An online notebook
Boris Johnson has hit Twitter! Marvellous. Only…
As of the time of typing, Boris isn’t following anyone. Also, ‘under the auspices’? Jesus wept.
Compare this to 10 Downing Street’s much healthier use of the service:
Twitter doesn’t work as a broadcast medium. Someone ought to tell the Mayor.
I’m going to be talking to the good folk at the Central London branch of the British Computer Society this Thursday, on the topic of The Search for Shared Meaning: How Social Media Changes Everything:
Blogs, online video, photo sharing and social networking are redefining the way that people interact with each other and with organisations. Understanding the implications of this is vital for any organisation which wishes to remain relevant in a Web 2.0 world. Dave will discuss how organisations can approach these new tools, and how such an approach should relate to existing strategies and communication plans.
Weighty stuff, I hope I don’t disappoint!
It all kicks off at 6pm at the BCS HQ on Southampton Street in London.
Hope to see some DavePress regulars there – and for those that won’t be, I hope there will be a twitter back channel to keep folk at home informed on just how badly I’m doing. How about #davebcs for a tag?
Whenever I mention Twitter to anyone who wasn’t previously aware of it, the first question they ask is always ‘What is it for?’
Like many social web services, it can be difficult to explain the concept of Twitter. I find it is best to respond with another question: ‘Well, what is talking for?’
‘Er, telling people about stuff. Asking questions. Finding out what’s going on.’
That’s what Twitter is for, too. It’s just like talking.
Steve Dale writes about his uneasiness with a new Twitter mashup service, Twitchboard, which automates the posting of content from Twitter to other social web services. At the moment, all it does is links: if you post a URL to Twitter it also gets pinged to your Delicious account.
I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble! These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness.
I can see some of the value, just in terms of time saving, for cross posting links to Delicious from Twitter. But I think Steve is right in this case – having Twitchboard perform this service would make you think twice about what you post to Twitter, and that’s just no fun. Presumably you also still have to go into Delicious to add tags and stuff (which is where most of the benefit lies) – so it isn’t that much of a time saver after all.
I mentioned in a comment on Steve’s post that actually doing this in reverse makes more sense: links I save in Delicious get automatically shared on Twitter. This is fairly easy to get set up, simply by using the RSS feed from my Delicious account and Twitterfeed to parse each link I share into Twitter.
It will be interesting to see how this works…
There has been quite a bit of twitterfuss over the last week about Mr Tweet, a hideously named service which analyses your current network and then suggests new people that you ought to be following, amongst other snippets of information.
To get your report, all you need to do is follow Mr Tweet on Twitter, and then you get a direct message when your feedback is ready. I’m still waiting for mine.
Other places you can go to find cool people to follow includes my Govwebby list, or the Twitterpacks wiki, which has lots of different feeds listed in a directory structure, whether by topic or location. Worth checking out.