My first post to Twitter was on 6 October, 2007.

Excel and Ruby

michaeltwofish

Goodness knows what I was doing with Ruby and Excel. I think it was something to do with trying to automatically process grades submitted by our African partners in the education project I was working on.

My first post to identi.ca was on 4 July, 2008, soon after it was publicly announced.

Hanging out on #laconica.

michaeltwofish

laconica being the IRC channel for the software running identi.ca, since renamed to status.net.

I used Twitter for less than a year, and jumped ship because of ideology and downtime. After joining identi.ca and until recently I only used Twitter to support people doing Habari-related stuff. But recently there's been a critical mass of other interesting non-tech people who are on Twitter, so I've been posting more there, both directly when in conversation and indirectly through identi.ca.

The ideological reasons still exist, and I'd love to see both Twitter become more open and more federated microblogging, but at heart I'm a pragmatist. I think that means andyc would call me a sell out.

Damn it Twitter, will you PLEASE stop opening new windows when I click on links in tweets? Please, please please?

Tim Bray

Unfortunately, Tim isn't a Firefox user, so this won't do anything for him, but I wrote a quick Greasemonkey script to stop the links being opened in new windows.

// ==UserScript==
// @name          De<em>blankify Twitter
// @version       0.1
// @namespace     http://twofishcreative.com/greasemonkey
// @description   Remove target="</em>blank" from Twitter links
// @include       http://twitter.com/*
// ==/UserScript==</p>
 
<p>var tweets, tweet;
links = document.evaluate(
  "//span[@class='entry-content']/a",
  document,
  null,
  XPathResult.UNORDERED<em>NODE</em>SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
  null
);</p>
 
<p>for (var i = 0; i &lt; links.snapshotLength; i++) {
  link = links.snapshotItem(i);
  link.removeAttribute("target");
}

I'll put it on http://userscripts.org/ when my account gets set up there.

On my recent post Stalking Habari comments, I stuffed around with and reordered screenshots of tweets to make a coherent conversation. In the comments, Sean Coates said, "You should be using my Twitter Silo." It's in the Habari extras repository (direct link), so I checked it out.

After activation, you need to configure the silo with your Twitter username and password. On the publish page, the silo has a tab along with your other silos. You can see this in the screenshot below. You'll also see that there are three directories.

Your own tweets.

Your friends' tweets.

Custom tweets, where you simply enter the URL of a particular tweet.

And this is Sean, talking about how beer is a soporific, as inserted by the silo.

Today, I had beer with lunch. Yesterday, I had tea. Not surprisingly, I'm much more tired this afternoon than yesterday.

Sean Coates

So, yes, I should have used the Twitter Silo.

As predicted by @8ball on identi.ca (remember, reverse chronological order).

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web? - O'Reilly Radar

I may exist in a bubble¹ but it seems to me that an opposing tension is emerging. Twitter has been used² by many people as a search and question answering service, as has FriendFeed more recently. Aparently people find things like Digg useful too³. By their nature, the organic links in these serves are mostly external, though of course both services are somewhat limited by the number of followers someone has.

1. Yes, I exist in a bubble. ↩
2. Yes, when it worked, fine. ↩
3. Though for the life of me, I cannot work out why. ↩

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

Really? Can people not see what Twitter is being used for? The problem is that Twitter is not doing the innovation, they're leaving it to third parties.

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 apparently been lacking in other aggregation services. I'm not making the claim about that lack myself, because I wouldn't know. And I'm not providing any references to people who make the claim. So there.

When considering Twitter before I signed up last year, I couldn't really see the point. Why would I want tell people I'm about to have a beer? Why would I want to know that a friend was watching a film? It became clear to me pretty soon after sending my first tweet that there was something interesting about it, and I've recently written about a small part of that.

It's not that hard to see the point of FriendFeed. By giving people a means and a place to comment on all manner of things they find on the web, and their friends an opportunity to have a conversation about those things, FriendFeed is providing an incredibly useful platform. I am making that claim, all by myself.

But as with Twitter, before I signed up I wasn't convinced. The thing that I wasn't sure about was how I would deal with all this new stuff. While he acknowledges that it's the interaction that FriendFeed enables that's valuable, Alexander van Elsas doesn't like FriendFeed as much as he wanted because people are inadvertently sharing things they didn't intend to share, and those things don't add value.

There isn’t an algorithm that will filter out the garbage and show me the valuable stuff. The principle is simple, garbage in means garbage out. And Friendfeed has made it very simple for its users to draw in anything at all. I never INTENDED to have all that stuff shared ;-)

This would be completely fair enough if the service aggregated the entirety of a person's online identity and delivered it to you in an unending river of unintended photographs of Aunt Mabel, videos of Gazza's 21st and bookmarked porn sites. That's definitely possible, but the reality is that both ends are filtered. I don't have to add my Flickr feed to FriendFeed if all I do is upload images that I'm then going to use on my blog, and you can decide to hide my YouTube videos so you don't see someone making fufu in Ghana (but why would you hide that??).

I did fear information overload, and I did feel overwhelmed for the first day or two, for which I was roundly ridiculed but working out that I could selectively filter things out of my feed, like my own tweets or blog posts but not comments made in response to them, was the first big hurdle I got over. The next hurdle I came to was making a start on working out how to consume all the new information effectively.

I began on the FriendFeed web site, but it just felt like a big mess of disorganised stuff. I then started reading my FriendFeed through my preferred feed reader, Google Reader. That was better, probably at least partly because it's a familiar environment. But the feed isn't ideal because you often get Blah posted 7 tweets, and see the first two but not the rest. Then if you follow the link it just goes to FriendFeed's main page, making it impossible to find the other tweets. I'm happy that when a new comment is added an item comes back to the top, that's as it should be, but I want to know which of the comments are new. This could be solved by making the new content a distinctively different style, even simply bold.

And that's another thing that gives me faith that I will get it. FriendFeed have released an API early. This enables the clever people to build clever applications, so the feed can be consumed in clever ways. I still think there's some work to be done to make the conversation as seamless as possible—though I'm willing to be told I don't completely get it yet—but the team is incredibly responsive to feedback, and there will be consuming applications that will make it easier.

Do I get it?

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 (or at least micro services like it, as on Andy's advice I'm trying out FriendFeed) is much more than that. The things I know about Andy have mostly come from that disposable blogging. It's exactly that reason that I think there is room for blogging and Twitter; blogging enables all sorts of complex ideas to be thrashed out, and I can get a real idea of what someone thinks, but through tweets I get to know the person. Of course there's a bit of a blurring between those two as well, but individual tweets don't have to be things of which to be proud. The body of tweets is indicative.

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 or what we've done for the day.

So - and I suspect isn't just me - my blog and Twitter are fulfilling specific and different writing needs, needs that I've had for a long time. I wonder if the people behind Twitter were conscious of this, or was it just a random lark?