Posts tagged “twitter”

Twitter's new UI is a mess of small but infuriating design failures: a useless right-column layout, duplicate tweet composition interfaces, broken conversation controls, and a chaotic interactions tab. None alone warrants outrage, but together they prove nobody's minding the store. A billion dollars buys better than this.

My linklog is powered by delicious, which Yahoo is shutting down. I'll migrate to another service, probably pinboard.in. Expect no disruption to your regularly scheduled distracting links.

I'm a huge Twitter fan, and watching it go mainstream means watching people completely misunderstand it. It's not replacing email, Google, Facebook, or blogs. It's not a competition or a celebrity toy. It's not even about what you're doing. Twitter captures what people are *thinking*, and that's genuinely new.

Google's PageRank dominance is crumbling as conversation shifts from blogs to Twitter, Facebook, and other real-time streams it can't effectively index. Whoever figures out how to measure authority across all these channels, not just the web, will have a shot at unseating Google in search.

My favourite tweets from 2008, collected in a zero-effort year-end post. Heated leather seats, Madonna's lifestyle choices, slow iPhones, pressure-sensitive sellotape and Gloria Gaynor's uncertain survival prospects. These are the tweets that made me laugh out loud this year.

I prefer RURL over TinyURL for shortening URLs because it's, well, shorter. I made a bookmarklet so I can quickly get a RURL for any page I'm on. Just drag the link to your bookmarks bar.

Still here, just exhausted. Follow me on Twitter and the linklog in the meantime.

Twitter's real competition isn't Friendfeed or Pownce. It's nobody, because nobody else does what Twitter actually does: SMS and XMPP. Twitter isn't a web service, it's a global mobile communications platform accessible to literally every person with a phone. That's not a niche. That's everything.

Twitter's value is its SMS interface. Friendfeed and Pownce miss this entirely. Without SMS, they're not real competitors, no matter how many people switch during outages.

I built a blue team avatar generator for Ze Frank's Twitter Color Wars 2008. Pick a team by following them on Twitter, show your pride with a labeled avatar. I'm blue for nostalgic reasons -- and because this site is basically a shrine to the color.

My temporary crown shattered, which accidentally reminded me I had a DMV appointment that day, which meant I had two hours to study for a driving test I'd forgotten about. Panicked, crammed, passed with a perfect score. Also getting a California ID. Might even learn to drive someday.

Twitter's down, so I'm blogging like it's 2003. Anyway: gym is finally awesome. Pushed past the constant soreness stage into the feel-incredible stage. Wooooo!

I used a handy web service to visualize my Twitter habits: I tweet most on Wednesdays, peak at 9am on my morning commute, and my monthly volume eerily mirrors my quality of life, dropping off when a big deadline crunch hit in July.

Got six Pownce invites to give away. Not sure it beats Twitter without mobile alerts, and I can't figure out how to pronounce it. Get in touch if you want one.

We're seeing dot-com bubble thinking resurface: "eyeballs" are back, business plans are passé, and VCs are burning millions on shaky ideas. I like Twitter fine and think they could monetize easily, but the broader market mentality is genuinely alarming.

Twitter crossed a threshold for me today, from "website I use" to "service I can't live without." Add me if you want 140-character windows into my daily life. You'll get Twitter eventually. Just like blogging.