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mom, this is how twitter works.
Pretty fun description of how Twitter works, written by Jessica Hische for “regular” people. Serious Twitter users will notice some missing info and inaccuracies, but overall, it’s a great overview for newbies.
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Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer’s Perspective
Really great take on why the Facebook Graph API is exciting and different than anything before it.
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Ten things that annoy the fuck out of me on Twitter
God dammit, people. You suck at this social networking thing. Allow me to educate your asses on how to suck less by outlining ten things that annoy the fuck out of me on Twitter:
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Facebook’s ‘Reconnect’ Strategy Is Brilliant
I thought the same thing when I noticed it.
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Anil Dash: The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
Anil has some really smart thoughts about what could be described as a “decentralized Twitter” — the ability to send web-scale messages without relying on a singe party or company (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.). There are some brilliant minds behind this stuff, and if it can be packaged together in a way that provides a good user experience, it could quickly become the biggest threat to Facebook yet.
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10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter
I don’t know that any of these are actually “stunning” or “useful,” but they are interesting (if not all that surprising).
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Paul Robert Lloyd: Social Media Icons
Apparently it’s icon day at jeffcroft.com. These are potentially very useful. Hope the trademark police stay at bay.
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How Twitter’s Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems)
This is one of the more preposterous and ridiculous articles I’ve ever read. The suggestion is basically that because, for the most part, Twitter staff members don’t tweet all that much and don’t follow all that many people, Twitter will be unable to cater to the needs of its “power-users.” Frankly, I question anyone’s ability to follow 500+ people and get any real value out of the messages. I follow about 300, and am constantly thinking to myself, “I gotta lower this number,” because I find myself missing things and skimming the list, rather than actually reading. But the real thing the writer here fails to recognize is that Twitter is used very differently by different people. And that’s okay. That’s the way it should be. By suggesting that there’s a “right” way to use Twitter (and that the Twitter staff themselves is using their own product wrong), the author demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the medium.
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Twitter Road Trip: Interview with @missrogue (Tara Hunt)
I just read Tara’s new book, The Whuffie Factor, and found it to be really brilliant advice for any business, or even individual, looking to raise their profile on social networks and IRL in this “Web 2.0 world.” In this little interview, Tara outlines hey five keys factors to “raising whuffie,” and gives a really nice overview of what the book is all about. Tara is everything social media gurus should be, but usually aren’t. After the book talk, she discusses what she believes is “the greatest idea she’s ever had in her life” (and I cant argue with her): a karaoke tour across America, which she calls Whuffaoke. I’m going to try to meet up with Tara and the gang for at least one of the stops — and you should, too.
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In defense of Twitter
I agree with all these defenses of Twitter running around after Dowd’s trainwreck of an interview, but honestly: who gives a shit if some washed up journalists don’t like Twitter? Can’t we just tell them to suck it and keep on tweeting?
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How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter
Geoff nails it. Frankly, anyone who dares to call suggest that Twitter somehow damages humanity is far too out and touch and (probably) too damn old for me to give a shit.
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Which cities tweet the most?
Kind of fun to look at. At the top of the list are London, LA, Chicago, NY, SF, and Seattle.
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Raina Van Cleave: User Experience Specialist, Web Copywriting, Web Usability Consultation, IA, Web Branding
My good friend Raina is looking for work, and recently put together a personal website. I’ve seen Raina in action, and she’s definitely super-talented, passionate, and a joy to be around. If you need someone to help you with IA, usability, or copywriting, she’s your girl. Also, she wrote a great blog post on how she’s using the web to help advance her career after being laid off in these tough economic times. Check it otu!
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A foot and a half: Finally, A Use for Twitter
A couple dudes meet Shaquille O’Neal in a local Phoenix diner after THE_REAL_SHAQ Twittered he was there. Fun story. For what it’s worth, I followed THE_REAL_SHAQ for a while, but eventually unfollowed, as I just didn’t find Shaq to be all that interesting on Twitter — and I’m generally a fan of the dude.
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Patrick Haney: Qwitter and the “Pity Follow”
Totally agree with Haney on this one. I don’t use Qwitter, but I certainly don’t see anything wrong with it’s existence. But that’s just me.
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How Twitter Was Born
Nice little “history of Twitter” piece.
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Google Latitude
Google’s new Dodgeball replacement/Brightkite competitor. Looks okay, but I’m not convinced it’s ready to replace Dodgeball and Brightkites.
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Twitter Grader: Score Your Twitter Profile Power
Totally narcissistic, but fun. At the moment, I’m in a heated battle with The Onion, plus my friends Eric Meyer (@meyerweb), Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman), and Aubrey Sabala (@aubs) for 200th most powerful person on Twitter. Eric I can take, but I won’t even try to compete with the ladies. :)
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Brightkite: Sneak Peek At Our iPhone App at Brightkite
Took them long enough, but I gotta say: it looks damn sweet. The place snapping is killer.
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14 Ways to Use Twitter Politely
All good tips. And yeah, I’ve probably broken all of them at one time or another. Doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re good tips.
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Creating Social Networks Few Want
Moveable Type and Wordpress are both touting new “social networking” features for future releases. The question is: does anyone care? Do people really want to start their own social networking sites around their blog? From what I can tell, these are attempts to add features that will generate media buzz, not features that will get users excited about the product. I could certainly be wrong, though. What do you think?
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The Next Social Networks, Powered By WordPress and MT
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.
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An interview with Tara Hunt
My buddy Mel Kirk interviews online community guru Tara Hunt — who, for the record, I finally got to hang out with a few months ago in San Francisco and found to be downright awesome.
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Who Should I Follow? Twitter Friend Recommendations
You enter your Twitter username, it gives you a list of people you probably should be following. Worked remarkably well, for me. via Zeldman.
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Dean Allen on Twitter: Did you really
First: welcome back, Dean! Second, Dean’s experience with Twitter echos mine. First time around: “What? This is f’ing stupid.” Second try — you know, when I actually friends who used it: “Wow. This is f’ing brilliant.”
It’s too bad my realization that the concept is brilliant didn’t make the site’s design suck any less.
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Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection
It seems as though Yahoo! and Flickr are set to start providing OpenID services. This is huge.
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Google Announces the OpenSocial API
You sort of knew this would happen with Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be this soon. Awesome — can’t wait to see where this goes.
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Scoble: Plaxo to ship online identity aggregator based on microformats
Joseph Smarr and the Plaxo guys are makinga pretty big step here in the social graph consolidation game (which, as I’ve said before, is the single most important “to-do” on the list of smart people working on the web today). Sounds very cool, and ranks as one of the first times I’ve seen something really useful done with Microformats.
Only one problem: it only helps users who have websites of their own. Still, a big step.
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Social Network Portability: Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph
In my opinion, social network portability is probably the single most important hurdle our Web needs to get over. Tackling it is also probably the single most ambitious Web project someone could take one. Luckily, Brad Fitzpatrick — who has already led the development of the tool that solved all your scalability problems (memcahced) and the tool that solved all your username/password problems (OpenID) — is probably the single most smartest person on this here global network, and he’s on the job.
Now, I feel confident this will actually happen. Maybe not soon — but it will happen.
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Facebook for iPhone
The iPhone version of Facebook looks pretty damn nice. Check it out, if you’ve got an iPhone.
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The lessons from BackFence.com
“Hyper-local is about utility and networks of people, not citizen journalism.” Yes!
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Jeremy Keith on Pownce
Jeremy has a nice review of Pownce, the new Django-powered social tool for “sharing stuff with your friends” by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and ShawnAllen
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VIRB° is now fo’ real
Unborn Media’s baby is no longer just for invitees. Rid yourself of MySpace! If you loves you some social networking, VIRB° is the new place to be, yo.
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Ze Frank: Waves
Probably my favorite episode ever. Or at least the episode most relevant and personal to me.
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Eric Meyer: The Twitters
My feelings about Twitter are similar to Eric’s. The concept of Twitter is kind of cool. However, it’s being abused as a really inefficient chat room, instead of used to post status, as it was really designed. Otentimes things being repurposed for something they weren’t intended for turn out very cool (see several tags on Flickr for examples). However, in this case, it really turns me off. I already have IRC and IM open most every day. I don’t need another chat room — especially one that doesn’t work very well.
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Facebook, a social site, has a suitor
Yahoo! offers Facebook $900 million. Zuckerberg is undecided.
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Congress: Hall Pass Revoked
Josh Williams: “I’m all about cracking down on online predators. This is not the solution. Parents need to be parents. Teachers need to be teachers. And Congress needs to stop talking about stuff it knows very little about.” Amen.
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MySpace to sell TV shows online
One word: WTF? Okay, that was three. Kind of.
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Django on MySpace
Django itself signed up for a MySpace account and created a profile. Does your web framework do that? :)
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Mike Davidson: Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace
Newsvine’s Mike D. shows you how to make your MySpace profile pretty. It’s a dirty job, but someone really, really, really needs to do it.
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