twitter

My Top Twitter Tip

Twitter is great, it really is. Even with the downtime, the dropping of SMS updates in the UK and other places, and all the other little irritations with the service, it still manages to inspire a considerable loyalty among those that use it.

As I have written elsewhere, it’s the fact that Twitter works as a service which makes it so cool. Rather than try to please everyone, all the time, through the use of its API Twitter has outsourced a lot of the user interaction stuff to other people, whether Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twitterific, Hahlo or many others. Twitter is therefore the wholesaler of the service, rather than necessarily the retailer.

One of my favourite services built upon Twitter was the search engine Summize, which was so good that Twitter bought it. Now found at search.twitter.com, the service will tell you exactly what is being said about a particular keyword or phrase. I found it really useful recently at WordCampUK, using it to track what people were saying on Twitter in a much more effective way that with, say, Hashtags.

Anyway, after all that preamble, here’s my top Twitter tip, which uses Twitter search. Simply run a search on @yourusername, and then subscribe to the RSS feed. You’ll never miss a reply again!

I hope people find this useful – it would be good to hear other people’s Twitter tips!

Interesting perspective

Colin McKay asks:

Are our British colleagues missing the forest for the trees? They have a PM and two Ministers tweeting, soliciting comment and petitions online, running blogs and pulling back the curtain – at least somewhat.

That’s infinitely more than any other government in the world.

Plurk – a microblog too far?

Twitter this evening is rife with talk about Plurk, a new micro-blogging service that brings a whole new meaning to the term feature-creep. I’m here.

I mean, the joy of Twitter, and I suspect the reason why we all stick with it despite the appallingly flakey service we receive, is its simplicity. It let you post short messages on the web, and that’s pretty much it. You can do more than that, but that is usually by using a third party service through the APIs.

Plurk adds stuff like groups, called – deliberately provocatively, surely – ‘cliques’, so you can send messages to just a select group of folk, points for regular posting (like that won’t encourage pointless noise…) and the ability to have what look like threaded replies under posts.

I just don’t need this stuff, frankly. The best thing that comes from Twitter is contained within the 140 characters of the posts people make. It’s about the content, not the bells and whistles.

But the most fundamentally annoying thing I found with Plurk during my brief play this evening is the way the whole thing is presented – on a horizontal rather than vertical timeline, which run from right to left. This means that the most recent stuff is the first thing you see, which is good, but once you start scrolling it soon gets really confusing. Well, it does for me.

Lots of people are signing up and giving it a go. But I can’t see anyone sticking with this in the long term. Unless they’re mental.

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