Recently in Twitter Category

Debian Lenny didn't have Gwibber in its repositories, and just about the only Twitter client in those repos was the less-than-ideal Twitux, which didn't really work for me.

Now that I'm running Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 beta 2, Gwibber is baked into the desktop, and it's pretty obvious that the Ubuntu developers are striving for as much social-networking, cloud-services and e-mail/IM integration as possible.

So I'm giving Gwibber a try.

On another front, at the Daily News, we're managing our Twitter feeds with HootSuite, which has quasi-native applications on some platforms, a Firefox add-on, various mobile-client apps and a Web interface. So it's flexible.

I'll be using both Gwibber and HootSuite over the next few weeks, seeing if Gwibber offers me anything more than HootSuite.

I'll probably end up using both, but at this point both are also quite new to me, and I don't know what each can really do.

I suppose I've reached some kind of Twitter milestone: My Twitter feed has slowly, finally reached 150 followers.

It's not like I've been really trying or anything. Gave that up months ago.

Thus far I've tweeted 826 times. I used to do "original" tweets on things that were happening, mostly in the world of technology. And I'd do my little updates, "Ubuntu just crapped out again," or what have you.

And my followers would go up, then down. That's due to Twitter's dirty little not-so-secret: A good many Twitter accounts are blatant attempts at shady marketing, in which the user or company or wanna-be-company involved tries to get as many followers as he/she/it can in order to have a vessel into which to send marketing messages of dubious use and quality.

They follow you in hopes you'll follow them and be subject to their pleas/ploys.

I don't do that. I only follow people who's tweets interest me. Right now I'm following 95 Twitter feeds. That's a pretty good number.

Just like having too many Facebook "friends," and missing most of what your "real friends" are doing because they might not be as active as some of your less-than-friendly Facebook friends, some people tweet every minute and clog out the people whose tweets you might actually want to see.

Enough grumbling about that aspect of Twitter. Now you can make and share lists of select Twitter feeds/users and have a filtered/better experience. I've made a couple of lists, but I just don't have time or care much.

If I really want to see what's going on in the world of Twitter, I generally enter a keyword in the search box after logging in and that way tap into the virtual pulse of whatever it is I'm interested in.

Here's the important part: It's like me to put the "important part" at the end, isn't it?

Well, here's how I "do" Twitter. I don't waste my time writing "original" tweets. I only use Twitter to promote links to other things I've written, either in this blog or elsewhere.

Every once in awhile I'll click one of those "ReTweet" buttons and create a tweet that way to call attention to something on the Web I think is worth noticing. But not that often.

For me, unless Twitter is doing something for me, I'm not doing something for it. Twitter is still white hot in terms of buzz and popularity, so it remains a great place to draw attention to just about anything. But if it doesn't drive traffic to one of my sites, it's not doing what I want or need it to do.

And Twitter is the ultimate in ephemeral mediums. I don't know how long a tweet remains on the Twitter servers, but I don't think it's very long at all. It's there, people see it or not, and then it's gone. And there's really no way of knowing how many people have seen any given tweet. The numbers could be huge. Or not. You can tell how many people are following you, or how many people have clicked your links. But how many have seen your tweet and just read it? There's no way of knowing.

And people seeing what I wrote on Twitter and not clicking back to anything does nothing for me. I'm not sure what it does for Twitter, either. But that's their business (and I'm not sure when it comes to business that they're actually doing any/)

So I habitually use the "ShareThis" button on my blog to tweet my entries.

But even if my non-linkable thought runs 140 characters or less, I'll be expressing that thought in a way that I have more control over and that lasts longer than the week or weeks that it's still accessible on Twitter.

I thought this was pretty cool.

You can indeed post to Twitter from the command line in Linux (and presumably any other Unix-like system with the curl utility).

Here's how the Tips4Linux site tells us how to do it:

$ curl -u user:password -d status="Your status message" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

where user is your username and password is your Twitter password entered in plaintext. Replace the text Your status message with anything you wish.

First thing I had to do in Ubuntu was install curl. I used aptitude:

$ sudo aptitude install curl

Once I had curl, I tried this. It works. It's a bit cumbersome and would probably work better as part of a shell script (or for the lazy like myself, copy/pasting), but it's a bit of cool geekophilia.

Don't ask me why, because I don't have a clue, but Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is following my Twitter feed. That means the mayor has his own Twitter feed. (Should I return the favor and follow it?)

Mr. Mayor (or should I use the inside-baseball moniker Hizzoner?), does this mean your interest in free, open-source software is piqued?

Do me a solid, Antonio (I can call you Antonio? We are joined together by the miracle of Twitter, are we not?), when you're reforming the L.A. Unified School District, can you get them to stop sending us .docx and .xlsx documents and spreadsheets? For one thing, we have a lot of trouble opening them because here at the not-taxpayer-funded Daily News, we don't even have old copies of Microsoft Office, let alone the new ones that use the accursed .docx and .xlsx formats, and we have to make sure we have a machine equipped with the free, open-source OpenOffice 3.1 to open and convert those troublesome files that Redmond, Wash.'s main employer has foisted upon us.

Here's the other thing: Having LAUSD send such newfangled and annoying Office-created documents only highlights how much money the district has and is not afraid to spend, spend, spend.

Put the whole district on OpenOffice 3.1 (the free suite that's getting sweeter all the time), dear mayor.

And while you're at it, now's a great time to begin rolling out desktop Linux and other open-source technologies all across the city. We can save money and love freedom (that's what free, open-source software is all about, my good friend Antonio) at the same time.

Don't know much about what's happening in free, open-source software? You can get started with my 1000+ blog posts on this very subject. Fascinating reading, to be sure. Every last one.

And while we're at it, teaching our kids about this great (and did I forget to mention freedom-loving) software — Linux, OpenOffice, even Apache, Perl, Ruby, and that classic of classics, C — is just the way to break at least the geekiest portion of the LAUSD out of its troubled box.

The last LAUSD school-site computer lab I visited (and no, every school does not even have such a lab) was built pretty much entirely with grant- and parent-suppled funds. Seeing the mix of dying hardware outfitted with a hornet's nest of Windows XP and a bunch of junky software led me to wonder just what computers are really for anyway in our schools.

Really, Antonio — let's start with City Hall. How about a little Ubuntu in your office? Couldn't hurt. I bet even Arnold hasn't thought of it.

I wondered why the search box and my saved searches disappeared from the Twitter.com page. But knowing that the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett were straining the entire Internet in general, I knew that the prone-to-overloading Twitter didn't stand a chance.

Turns out that's exactly what happened, according to this mocoNews item.

Anybody who's used Twitter knows that the exponentially growing popularity of the microblogging service means that it's a major news event or two away from collapsing entirely.

As my fellow blogger Matt Asay says, what do you expect from a free service that's not even trying to make money?

I won't blame everything on Twitter. The whole Internet is feeling it

10:30 p.m. update: Twitter search has returned. (The fact that I'm noting this at all means I am sorely in need of getting a life.)

This is the screen I got this afternoon when trying to send a tweet. How often have you seen it?

Someday I'll meet Matt Asay. I'm no tech executive, I appreciate but don't fawn over Macintosh laptops, but I do admire his writing at Cnet.

On Twitter's change of policy for @replies, hiding them from the unwashed Twitter masses unless the individual users are also followers of those receiving said @reply — and the furor following that change, he is a voice of sober- and business-minded reason:

For those who will chime in to voice their serious displeasure that Twitter had the gall to change a service for which these users have paid a whopping $0.00, I have two words:

Pay up.

That's right: pay money so that you actually have the right to voice your displeasure as a customer rather than as a user. Customers have a right to complain about changes of service. It's unclear to me why anyone else would.

This, perhaps, is a budding business plan for Twitter: use a free service as a grand experiment, constantly evolving and changing at Twitter's whim, with a paid service that keeps things constant for customers, and perhaps adds additional functionality or quality of service guarantees for these same customers.

Stuff like this is why I read The Open Road every day.

In other Matt Asay news: Matt claims he's far from famous:

On the Web, however, what passes for "fame" usually isn't. Would you consider me famous? I certainly wouldn't. My kids still get excited when they see my picture on my own computer...in my iPhoto application...displaying pictures I took with my own camera. Me, famous? Not even close. Not even close to close.

Never has the bar to fame been so low.

In this week's print column, I begin my discussion of Twitter, the Web-based, super-hot service of the fortnight.

In the article, I make predictions about where Twitter will be in six months (owned by a huge company) and how much competition it will face in over the following months and year (much).

I try to make a case for Twitter as a new and useful underlying structure of the global network that is the Internet. Call it a new set of tubes.

Yes, I will be writing about Twitter in this week's print column, but I've been "tweeting" (I still hate to say "tweet") here for the past week and then some.

The Twitter feed goes to the right-hand side of this blog and is also hooked up to my Facebook page via a Twitter-Facebook widget (for me the best thing about Twitter thus far) that makes it easier than ever to update Facebook as well as promote my various blog entries and other super-exciting activities.

They say blogging "jumped the shark" long ago. Probably so. Twitter is seemingly at its apex at the moment, and that shark-jumping hasn't yet happened. For one thing, Twitter is way more flexible and malleable than you'd think, and that's probably the key to its success thus far. It has an open API (application programming interface) that allows just about anybody to incorporate Twitter content into their own framework (and it's easier for me to type this than to actually understand all of it).

To you, me and the rest of the unwashed masses, that means lots of applications big and small that feed into, draw on and otherwise make use of your Twitter feed in ways you probably don't yet know you need.

Or at least it seems that way.

Anyhow what this means to me at this very moment is that when I get a quick thought about something, or just want to share a link to another blog post or story, I tend to "tweet" it and not bother to start up, log in and write in the Movable Type software that powers this very blog.

There's a reason why SMS text messaging on cell phones is such a compelling (and wildly profitable) application, and Twitter realizes that big time. While the company itself is famed for having no business model and little revenue, you never know what will happen to it in even the next six months. I bet an acquisition is in the works.

I think this acquisition will happen chiefly because you'd be crazy not to think that two dozen other would-be entrepreneurs as well as full-on established companies are contemplating launching a Twitter-like service of their own.

It's going to happen. And happen.

But for now I'm going to be making a lot of use of Twitter just because it's so darn easy to do so. And effective.

I get that Twitter is different than regular blogging. I also get that you can update your Facebook page with your Twitter account. I further get that Twitter is white-hot at the moment.

I'm sure there are ways to make Twitter really work for you. Those add-on apps, of which I know nothing, are probably the key to this usefulness.

I need to figure out what TweetDeck, TweetChat, TweetGrid, Tweetie, WordTwit and maybe hundreds of others I haven't heard of are all about.

Due to the open nature of Twitter, it's anybody's guess at present just how the service will evolve.

Twitter seems useful as a barometer on people's thoughts and actions. You can drop a keyword or two in the search box at Twitter.com and find out who's Twittering/Tweeting (OK ... I'm going to use the word "Tweet," so kill me already) about it and what they think of it ... in 140 characters or less.

And as you seasoned Twitter users probably already know, you can send a Tweet (there, I said it, no slashes, "Tweet") to an individual by beginning it with:

@their_twitter_username

or let Twitter do it for you when you hit the "reply" arrow near the Tweet to which you wish to reply.

OK, so there's more to Twitter than is apparent at first glance. Looking at it this soon after first using it, the secret of its success seems to be that it brings instant-message and social-networking vibes to blogging. Or it brings bloggy vibes to instant messaging and social networking. It's extremely cross-platform friendly. And it's all about the quick hit.

You can feed a blog into Twitter, feed Twitter into a blog, feed Facebook with Twitter and probably do the opposite as well. So in a way Twitter is a flexible, morphable network. Kind of like the Internet itself. You could say that Twitter leverages connectivity in many forms. It's a tool that lots of people seem to be using quite a bit.