This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.
It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.
Great analysis of how “Twitter Trends” work, with plenty of data to help ease the “CENSORSHIP!” cries of the conspiratorially-minded.
Atlantic article on the Web Ecology Project’s ace Socialbots game, where teams of software bots “played” to influence regular Twitter users.
“There’s a lot of potential for a lot of evil here,” admits Hwang. “But there’s also a lot of potential for a lot of good.”
Tim’s 5-minute talk at last week’s Ignite SF, covering his recently run social-battlebots contest. Must watch!
Great analysis by Robin Sloan of a sizable Twitter hashtag meme. Size of followership != size of readership.
or “Things to bear in mind when taking advice from a small, Asian girl”
This weekend, I got retweeted by a top chef from off the telly (after praising the creamed corn at his new restaurant)(!), and one of my all-time favourite indie musicians of all time (after buying a t-shirt from her). All hail the power of Twitter.
Made me sad that I didn’t know they were in town until they were already here. I’d have loved to have protested outside Twitter with a “God Hates Failwhales” sign.
Thoughtful and funny piece by Baratunde Thurston.
Features push notifications of your tweets being faved, so you can have your ego stroked IN REAL TIME!
Twitter is down, after reportedly being hacked by Iran.
I guess the hackers are pissed at how few people still have a green avatar.
Lovely lovely lovely! I’ve been using COLOURlovers patterns to decorate my Twitter profile for some time. Their new “themeleon” lets you customize and tweak in-place then upload directly to Twitter.
This evening, @cheever saw an automated retweet by @02138now of a tweet by @Sooz containing a picture of me wearing the Twitshirt of the tweet I posted last October which helped me leave Current.
He, of course, twittered about it. And I just bought his tweet as a t-shirt.
Congratulations, Twitter, for building one of the world’s leading “What t-shirt is Rod Begbie wearing right now?” systems.
Another URL shortener gets shuttered. As it turns out, unless you slap frames and shite over the links you bounce users to, there’s no business model. Another example of why I run rdbgb.us: I am solely responsible for keeping the links in my Twitter posts alive, without having to worry about a third-party collapsing.
Great report from a group of Boston-area smartfolks led by Tim Hwang, on what’s been going on on Twitter over the last few weeks.
By Tony Stubblebine, who was at Odeo when Twitter launched. “Rails was never the problem”.
“When people sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return.” There’s a whole lesson in User Experience right here!
Can you spot the day that Twitter changed its algorithm for displaying friend icons so that early adopters such as myself didn't get disproportional prominence?
I love the way tweetpo.st/ translates @usernames when updating your Facebook status with your Twitter posts.
Dan Sandler’s research project, creating a protocol for distributed microblogging. An improvement on identi.ca, as he built a Twitter gateway to help bootstrap. Will definitely be playing with it tonight.
Tweetie has been my iPhone Twitter app of choice for some time. The new OS X version seems equally lovely. Not going to tear away folks with seven-column Tweetdeck setups, but it seems to be a good step-up from Twitterrific.
I saw this unfold on Sunday, fairly sure it was a storm over an Amazon user error. Man, the Twitter crowd sure like their torches and pitchforks.
“Proposal: World media mock N. Korea missile dud 24/7. Shamed Dear Leader shoots top scientists, crippling program for years. Flaws?”
I’ll be that the folks at Careerbuilder are pretty thrilled by the “Talking about ads” timeline.
Roald Dahl’s excellent “The Twits”, 140 characters-or-so at a time. It’s only just started, so you can still catch up. Tremendously happy-making.
Full details on yesterday’s Twitter hack. Twitter’s admin interface was available offsite to all their admin users, one of whom has a weak password, plus their monitoring didn’t notice a dictionary attack going on. Oops.
A chance to revel in my earlyadopteritude.
The real winner of tonight's debate? ME! For managing to spread my "X loves Y like a basset hound love cheese" attempt-at-a-meme to an unsuspecting debate-viewing audience.
I get annoyed with people who announce their every blog post in their Twitter feeds (if I’m interested, I’ll just subscribe to your blog). But curious to see if there’s a market for it, I’ve created a Twitter user which will announce new links on this site. Follow “him” to get notified.
During a test run of Hack the Debate.
This is either the Twitter-scanning nerve-center of the Current TV Hack the Debate coverage, or we're having a pledge drive.
Twitter’s “track” service (which texted you whenever a phrase was uttered) has been disabled for some time. Luckily, an enterprising soul has reimplemented it using Twitter’s search API, and it works a treat. Follow @TweetTrak to get started.
A little project that’s been going on here at Current Towers - During the presidential debates, we’ll be diving into Twitter and putting the *real* debate up on national TV in real(ish) time. (And who’s that handsome avatar halfway through the promo…?)
Screenshot from the Current TV Hack the Debate promo. (Words put into my mouth by persons unknown).
Current will be screening the US presidential debates live on TV, with relevant tweets overlaid in real(-ish) time. It promises to be a hell of an experiment (not least for our broadcast team!) First debate: Friday September 26th.
Kent Brewster's Hack Day Display, pulling in the latest photos from Flickr, and tweets from Twitter.
Quality! A 3D-sculpture of Twitter’s almost-ever present beacon of FAIL!
Nice plotgraph of your Twitter posting habits.
Clever attempt at threading Twitter conversations.
Ze Frank is causing splendid hijinx on Twitter. Let’s go Sepia Team!
I love that the Wall-E trailer caused a spike.
Great post by Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton. Exactly sums up why Twitter is so lovely: “For a contrived, weird and techy way to communicate, Twitter’s “passive conversation” fosters very natural, gradual relationship-building.”
T-Mobile is blocking SMSes sent to Twitter, claiming it is “not an authorized third-party service provider”. This is interesting — if users are paying for text messages and SMS packages, does the phone company have any right to block delivery?
If you could follow any three possible twitterers, who would you choose? I’d go for @yooouuuk, @sjobs and @bez.
Blaine at Twitter has implemented OAuth authentication, the first (I believe) live implementation on the web. I hope to have this rolled into Twadget in the next week or two, so I can stop asking for usernames and passwords.
Good Twitter search-engine, which has RSS feeds for search results.
Adam Green: “What I’m seeing on Twitter, however, is true social construction of software features. Users are coming up the ideas, and implementing them through adoption.”
This afternoon's New England Twitter/web/podcast geek meetup.
Twitter add a page listing all the times someone @s a message at you. I found a couple of times someone I’m not following has responded to me!
Oh, good lord. Trying to cram more context (or, if you prefer, noise) into the 140 characters allowed in a Twitter post.
Minimal web interface for mobile devices.
The origin of Twitter (or Twttr as then was) in papery form. Seems I was quite accurate when I first saw it and described it as “the way my friends and I used to use our AIM Away messages to pass on information and injokes.”
A good explanation of what’s so lovely about Twitter, in a way I can explain to folks without sounding crazy.
John Edwards’s campaign is Twittering his campaign stops.
Uses OpenSearch to post to Twitter. I didn’t realise you could POST using the Firefox search bar — This introduces opportunities for all kinds of cool hacks.
“Having “community” is extremely important; far more so than our productivity.”
There are currently four posts on the Twitter public timeline (including one from me) saying “Reading Kathy Sierra’s article on Twitter”. The lower graphic on “flow” is alarmingly true for me.
I’m having lots of fun with Twitter. My “Emergency Snark Broadcast System”, if you will.
This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.
I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.
