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Twitter Re-Tweets
As many of you may have heard, Twitter are currently testing some new functionality in beta called Re-tweets. What’s new about that I hear you cry, Re-tweets or RT’s have been about for ages?
Well yes and no. While many clients have automated the re-tweeting of existing tweets, this is not something that Twitter itself has supported and users of the web interface have been required to cut and paste to manually create the posts.
I am fortunate enough to be part of that beta release, so thought you may like to hear and see how Twitter’s implementation works. Below is the explanation that Twitter provides:
There are two main differences. Firstly you still see the author of the original post and not the author of the re-tweet as you do currently.
Secondly, while you will still only see re-tweets from people you follow, they have included a count of how many other people have also re-tweeted the same post. This is quite useful in quickly gauging the popularity of the tweet.
Not drastic changes but useful ones and expect to see third party twitter clients falling into line and supporting this functionality in the very near future.
Google Wave More of a Ripple
I was fortunate enough to receive a Google Wave invitation over the weekend. Having watched the promotional videos and listened to the buzz in the blogs and on twitter, I was keen to have a look and see if it stood up to all the hype.
So it was with some excitement that I logged in for the first time yesterday. Initial impressions? Well to be honest I have to say I was a little disappointed.
Google Wave is badged as the future of on-line communication and collaboration, combining email, chat and document management into one single location. This may well be the case but to achieve this you need people to collaborate with and that is the big issue, at present anyway.
You can only collaborate with other Google Wave users and as its currently in limited preview, you may find your contact list a bit restricted. I’m no Billy No Mates and have a gmail contact list of over 400 people but only 3 of these already had Google Wave accounts. An appeal on twitter added a few more but with nothing serious to get our teeth into, we’ve been restricted to having quick conversations which we could easily have achieved through email.
Other issues appeared when trying to run Google Wave in Firefox on Windows. I found it sluggish, buggy and in some instances it would crash completely. I switched to Google Chrome…
Is Tweetie v2 the Ultimate iPhone Twitter Client?
I’m a self confessed Twitter addict and have tried all the major Twitter clients on the iPhone.
Like most people I started out with Twitterriffic but soon moved onto Twitterfon (recently renamed EchoFon) where I stayed for quite a while. I was eventually attracted to the simplicity of the user interface of Birdfeed but as my use of Twitter grew I needed more power and so migrated onto applications such as Tweetdeck, Simplytweet and finally Twittelator.
Along the way I tried and discarded many others but was always on the look out for the ultimate twitter client. One which combined an easy to use interface, with the power and enhanced functionality needed by a user managing multiple accounts.
I will admit that I wasn’t a massive fan of the original version of Tweetie but I was excited to read the pre-release hype about version 2 and purchased it the moment it was a available in the App Store. Now we all know with iphone apps that the hype can be a long way from reality, but in this instance I can report that it was spot on!
Tweetie version 2 by Atebits, brings the perfect blend of interface polish and functionality. Advanced features are available for power users but these are discretely placed within the interface so as not to overwhelm the user experience, something other apps can be…
Spy on your Boss using Twitter
At last a good reason to encourage your manager to make use of Twitter!
This Dilbert cartoon has been doing the rounds on the blogs and by email over the last couple of days and I couldn’t resist publishing a copy myself. As a self confessed twitter addict, I’m sure my old team found twitter equally useful for tracking my whereabouts in the country or even the office.
Catch up with all the latest from Dilbert & Friends at the official Dilbert website or on Twitter
New Blog or Just a New Look?
After over a year of languishing on my to-do list, I have finally pulled my finger out and got my new blog off the ground and here it is!
I’ve actually had a blog for nearly five years and despite Lea and I using it quite extensively when we were on our career break, it has since sat forgotten and unloved on the Internet, with very occasional random posts from conferences, supplemented by regular automated posts of weekly twitter updates and delicious bookmarks.
I’ve flitted from social network to social network over the years but have found that there is a core set that I return to and use regularly, some on a daily basis. I realised there was a lot of content that I was generating on these and although they were available on the relevant site and aggregated through my friendfeed, I was keen to pull these altogether on my own site. This is where the idea for this site started to form.
At the same time I was doing more and more freelance work using ExpressionEngine and was really liking the flexibility it gave me, both in terms of design and functionality but also in how easy it is to extend, through existing extensions or by writing your own. These two ideas came together and eventually a new blog was born.
So why blog? Well in the last eighteen months I…
Day one at Microsoft Remix UK 08
Firstly I should state that I come from a Microsoft background, developing both Windows and web based solutions using a variety of their products, attending their conferences, doing their qualifications etc etc etc. However over the years I have come to think that although their products are very impressive, my experience has shown that in many cases the bells and whistles their products are launched with are soon followed by disappointment and frustration as you start to use them.
That said it was with an open mind that I attended Remix UK yesterday in Brighton UK. This event, aimed predominantly at designers has 4 tracks covering developer, design, business and usability topics. It was interesting to see Microsoft trying to engage with the design community, which before the launch of their Expression range of products, they generally ignored.
The main Microsoft presentations still had the feel of being preached at in church but the topic range was very good, with two presentations providing an introduction to Silverlight and a technical overview of the new ADO Data services available in .NET. Bill Buxton gave two talks and sat on a design panel, where he discussed the importance of design and the use of sketching in this process. For those familiar with user centric design this approach won’t be new but it was interesting to see an influential Microsoft…
The best till last at dConstruct
Well it was definately a case of leaving the best till last at dconstruct today. The final session kicked off with a dopplr double act from Matt Biddulph & Matt Jones, two of the main players at travel focussed app/network Dopplr.
With a great blend of jokes and retro tv videos this was entertaining while still being informative Looking at extending the boundries of your app by identifying and utilisng cross overs with other applications, this was definately the highlight of the conference for me.
The final slot fell to Jeremy Keith from Clearleft, the conference organisers. Usually this session would see a conference slowly emptying as people head off for an early train home. However Jeremy’s reputation went before him and the auditorium sat gripped as he took us on an in depth exploration of the system of the world and how the behaviours of ant colonies and bee hives can be mapped to human interaction. Countless examples demonstrated the sense of the masses and like many in the audience, I was left with much to ponder.
All in all a great conference, with a good list of speakers covering a variety of topics around the social web. Highlights were Jeremy’s and Josh’s presentations but the top award definately goes to “the boys from Dopplr”. Now it’s onto the post conference party before a very early train home tomorrow.
And blogging on the iPhone? Well its pretty straight forward and after a sluggish start I really got into it.…
dConstruct08 and the post lunch lull
So after lunch we had an excellent presentation from Daniel Burka, chief designer for Digg & Pownce on Designing for Interaction (link to follow). Lots of good examples for designing with users in mind, some pretty obvious but then these are always the ones you overlook in the rush to realise. Definately lots we can use in our projects going forward.
Dan was followed by Tantrk Çelik who talked about microformats and the need for social networks to be able to share a common profile. He demonstrated some good examples and hopefully these standards will be the answer to the age old problem of how to update my photo on 15+ networks.
Morning sessions at dConstruct08
This blogging lark is pretty time consuming and there has to be a more efficient way if doing this than I am following.
Blogging during the presentations is a none starter as you end up missing details. So for the morning I’ve decided to leave it until the lunch break and then do a summary of the first 3 sessions. So let’s go ......
We started with an interesting talk by Steven Johnson on the urban web. The first 15 min were about cholera outbreaks in London, which as you can imagine was a real ice breaker. However what he demonstrated was the similarities between research done into the source of the outbreak and that done with social networks, sounds strange I know but it did work. He then went on to talk about the need to be able to find content by location and the benefit location aware devices like the iphone can bring to the web and our social interactions online.
Next up was Aleks Krotoski of Guardian Tech Weekly fame. She discussed the common grounds between game and web designers and the lessons that we could learn from each other. Aleks was her usual enthusiastic self and had some useful observations, even managing to make some of the more academic elements pretty entertaining.
Finally we had Joshua Porter who continued on from Aleks talk to discuss leveraging cognitive bias in social design. This was my favourite presentation of the morning session with Joshua making some interesting points…
Good buzz around the room
Well here we are, we managed to get here without getting soaked. As last year there us a good general buzz around the conference. Looking forward to finding out more about Silverback, clearlefts new usability app. Looks like a def option for OLs usability offering.
The sub title of this years conference is “designing the social web”. So here we go with the keynote .....
