into a sidebar, does annotate tweets to @usernames with links directly to them. Not quite the greasemonkey script you were talking about, but it works the same
At least Google indexes tweets. I wonder where that will lead . . .