Posts about twitter

On the pulse

It’s fascinating how new layers of Twitter as a platform for our thoughts keep emerging.

I saw Twitter-maker Ev Williams say today that he loves Twistori, which was inspired by friend Jonathan Harris’ WeFeelFine. It simply pulls out the tweets that have the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish in them. It’s oddly compelling.

I’ve also seen work by the BBC and Reuters, among others, in trying to extract news from Twitter (and other us-created media) by looking for the hot words of news (explosion, evacuate…). This becomes a sort of canary in the news mine. People are writing about their lives and when news happens to or around them, they’ll surely tell their friends about it and now that is aggregated and searchable.

Next I expect someone to come up with a national mood index based on our tweets. Today, we’re feeling self-conscious.

Campaign placement

The most fun I had Twittering the election last night was immediately seeing the three Abercrombie & Fitch guys dudes standing behind Obama. Coinicidence? Conspiracy? Product placement. Either there is a story there or the Obama campaign is its own demographic clliche.

Maybe it’s the latter. The Toronto Sun said yesterday:

Hillary is minivans and American sedans, Barack is Range Rovers and Hondas. Hillary is cross-trainers with jeans, Barack is Abercrombie and Fitch and Banana Republic. Hillary is Dunkin Donuts, Barack is Starbucks. And their supporters are equally vocal, in different ways.

: LATER: USA Today talks to A&F, who says they had nothing to do with it. Ditto the campaign. The USAT blog is asking, ‘Anybody know these guys?’

Twittered out

Been Twittering the Pennsylvania vote coverage like a madman tonight.

The perfect melding of celebrity, politics & technology

A No. 10 Downing Street post on Twitter just now:

George Clooney was at No10 to discuss Darfur. The PM is grateful for the leadership Mr Clooney has shown in drawing attention to the crisis

One hopes that photos will soon follow on Flickr, videos on YouTube, apps on Facebook, groups on Google, podcasts on iTunes….

The lost URL

Just wondering: Are we losing a wealth of link knowledge on Twitter because it’s all going through TinyURL and other services that truncate addresses so they’ll fit? I’d love to know who’s getting linked in Twitter but to do that, I imagine one would have to scrape and then click on and resolve every one of those proxy URLs, no? If so, this is a shame.