An online notebook
This blog has a clear theme this morning. Here’s another tool that makes Twitter even more useful: Twitter100. It displays the latest updates from up to 100 of the people you follow on one page. It certainly makes following what’s going on a lot easier.
Thanks to Mike Butcher for the link (via Twitter, of course!).
Mike Butcher reports on TechCrunch UK about Tweetmeme, a new UK based service which provides updates as to what the hot discussions are on Twitter. A Techmeme for microbloggers, if you will. Having had a look at it this morning, much of the conversation being tracked is around Tweetmeme itself, though the new WordPress Twitter clone theme Prologue is making waves too. This will be an interesting service to track, to see what conversations I might be missing out on.
As Mike says:
Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorises the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme.
Twitter is becoming an indispensable tool for me – albeit one I didn’t know I needed until I started using it in a big way. I guess that as with a lot of these social networking type utilities, Metcalfe’s law applies – the more people use it, the more useful it is. Now I am following a number of people, and them tuning into my updates, suddenly I can’t get enough of pinging little messages around: about what I am doing, or what I need to know, or how I can help others.
So what is Twitter? Well, it’s a ‘micro-blogging’ service. You’re limited to 160 characters per post. That limit is important, because it means you can use text messages from your mobile phone to update your status, and also to receive them from others.
As every good Web 2.0 service should, Twitter has released an API, meaning that others can building applications which ‘mashup’ Twitter with other services to make it more useful. A good example is Dave Winer‘s Twittergram, which lets you post short bursts of audio onto Twitter; or hashtags, which allows people to post on, and follow memes through Twitter.
Dan York has an excellent post on the ways he uses Twitter. I’ve quoted his headings below:
Today the service has had a little trouble though, and I blame Macworld. So many people will be sending Twitter updates from their mobile phones and laptops about the big breaking news from Steve Jobs’ keynote that the whole thing is under considerable strain. And Twitter isn’t the hardiest service at the best of times. More on this from Duncan Riley at Techcrunch. How hard would it be, I wonder, for some to just copy Twitter, but back it with sufficient infrastructure to actually work all the time?
Finally, a quick real world example of how Twitter can genuinely be helpful. Last week sometime, my good friend Steve Dale sent out a message requesting that someone suggest an example of a ‘shout box’ on a website. I responded within a few moments, giving a URL of a site where I had just added shoutbox functionality. Steve was in a meeting at the time, and those who were waiting for the shoutbox example were left open mouthed at the speed of this forum of communication and collaboration.
You can follow my latest Twitter updates in the widget on the left of this blog. Alternatively, join Twitter yourself and add me to your follow list!
Ning founder Marc Andreessen has posted a response to the discussions about the fact that quite a bit of Ning’s traffic is as a result of ‘adult’ communities. Ning, remember, is the service that allows you to create your own social network. Andreessen says:
First, we have built Ning to be a broad-based service — people can use Ning to create social networks and social experiences around any topic area they want and then contribute content and engage in any activity they want, as long as what they do is not illegal and fits within a pretty general set of terms of service…
Second, due to this inherent flexibility, some people have chosen to use Ning to create social networks and upload content around adult topics, including porn. It is true, there is porn on Ning…
Third, adult topics and content are a relatively small percentage of the total activity on Ning. We have various ways of quantifying this, and all of them show this to be the case.
However, my view is that I would now be much less likely to encourage someone to use Ning within the public or third sectors because of the heavy amount of adult content. I think that one of the key factors in encouraging people to engage with social media in a professional capacity is that it needs to be safe – and part of that is being free from association from undesirable content, like porn.
Ning is a great service, and could continue to be without the one-handed content!
I’ve been playing around with Ning a little this morning, and am really impressed with it, not least because now users can create subgroups within a community. Add that to blogs, forums, photo and video uploading and plenty of RSS goodness, and you’ve got a pretty comprehensive community platform.
The community I created whilst testing this stuff out is called Online Innovation UK. I had the idea that it might be nice to have a place for everyone to get together, whether public or private sector; and regardless of geographical location within the UK. All you need is to be interested in the application of web technology to make life easier for folk
I think this could be really useful, and I hope it isn’t a case of reinventing the wheel. There are probably several groups out there that cover one aspect of this area, but nothing that drags everyone together.
Ning does allow me to send out invites to people to join, but that makes me feel nervous – too close to spam for my liking. So I thought I would try to promote it in a more circumspect way: through my blog, twitter, facebook etc. If nobody joins, then I guess I haven’t lost anything, as amazingly, Ning is free.
If you’d like to connect with other people who are engaged in making use of Web 2.0, Social Media and other web technologies, please visit OIUK and join in.