echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Something thing I find frustrating about del.icio.us (yes, I like the dots) is that you don't know who anybody is.

As a participating member of the Habari project I keep an eye on mentions of Habari all over the place. One of those places is Twitter, via a Tweet Scan feed for Habari, so that I get an item in my feed reader when someone tweets about Habari. When I have the chance, I visit the user's Twitter page, have a look at what they said, maybe visit their blog, and generally reply to them. This might be to address a specific issue or question they have, or just to point them to where they can talk to other users and developers.

I do the same thing on del.icio.us, where I have a subscription to bookmarks that are tagged 'habari'. This means that when someone comes across the Habari project web site or a useful plugin and saves it to del.icio.us (and they tag it sensibly), I get an item in my feed reader. So I go and have a look at the user's page and what do I see? I see their other bookmarks. That's it. I can't see their blog, I can't send them a message, it's a dead end. I can take pot luck and do a search to see if they use the same username elsewhere, but that's a bit ridiculous.

Please del.icio.us, let the conversations continue, or in the end you won't be a nice place to visit any more, and people will look elsewhere.

Occasional ads in the Twitter timeline ... seems like the only real way to monetize Twitter, aside for premium subscriptions. The only question remaining is how Twitter users will accept the move after a two year free ride.

• Twitter Testing Advertising In Twitter Streams
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I signed up to FriendFeed a few days ago, after a sustained sales pitch from Andy C, who 7 minutes later asked if I "got it" yet. I've been mulling it over and while I'm not sure I completely get it, I will say that I'm getting there. Got it? I've never used a social aggregator before, and from some of the commentary I've read (and promptly lost), that's probably a good thing. The most interesting thing about FriendFeed is not the aggregation but the interaction that can take place after something shows up in a feed, which has ...

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My new buddy Andy C recently said to me:

I used to enjoy blogging a lot more and I actually have a couple of humourous blog articles that I am genuinely quite fond - no more than that - proud of. Twitter is just the ultimate in 'disposable' blogging. All that crap posted from Heathrow T5 just fills my time in. It's hardly earth shattering, is it? God - I can't remember any of those stupid tweets (apart from the lads in Yellow Lurex suits that was pretty funny) let alone be proud of all those throwaway one-liners.

But Twitter ...

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When travelling, I keep a journal. I've been doing this for almost eight years now, with varying degrees of commitment, and have filled a couple of moleskines. This last trip to Iran is the first trip I've done since I started blogging and using Twitter, but I realised that I've been doing both for years, albeit low tech paper based blogging and tweets. Typically I'll have a couple of entries like, "Mannequins are freaky enough but someone got an import deal in Iran for extra freaky mannequins" and "Found veggie soups!" and then a longer entry about somewhere we've visited ...

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