7.21.2008

Twitter Hits Max -- Snuck Up on You, Didn't It?

Twitter, my darling, my jo -- has maxed out its capacity. Clearly, the zoobs are becoming adopted for all their many uses. I think Twitter is like a shopping bag -- it can be used for anything that needs a holder for transportation - but the thing transported can't be bigger than the shopping bag -- well, duh. And I enjoy hearing that the character limit is too small. It's a perfect size for an efficient blast of update -- a small haiku, a greeting, a show of emotion, a tiny short story. Its size makes it quite perfect, like a bonsai tree. It must be created without sludge or puff or bows or any of the other politesse of prose -- it's been interesting to find that most news items contain about a Tweet's worth of actual information. We all do a lot of wading through material that's only there to establish the writer or to validate the form in order to get to the actual material of interest. Do you remember the newsletter/broadside called The Bottom Line? It was early print Twitter. I gotta find a copy just to show you -- it was riviting reading, and it took about a, well, a couple of minutes to read. I love Twitter, and mostly watch and follow (and track, when it's working) -- I went through some withdrawal when through a churn in my handhelds, I lost the ability to send tweets -- also hampered by my company's (happily) short lived ban on Twitter on company machines. Twitter actually subs for blogging for me much of the time. and Thank God for that...
(Later) Full disclosure -- Twitter returns and offers this status message:

But, Twitter, shouldn't your status updates also comply with the 300 chr limit?

Checking Out Twine

I'm trying to figure out how to link a tagger to an aggregator. I've been trying with Twine, but it's no good because the feed isn't exposing items to the reader -- I'm trying Grazr. Of course, I've also tried the standard one...I'm sure I'm being silly -- I should just use the tagger interface, but I'm not seeing what I need from the ones I've been trying...Let's try this: http://www.twine.com/twine/11b3y6x7k-1bs/internal-twine#

4.24.2008

Web 2 announcements

Okay
Microsoft announces Mesh - a peer to peer data and media sharing network pitched to households - though Gates vision ... (Oddly IBMish) Mozilla announces mobile meets web platform a new type of fox. Everyone announces ubiquitous APIs. Yahoo announces social elements on all services - and open strategy - opening all google services to developers. A sandbox with rules. The unification of all social user profiles (Finally). Standardizing API behavior. Yahoo is great, but it's the execution of last year's vision. Depending on developers to build the world. Oh, wait, now he's announcing the social embedding. Rewiring Yahoo? That is news.

4.21.2008

Back from holiday

I took about six months off from the whirlygig of comments and absorbtion and such, and a strongly recommend it to anyone feeling, well, whirly. I'm going to Web 2.0 Expo later this week and I anticipate that I will have some new posts as a result.

11.24.2007

The mistake

I'm showing my Touch to one of my brothers in law and he plays around with it and then tells all about the Nokia similcrum that's waiting for him in a package at home. Yeah,it's bigger but it has all these other things you can add on. He seems to lose interest in my toy when I tell h that that's all there is, no addons in view. He isn't the same kind of user as me. He's buying devices. He has seven mp3 players that he sorts different types of content among. He's generous in accommodating design flaws. I'm not. My 16 year old played with the touch for a few minutes in a Starbucks and she understood the package immediately-- and somewhat offensively said that I wasnt really the target market (she was, she sez). Like iPod and iTunes from the start, the product is a designed experience. So, she sez, with that trademarked heavy-lidded incredulity, "They just made guesses?? They just guessed what people would want to do with it??! That is so random!"

But that is exactly it. Its a nice package of supremely confident guesses. And for me anyway so far all the guesses are correct.

So what's the mistake? It's in evaluating the objects in terms of technology rather than the integrated package of process and tool and use.

B to B Participation