Jun/094
When I were a lad
Now I'm not an old duffer, but I do remember a time before the internet and before mobile phones. When I was 19 I lived in Sydney for a year. I hadn't heard of the internet, didn't have a mobile phone and traveled with travelers cheques.
Instead I went surfing a lot on the beaches up the North Shore. North Styne on Manly was generally the easiest to get to on the bus and that's where I surfed most.
This all came back to me this morning when I read a retweet from my mate on twitter (@andygozo) with a link to an amazing image in Google Maps showing a surfer very close to what appears to be a shark. Take a look at the actual Google Map Image (you'll need to zoom in on it).
It's amazing that the image was captured by the Google Earth satellites. Incredible that someone actually spotted and recognised it for what it was and wrote a blog about it. It's almost unbelievable that the information managed to find it's way through the internet maze to be in front of my eyes.
It's easy to forget how far we've come and how fast. As far as I can tell we've only just started. I'm actually looking forward to being an old duffer, shaking my head at innovation in a world I no longer understand. When I were a lad.....
May/090
Wasting time on twitter
The beauty, and addictability of twitter lies in it's incredibly diverse number of ways to waste your time. It makes the facebook addictions of a year ago seem like very soft drugs. In that context, #spymaster is crack. Here's what tech-crunch has to say about the game.
Spy Vs. Spy: The Spymaster Backlash Begins And Twitter Needs To Fix It
Spymaster, the Twitter-based game that we covered last night, is spreading like crazy today. It’s been a trending topic on Twitter throughout the day, even ahead of the hype around Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Because of this popularity though, some Twitter users are getting inundated with tweets from the service in their streams. It’s not really spam, because it’s their friends doing it, but to some, it’s very annoying. Former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump, is particularly pissed off.
I think that's a bit snotty myself. It's a very clever little game. Addictive, fun, with great graphics. It's a fun way to spend a couple of hours building up followers on twitter.
Twitter is ALL about how many followers you have. Check out this site which offers to buy twitter accounts based on the number and quality of followers you have tweetvalue.com. Stephenfry's account is apparantly worth $42,542.
May/090
Should you update your facebook status with twitter tweets?
Let's say you have both an active twitter account and an active facebook account. Coming up with pithy little updates to keep yourself at the top of people's lists is quite fun, but you've probably come across those annoying types who blog about how their coffee tastes. We wouldn't want to be one of thosewould we?
So when you've come up with something so brilliantly amusing that you're happy to share, do you tweet it to your twitter followers? Yes Definately. Should you also send that same update to facebook? What if it's a link to a nice little special offer you're doing on one of your business's products?
Sometimes Yes. Sometimes No.
Sometimes those tweets will be relavant to your facebook friends, but often they won't. If you're brave, you could get a lot of people looking at your website. If you annoy people, then you've ruined that marketing opportiunity for a while, so use it sparingly.
Here's how to do it. First use this fantastic piece or Adobe AIR software software which you get from here: www.tweetdeck.com . When you are tweeting, checking the facebook option on the update box will send tweets to both accounts at the same time. Follow @tweetdeck on twitter to help develop the software.
It depends how often you tweet, how many followers you tweet to and how much you use facebook as to whether you could benefit from this. Try tweeting a link to 200 followers and updating your 200 friend facebook profile at the same time. If you track how many people clicked your link from both those sources what do you find?
Apr/091
Micro-blogging with Twitter
When I first came across Twitter a few years ago (yeh, it has been around that long), I was pretty unimpressed. Far too geeky. I could see the cleverness in the technology but it seemed that only other techie-minded people would see any value in it. Frankly, being updated about what a bunch of web developers are eating for breakfast seemed like a proper waste of time. This was before the iphone, when mobile internet use was still in it's infancy.
Amazingly Twitter has gone mainstream over the past few months. Due in no small part to the increasing ease of mobile internet use, twitter is being heavily used by all kinds of interesting groups and individuals from the Guardian & BBC to bloggers like Violet Blue .
As it happens I AM interested in what Stephen Fry is having for breakfast.
I see a use for twitter in enriching this blog by using my iphone to micro-update from my phone. There are still people out there who don't follow the blog by RSS and actually visit the site to see if there are any new posts. The twitter application you see on the right will hopefully provide a bit of interest to those readers.
I also think that just like facebook offered some interesting search-marking opportunities, so will twitter. Just like facebook, your success on twitter is measured purely by the number of followers (friends) you can convince to sign up to your feed. Then it's a case of not loosing their attention and feeding them interesting stuff.
Many of the readers of this blog are techie enough to have twitter accounts, whether they post to it or not. Thanks to Darko for leading the way, but anyone else who has a twitter account - follow me please!