Life is grand

TwitterCamp is an Adobe Apollo app. that displays a lovely view of your Twitter feed. Useful for Barcamps and other events where you want to display the buzz of the event.

In RIP Twitter (2007-2007) there is one point that is interesting:

Key Users Will Bail Ah, the double-edged sword of network effects. I suspect that once the community anchors in Twitterati start to give up on it (and they will; wait for the SXSW hangover to take effect) it won’t take long for the entire house to crumble.

I just want to say that I don’t follow Scoble or any of the Blogerati who are on Twitter. I don’t much see the point as I follow those folk through their blogs.

I use Twitter much more locally than I do blogs. So there is no Twiterati for me and I suspect for many others. Those following the Twiterati now will probably start dropping off and localising who they follow.

So Twitter is nice to have in the background bumbling away but like many programmers I am paranoid I will miss something (admit it all you programmers; you read every single RSS item, every single email and anything that scrolls too fast to read completely is annoying as fek. Programmers want 100% solutions, not 80% or 99.999% solutions.)

Thankfully your Twitter stream comes in RSS (actually, atom) too and you can use a simple feed keyword filter system like FeedRinse to catch any tweets/twits you miss. Here is one I made on my Twitter stream that looks for “@paul” which is how it seems most of my Twitter buddies ping messages at each other.

Simple and Twitter didn’t have to provide the functionality. Yahoo! Pipes could provide an even more complex Twitter filter setup.

An interesting SMS project over in India is proving to be popular with farmers. Twitter is a presence command line, YubNub an internet command line and IM bot systems like IMIS are coming out into the open. I for one spend most of my day between the Mac OS X terminal and a text-editor (which interestingly can run terminal commands.) When I use Gmail or Google Reader I use the keyboard almost exclusively. I wish WordPress had better keyboard support. Even when I am in Photoshop or Fireworks I find learning the keyboard shortcuts to be invaluable though in those two cases it becomes an even faster system of mouse and keyboard movements. Mac OS X with Quicksilver or even Spotlight is a god-send for launching applications and finding files.

Even Windows Vista has made some improvements by putting a search/run/command text-box in the Start menu. Now if only Windows would have a good command line as default (PowerShell requires extra steps, make it the default Microsoft.)

All in all the command line and the keyboard are reclaiming some lost-ground that the mouse ate.

Twitter is a strange little creature. Hyper simple, super focused and potentially very useful. If I explained it here you’d think it was a frivolous service for asbos and ADD afflicted kids. Worse than blogging, way worse than IM and email, bah!, way worse than that email malarky that will never catch on with us high-minded folk.

The way I see Twitter is as the background murmur in a cafe filled with super intelligent people. You let the stream of twitters slip by in the background until a keyword or thought pulls you in and you respond to it. The next thing you know you’ve helped someone with a problem in your area of expertise or they’ve helped you or you’ve shared a joke that titillates just two people on the face of the earth.

It is a way of connecting as if serendipity could be programmed.

Don’t be too bothered by it. Don’t try and read every twitter, just let it flow by*.

* Much the way you should treat RSS really.