I’m standing in for Karlin on the Right Hook’s Technology slot next Monday. I thought I’d throw out an invite- if anyone thinks there’s something I ought to cover or introduce to George’s 80,000 or so listeners, leave a message. Make sure that a non-technical Classics graduate such as myself can understand it!
At the moment, I’ve been playing with Twitter, trying to work out the hows and whys so I can talk about it. I’d be particularly grateful if you use this tool if you’d leave me tales of why you find it useful or entertaining. I’ve already come up with three or four uses for it and I’m still trying to work out how most of it works.
7 Comments
Hey Simon,
I’m a big Twitter user (conoro) and did the whole road to Damascus thing on it a few months back (actually for the Blog awards). Day to day I use it for grumping, sending/receiving tech gossip, sending/receiving useful info, oh and grumping.
Last weekend I put together a simple idea which makes use of Twitter. It is a site called http://corkprobs.info and it allows you to post problems to that page about gas/water/elec/roads outages in Cork using Twitter so that everyone can read them. Inspired by the complete lack of any information service from Cork CoCo.
I used Twitter because it means that you can report those problems using the Web, SMS or IM.
To use it, you just have to add the corkprobs user on Twitter as a friend and then send your reports using the style: @corkprobs Water is out in Bandon.
I blogged it here with full instructions:
http://conoroneill.com/2007/06/03/report-problems-in-county-cork-using-this/
Conor
Oh and have a look at Jaiku from Finland. Same idea as Twitter but European with tons more features and a mobile focus. Not as popular as Twitter and I think maybe featuritis is the reason.
For Hookie: RSS Feed Readers – I haven’t met anyone in “real life” who knows what they are or how they can transform the web experience
(sigh) I see you’re another one who hasn’t put your clock forward (or something)
Twittervision is more fun than Twitter. Bring it up on George’s screen and get a half dozen Irish twits to send Right Hook comments on Monday evening. We could make up @LastHook so the comments are easily findable on the public timeline.
I might be the lamest Twitter user with more than 1000 tweets to my user names. The system has effectively expanded networking opportunities during tech conferences because you can nudge someone across a swath of 500 attendees with banal things like lunch invitations or by making snarky back channel comments together.
However, the real mover in the space is Jaiku, in my opinion. That would be pronounced HI-koo if you’re a native to the place where it’s coded. Or if you’re an athlete and play Jai-Lai.
If you could find a nice rugger and food angle on the Twitter situation (perhaps a nifty little restraunt review widget based on it) then Hookie will think you’re great. Rugger and Roly’s. A man’s best friend apparently.
Could be used to give real time, localised traffic reports among neighbours with the same commute – not that texting while driving is recommended, unless you’re stuck in gridlock and not technically in motion.