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Twitter Buys Summify, Gives Everyone a Reason to Use It
Mike Davidson on the Summify acquisition — but more importantly, on the future of news delivery in general. A great read.
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Building Twitter Bootstrap
On one hand, I’m thrilled to see this ALA piece on Twitter Bootstrap, because I think Bootstrap is extremely well-done, and because it lends some credibility to my original 2007 concept of CSS Frameworks, which a lot of traditionalists shunned hard. On the other hand, Mark Otto’s article is yet another example of my complaint that ALA is focusing on the same things in 2012 that they were in 2007.
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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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Why Twitter Will Endure - NYTimes.com
In so many way I think Twitter is built and designed poorly, but I totally agree with this article. Just goes to show that it’s the idea that really counts.
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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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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 Constant Reviews Twitter - Features - The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper
“When anything is made, people will find a way to see their reflection in it. As soon as their reflection appears, they’ll want to fuck it.” The best review I’ve ever seen of Twitter, written in a lengthy series of 140-character paragraphs.
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Shaq Finds Out He’s Been Traded To Cleveland…Through Twitter
Simultaneously awesome, hilarious, and well, really, really sad.
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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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Can You Copyright A Tweet?
A thoughtful analysis. The conclusion? Well, it’s two-fold: First, It depends on the tweet. Second, almost no tweet would ever be protectable. A protectable tweet exists in theory, but actually finding one is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So, pretty much, your tweet is not copyrightable. In other words, get over yourself.
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Tweet From the Command Line
It’s hard to imagine anything nerdier than tweeting from the command line. But then, you’re already on Twitter, and at the command line. So face it: you’re a fucking nerd. Get the gem.
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Twitter @replies Saga: Oops, But the Feature Isn’t Coming Back | Epicenter | Wired.com
A nice overview of the Twitter @replies kerfluffle that went down this week, if you weren’t part of it. I guess maybe because I’ve built my share of web apps, it was completely obvious to me from the moment they announced the option was going away that it was for reasons of scaling an optimization. But Biz messed up by not just saying that. I love, love, love Twitter, but I do have a beef with the fact that they keep doing this. Every time they have a scaling issue (which is, let’s be honest, often), they solve it by removing features. I still want track back, but it was taken away in the name of performance. So was IM integration. I appreciate that Twitter is facing scaling needs the likes of which have probably never been seen by any other website. It’s a tricky problem, no doubt, and I certainly don’t have any answers for them. But, removing features to lighten the database load every time things get a little slow just seems like a back-asswards approach to optimization.
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Oh no! Twitshirt FAIL.
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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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Ms. Dowd Interviews the Inventor of the Telephone
Hilarious.
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To Tweet or Not to Tweet - NYTimes.com
Ev and Biz talk Twitter with Maureen Dowd. End result: Dowd sounds like a raving bitch (I read her as serious, not snarky, but I could be wrong), and the Twitter boys come off as funny, good-natured, and not affected by her lunacy.
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Sign in with Twitter
Now you can bitch and moan that such-and-such Twitter mashup app requires your username and password, because Twitter now offers OAuth in their API. They never did before, which is why all these Twitter-barnacle apps had to resort to shadily asking for your password.
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On Twitshirt
On Thursday, my friends at Airbag launched Twitshirt, a simple but awesome service that lets you print the text of a Twitter posting on a tee-shirt. On Friday, the app was gone, replaced by a message stating, “we’re reversing the polarity.”
Why? Because some people — and notably some people who turn out to be very influential in the Twitter community — had a problem with Twitshirt. Apparently, they felt like it was “stealing their intellectual property.”
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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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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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Map of Popular Super Bowl Words Used on Twitter
Absolutely awesome data viz from the New York Times. Love it.
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How Twitter Was Born
Nice little “history of Twitter” piece.
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Wait, you're not Twitter!
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FakeSarahPalin calling it quits
Thanks for the LOLs.
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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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Tweethearts: blogger proposes to nerd girlfriend over Twitter, she tweets back acceptance
My old Seattle buddy Tara Brown got engaged to Sean Bonner tonight — over twitter. Congrats, you two!
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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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Twitter users reporting problems with iPhone in-store activation
According to a growing number of people on Twitter, Apple is having problems with its in-store activation process. Couple this with the botched MobileMe rollout, and this launch isn’t looking good for Apple right now. Here’s hoping they get it all resolved in short order.
Update: Engadget on the activation problems.
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Twitter: It’s Not Rocket Science, But It’s Our Work
In response to a Michael Arrington post on TechCrunch that as clearly designed to irritate, Ev and Biz at Twitter politely explain several details of their architecture and how Twitter works, and what they’re doing to make the service more reliable in the future. Nice.
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Twitter Said To Be Abandoning Ruby on Rails
> After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails…
As a Django fan and evangelist, I admit it would give me great pleasure to see this as a colossal failure for Rails, point, laugh, and generally poke fun at all the Rails fanboys and girls.
But let’s be real for one minute. Twitter doesn’t suck because of Rails. Twitter sucks because they have ridiculous amounts of traffic (especially to their API and SMS gateways), a limited ability to cache (a non-realtime Twitter is a pretty useless Twitter), and (as far as I can tell), they’re not making any money, so they probably have limited resources to pour into more hardware.
The bottom line is that Twitter will probably cause major scaling problems for any platform, be it Rails, Django, Java, .NET, PHP, or tin cans with a string tied between them. Ruby is undeniably slow compared to Python, Java, and PHP, but I really doubt the problems Twitter deals with are at the Ruby level, anyway. Much as I wish they weren’t, anyone who says Twitter sucks because of Ruby on Rails is either foolish or joking.
Twitter sucks because of Rails. Just joking.
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You Look Nice Today
> You Look Nice Today is an audio-based Journal of Emotional Hygiene, staffed by lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.
In other words, its a podcast by some of the funniest dudes on Twitter. Check it out.
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Goodlatte: Platform Atop a Platform
Dan, Justin, and Rob roll out a big new feature for StrawPoll—the ability to run your own Twitter polls. Clever stuff, using the Summize API. Nice job, guys!
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Look who's tweeting about no pants!
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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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Diablo Cody on Twitter
The first celeb on Twitter I’ve ever wanted to follow. I mean, c’mon — we have the same birthday. via Rex.
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Twitter in your blog, blog posts in your Twitter. Ping ping ping!
Sarah gripes about people that pipe their blog posts into twitter or their tweets into their blog feeds. I couldn’t agree more. It’s incredibly annoying.
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Daring Fireball: The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone
Gruber compares web clients for Twitter on the iPhone. Personally, I think Thincloud is pretty good (and my favorite of the bunch), but it still hasn’t been enough to make me give up Twitter over SMS. Gruber says Twitter over SMS is too annoying — I disagree. I find it to be perfect. It has all the feature John wants, works well, and has the most “iPhoney” interface of all.
All that having been said, I hope (and suspect) someone will create a killer native iPhone app for release after iPhone 2.0 is out.
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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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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with Simply Measured, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my past clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, Django, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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