One of the best things about living in the mid-west is that it is so incredibly simple to stay on the bleeding edge of technology. The hard part is often dragging a bunch of friends with me so that I'm not lonely out there. Of course, then I suddenly have more friends on MyFriendDegrees than in real life, and its no longer the edge, let alone bleeding.
But I digress.
My point is that St. Louis is a great place to be a lazy trend-setter. All you have to do is read some press from the Coasts, check in with Chicago people every once in a while, and keep a vague eye on what's cool in London and Berlin. Then hit the bong a couple dozen times and forget all that. Follow this by siting on your ass for six months until you feel like just can't avoid work any longer, and then hope the URL suddenly springs unbidden into your consciousness.
This is approximately the story of how I started using Twitter last weekend. All the tech-toy cool kids out on the Left Coast have been using it for months, talking about how it makes them feel connected even when they can't see friends for months at a time. My initial reaction was envy; I often wish I could not see my friends for months at a time. I even spared a moment of jealousy for the bong hits those hippies must have been doing.
The Master Plan behind Twitter is to give your friends, associates, digital stalkers and illicit love interests an easy way to keep up with what you're doing. At first glance it seemed like it would have to be a huge pain in the ass in both directions. First, who the hell would bother to keep it updated. Second, who's going to remember to check some website to find out what I'm doing.
Of course, since then I've started spending more time on the whole "Blogging in my Blog cuz I'm a Blogger" thing. I've also managed to reduce most of my inter-personal communications to one or two line text messages, often accompanied by an emoticon*. And I've been told that my best artistic endeavors are often found in my status message on Google Talk.
Anyway, it turns out that the whole thing is much more zero-interface than I would have thought. Of course, there's the web view, which is very much boring-in-a-good-way but has been primary useful as only when telling someone about the site, or blogging about it. The ideal way to use Twitter is via text. You can send in updates, check on your friends, and even nudge others to update either by SMS (text message) or IM (chat). You can also have Twitter send you notifications of your friends' updates by either of those methods, although I don't recommend the SMS notifications if you're paying for text messages.
When I created my account last weekend, I registered both my phone and my Google Talk account and the whole process took about five minutes. The longest part was waiting for Google Talk to catch up after I added twitter@twitter.com. Since then, whenever I'm bored, I've been updating it with whatever I'm doing, thinking about, or banging my head against. I've set my notifications to come in via IM as well, so I see my friends' updates in the same window. If I get busy and don't want to be bothered, sending the text off turns off notifications. After that, I can either get recent updates from friends with get or get username or just turn notifications back on. Oh, and if I'm wondering what someone is doing, nudge username will prod them into action (sometimes, depending on the person).
Of course, the same should work with any chat client, but if you're not into IM the any phone with SMS capability will do. I'd probably leave notifications off quite a bit more often if I was doing it that way, and (particularly if I had to pay for text messages - poor L-a) I might update once or twice a day at most. Still, if that were my case I think I might value it more in some ways, since I'd have less chance to just talk for entertainment purposes.
My advise? Go sign up, check it out for a few days. The process is brief and, although you are giving up email, IM and cell phone. I'm not worried, as I expect the privacy policy to hold given the pedigree of the founders, Obvious Corp, who also created Odeo and (most recently) Hellodeo.
Oh, and when you do, hit my page and click the Add Oliver Wendell Jones button on the left. You may even be able to just Add Me To Twitter with this link, once you're signed up. Then let me know at owenj23-at-gmail-dot-com, in case I don't notice right away. I haven't found enough people on there yet to really be sure how the friend notifications work; that's why I need my loyal readers to help me learn. Let me know if anyone is trying and has trouble; I started to take some screenshots to write a step-by-step, but it seemed intuitive enough to me that I didn't complete the effort.
*While this isn't quite true, I do sometimes go in another room so I can argue with The Brat via GTalk. Trust me, it's easier that way.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Monday, January 8, 2007
Google Case File IOT02: Case of the Unread Items
As I've mentioned before, one of the reasons I drank the Google Kool-Aid a long time ago is that they have some of the only software so complex that it regularly exhibits behavior that I simply can't explain. I have this pet theory (or maybe I read it somewhere) that Google has developed into the first networked intelligence. I know more, but fear Blogger would only delete my post if I were to publish it.
But I digress.
For today, let's just take the case of my Topher's linkblog. Topher has been following my linkblog for a while now; frequently I convince him to try a service shortly after I declare it The Coolest Thing Ever, and Google Reader was not a hard sell after it's incredible upgrades last year. Of course, as soon as I set him up I subscribed to his Shared Items feed, but for a while he didn't use them much. Recently however, he decided to emulate my for- tags and share a for-me feed (no, I'm not linking to that... god only knows what that boy might send me). That's when things got weird.
It seems that two items in his shared feed and one in his for-me feed just refused to become unread in my Google Reader. Eventually we traced the for-me item down to an old post regarding a Mythbusters bloopers reel on Youtube [Ed Note: can't find the link right now, ironically -- Topher?], and once he removed it my Reader returned to normal for that feed. The Shared Items problem was more recalcitrant, however, and even GReader admitted there was a problem:
Now obviously this is not particularly a usability issue, at least not for me. It does however trigger my OCDUI tendencies, which made me investigate further. It seem that if I go to the home screen, It will actually show me the two "unread" items:
Funny thing is, these are both links I'd seen before, on feeds that I read, and I'm pretty sure that I shared one or both of them. Not that I can find them now, of course; as has been lamented in nearly every forum on Earth, the lack of search in GReader is deplorable. And while the Google Co-op Hack and ensuing Greasemonkey script are cool, they don't really excuse it. I really have to think that some company out there must have the necessary technology to index large amounts of text for quick searching by many users at a time. If only Google could partner with them...
Anyway, it seems likely that once I tell Topher what items are bugging the system, [Ed Note: it's the XKCD Katamari comic and the Lifehacker DIY Warhol, if you're curious.] he'll be able to remove them fairly easily. Which still raises the question, where and how did the wires get crossed?
I suppose I'm pretty unlikely to find out, and knowing Google the entire issue will completely disappear with absolutely no warning nor fanfare by about half past whenever. Still, it's curious. Is anyone else using Google Reader to subscribe to Topher's Shared Items? Do you see the same behavior. Let me know...
[Another Ed. Note: Special thanks to CyberWare, which pointed me to FastStone Capture for the screenshots above. Beautiful piece of software. Installed in about 60 seconds, worked immediately, almost zero-interface and it sits in the system tray when I don't want it. Oh yeah, and it's free.]
But I digress.
For today, let's just take the case of my Topher's linkblog. Topher has been following my linkblog for a while now; frequently I convince him to try a service shortly after I declare it The Coolest Thing Ever, and Google Reader was not a hard sell after it's incredible upgrades last year. Of course, as soon as I set him up I subscribed to his Shared Items feed, but for a while he didn't use them much. Recently however, he decided to emulate my for- tags and share a for-me feed (no, I'm not linking to that... god only knows what that boy might send me). That's when things got weird.
It seems that two items in his shared feed and one in his for-me feed just refused to become unread in my Google Reader. Eventually we traced the for-me item down to an old post regarding a Mythbusters bloopers reel on Youtube [Ed Note: can't find the link right now, ironically -- Topher?], and once he removed it my Reader returned to normal for that feed. The Shared Items problem was more recalcitrant, however, and even GReader admitted there was a problem:
Now obviously this is not particularly a usability issue, at least not for me. It does however trigger my OCDUI tendencies, which made me investigate further. It seem that if I go to the home screen, It will actually show me the two "unread" items:
Funny thing is, these are both links I'd seen before, on feeds that I read, and I'm pretty sure that I shared one or both of them. Not that I can find them now, of course; as has been lamented in nearly every forum on Earth, the lack of search in GReader is deplorable. And while the Google Co-op Hack and ensuing Greasemonkey script are cool, they don't really excuse it. I really have to think that some company out there must have the necessary technology to index large amounts of text for quick searching by many users at a time. If only Google could partner with them...
Anyway, it seems likely that once I tell Topher what items are bugging the system, [Ed Note: it's the XKCD Katamari comic and the Lifehacker DIY Warhol, if you're curious.] he'll be able to remove them fairly easily. Which still raises the question, where and how did the wires get crossed?
I suppose I'm pretty unlikely to find out, and knowing Google the entire issue will completely disappear with absolutely no warning nor fanfare by about half past whenever. Still, it's curious. Is anyone else using Google Reader to subscribe to Topher's Shared Items? Do you see the same behavior. Let me know...
[Another Ed. Note: Special thanks to CyberWare, which pointed me to FastStone Capture for the screenshots above. Beautiful piece of software. Installed in about 60 seconds, worked immediately, almost zero-interface and it sits in the system tray when I don't want it. Oh yeah, and it's free.]
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Project Description: Blogroll Widget
I've been wanting to build one of them thar Web 2.0 Widget Thingamabobs for a while now. The problem, of course, is that almost everything has been done. Not always to my specifications, of course, but often close enough to let the laziness factor kick in. However, I have yet to find a Blogroll Widget of any sort that will satisfy my theoretical use case, and it seems like it should be easy enough to design.
Here's my plan: I'd like to auto-generate the blogroll by querying my del.icio.us account, perhaps for the tags iot+blogroll for this blog or cas+blogroll for Cheating At Solitaire, my poker blog. From what I understand, having not yet looked at the API, this should be a trivial implementation. However, I'd like to go a step further, adding the ability to add meta-data such as feed or author links. I think this could be accomplished by embedding formatted text in the description field, although that may violate a TOS or something. A preferable method would involve tagging additional links with the same title and iot+blogroll+feed, for example. I'm not sure if their querying structure will support that, however.
It seems to me to using del.icio.us as a back end for this sort of thing would allow the ability to insert one of those little buttons on your page that would allow others to automatically add you to their blogrolls. You could even add such a thing directly to your feeds, if you use a service such as Feedburner. Obviously, the real Web 2.0 way to do this would be to announce a startup called iBlogRoll.com or MyBlogBuddies or something and then try to get VC funding prior to actually writing a line of code. And of course, I may still do that... hmm, wonder if someone has already snapped up those domains?
Anyway, I'm not sure if or when I'll get time to work on this, but I thought it might be a good idea to get the project notes down while I'm still high and think that I can accomplish something. Later, once I realize that I'm nearly completely useless, I'll feel properly embarrassed about posting this I'm sure.
Here's my plan: I'd like to auto-generate the blogroll by querying my del.icio.us account, perhaps for the tags iot+blogroll for this blog or cas+blogroll for Cheating At Solitaire, my poker blog. From what I understand, having not yet looked at the API, this should be a trivial implementation. However, I'd like to go a step further, adding the ability to add meta-data such as feed or author links. I think this could be accomplished by embedding formatted text in the description field, although that may violate a TOS or something. A preferable method would involve tagging additional links with the same title and iot+blogroll+feed, for example. I'm not sure if their querying structure will support that, however.
It seems to me to using del.icio.us as a back end for this sort of thing would allow the ability to insert one of those little buttons on your page that would allow others to automatically add you to their blogrolls. You could even add such a thing directly to your feeds, if you use a service such as Feedburner. Obviously, the real Web 2.0 way to do this would be to announce a startup called iBlogRoll.com or MyBlogBuddies or something and then try to get VC funding prior to actually writing a line of code. And of course, I may still do that... hmm, wonder if someone has already snapped up those domains?
Anyway, I'm not sure if or when I'll get time to work on this, but I thought it might be a good idea to get the project notes down while I'm still high and think that I can accomplish something. Later, once I realize that I'm nearly completely useless, I'll feel properly embarrassed about posting this I'm sure.
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