Can't Stop Geeking

In an apparent effort to compensate for the competition from Apple’s iPad, Amazon released a software update that allows it e-reader to access Facebook and Twitter. So, if you have a book you’re reading and want to share a passage on Twitter or Facebook, you can now do that. I still want to make sure I can highlight certain passages for later reading.

The Library of Congress announced that it will be archiving all the tweets placed on the social network site since Twitter’s inception in March of 2006. According to the article by Dan Hope, there are 50 million tweets per day and the total number of tweets in the site’s four year history already numbers in the billions. The LoC says they are going to focus on tweets that have more of a milestone quality to them, such a Obama’s election win announcement, the first tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey and a series of tweets that helped free a photojournalist from prison in Egypt. The other supposed benefit is the sociological insight.

I have to say I’m not real sure of the benefit of archiving all the tweets. Even the article admits that the significant tweets will outnumber the relevant ones. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of tweets are people sharing information by posting links to articles and other websites on the internet. Most significant tweets have a corresponding story on one of the major news sites. If the LoC wants to really archive something with a sociological insight, I say archive the blogs. That will obviously be harder to do since there are A LOT of blgos out there and the have been blogs for almost 10 years. The amount of data storage would need to be huge to do it, but I think it would give a better insight to our culture than the 140 character tweets.

That’s right.  Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, arguable the richest man in the galaxy, philanthropist extraordinaire, has joined the ranks of tweeters.  So, Bill can let us know what’s going on 145 characters at a time.  Can I ask a question: what is the point of personal Twitter accounts?

I mean, corporate twitter accounts I can understand.  Businesses can tease the public with upcoming product news and release dates.  But what can you share from a personal standpoint?  Is anyone’s life changed forever knowing Bill was working on his foundation letter when he tweeted?  Does getting an update from Ashton saying he and Demi are ordering wine with dinner make your life better?  Can someone tell me what value personal Twitter accounts have?

With the popularity of Twitter, companies are working hard to keep their deep links below 140 characters to enable ULR sharing. However, this seems to cause a problem because scamming and phishing can be a problem. Also, there are several sites where a URL can be fed into a code maker and it will generate a shorter URL that will redirect people to the desired site. In some cases there is a small fee for doing this but hey, it works and that way people can spam Twitter users!

Apparently people in Japan really have nothing to do. Someone created a DIY project that monitors your heart beats and reports the results to Twitter in the form of small messages. I can see the validity of this if you need to report info to your hear t doctor but for the average person this seems like a carbon sucking major use of bandwidth. This folks is the reason why providers want to charge for bandwidth!

I wonder if the those who developed social media outlets like Twitter ever through that their services would be used to let the world know about a revolution. With the out crying of countless people in Iran it’s amazing to see that the Internet outlets are the only viable resources of information seeing that the leaders of the country have done their best to sensor the news. This is prof that we are beyond boarders now and that no information can be kept from us! This is truly the information age!

Lawsuits over fake tweets have prompted the leadership team was Twitter to roll out new “verified accounts” to ensure that unsuspecting “tweeties” will be getting tweets from the famous people they just can’t live without! This has always been an issue on MySpace and other peer sites but at least Twitter is ddoing something about it. I personally think law suits are a bit stupid but it’s cool to see one of these peer sites actually going something to improve their service.