From Twitter: #ThereIsASearchResultForThat? Bat suckling. 9 hrs ago
Thursday, May 28, 2009

DIY Twitter Clubhouse

Just a thought: if for any reason you wanted to follow only close friends or family on Twitter and wanted a way to more privately communicate with only that group of people, you could create a Twitter clubhouse. Set up an account that only allows invited individuals to see updates. When a person (who should be allowed in the group) requests membership, you (the presumed admin) would not only allow the individual to join but also give them the keys to the clubhouse (login and password for the private Twitter account). What this allows for is a few things:

  1. Everyone that is allowed to follow the clubhouse can see its postings (including @ posts to the clubhouse).
  2. Any member of the clubhouse can DM the clubhouse account privately and anyone in the clubhouse will see it.
  3. Any member of the clubhouse can publicly @ the clubhouse

Obviously, this is not as fancy as a clubhouse could be. For instance, only one person would get the privilege of receiving DMs on a device. With most systems (like Tweetie for the iphone and ipod) that’s a fairly moot problem (since you can switch between accounts with relative ease and see DMs that way). But it would be a good way to create a somewhat cloistered area for casual semi-public messaging. I work on a collective novel over at Jelly Halo right now and despite the great things PBworks have set up, there isn’t a communication system that would be as “collected” in one place as this method would.

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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Experiment Complete, Cleaning Up

Well, I tried a new experiment with my favorite online tool, twitter. I thought it might be fun to compose them into digests and post them daily here. As far as experiments go, it was quite a successful one since it proved three things to me. One, it’s a stupid idea and made a mess of the blog. Two, one is largely due to the fact that I twitter way more than I blog right now. I’ve discovered a whole great gaggle of pithy writers on favrd.com who are nothing like the ego massaging masses of twitterers who write compelling cliffhangers like “I’ve got a headache” or “I’m going to bed.” Anyway, if you poke around on Favrd for long enough, you’ll find most of them. I enjoy competing for favorite stars. Someday someone will learn how to spam Favrd and that will be a sad day, but I don’t sense this trend coming to an end for at least another 6 months. It reminds me of the early days of the blogosphere, those rough-tough ragged days when you could stake a claim just about anywhere on the world wide web and set yourself up a nice little blog. People argued back then that blogs seemed trivial and useless—little more than diaries made public. Oh, how wrong you were naysayers. And twitter seems to be causing a similar hubabaloo. So, I think there’s good uses for twitter, aside from adding another awkward verb to the English:

I wish I lived in the heyday of ham radio. Because I would call it Hamming. Everyone would be like, “Huh?” And I’d be like, “Just wait.”

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

The second thing that I learned from this experiment was that what I like to write on Twitter has nothing to do with what I like to write on Banapana. Admittedly, I’ve been loosening up on the syntax here on Banapana—makes it easier to write more—but I’m still writing about particular subject matters, not stuff like this:

The evidence is mounting, and scientists agree, global idiocy is an increasing concern–possibly doubling by the year 2010

The Beloved Leader, via Twitter

That there’s a legitimate place to put a thought like that on the Internet?—now that’s just fun! So, it looks like Twitter is just entertainment! Who knew that enforcing a 140 character limit would make email fun? So, at any rate, I am for the moment considering posting a twitter digest of my best from the week here, but no more daily updates. It makes a mess.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Fail Whale! Long Time No See

I just saw the fail whale for the first time today in a long while (months maybe)? And I’m pretty sure that this nifty radio network is to blame. It certainly appeared on my own memetic map rather suddenly. Within a day, it seemed like, a large number of people I follow and folks who follow me on twitter were to be found on blip.fm tweeting away at their favorite tracks. It’s no Pandora killer, and I think some of the novelty will where off rather quick, but if you’ve got a tune you want everyone to know about, this is a great tool. I have a feeling some lucky band is going to get rocketed to some new level of stardom with a system like this.

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Friday, February 6, 2009

Visualizing Twitter

You saw what the world looked like when the inauguration was twittered.  Now the New York Times has a nice twitter visualization of the Super Bowl.  My favorite part is watching the world’s collective consciousness synchronously call out for Springsteen!

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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The #JTP Meme

I found a new meme on Twitter (the coolest social app there is). With twitter, if you want to refer to a particular subject, you can put a # in front of the key word (the same way you can reply to someone by putting @ in front of their user name). Someone’s started a #JTP subject which stands for “Just the Punchline.” What’s funny (sad?) is that I actually recognize quite a few of them.

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