Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Twitter”
Is there a replacement in the Fediverse for the Creative Class?
I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).
Micro-blogging: 3 years later... (5 years in)
It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber to using Choqok:
[caption id=“attachment_7119” align=“aligncenter” width=“618”] Choqok[/caption]
I used Tumblr for about a year but I abandoned it because it’s just animated gifs and curation of the work of others. Out of all the Tumblrs I followed (about 20) only about 3 of them produced original content. All the rest were just reblogs. Also, there’s too much porn on there to use at work.
The AV Club is Right. Patton Oswalt Won Twitter
The important thing is that you need to read to the end of the article or it’s just going to seem really weird.
When Twitter is Awesome
The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time. In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate. I started following Paolo Rivera after meeting him at Baltimore Comic-Con. (Related topic: meeting a bunch of creators in person at Baltimore Comic-Con helped make them more “real” to me. I’m not a jerky person, but it really does give me pause when I post a criticism to someone on twitter. Unlike these guys.) So when Paolo tweeted something from his blog that I wanted to comment on, I kept failing the captcha he had on the comments. I tweeted and (to my surprise) was retweeted by Paolo:
The Initial Failure and Eventual Triumph of Social Media in my Attempts to Get Tech Support to Help
A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices. In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix. She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix. We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case. I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu. At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content. I figured it’d resolve itself. So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player. Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix. I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem. I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site. Neither could Danielle on her computer. These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer. Strangely, that one could log in. That’s weird. I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference. So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then. That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me. (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either. What was going on here? Was Netflix blocking Linux? Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.
Automatically Posting your Top 3 Artists from Last.fm onto Twitter (with Python!)
I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week. So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me. Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday. I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page. Here it is for you to see and for Google to index. Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.
Micro-blogging: 2 years later...
Almost exactly 2 years ago I started micro-blogging. Back then I signed up for Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk accounts. One month later I concluded that I really liked Twitter and that Pownce and Plurk were annoying. A few days later I discovered Identi.ca - a FLOSS version of Twitter and decided I would send frivolous tweets to Twitter and tecnological dents to Identi.ca. Then, a little while later Pownce was taken off the net. So what has happened in the intervening years?
The "Look at Me" Culture
I came to a disturbing realization the other day - I’ve come to feel that whatever isn’t online isn’t real. This came about thanks to the Wii’s insanely stupid online policy. Everything about playing online with the Wii is an exercise in frustrating the user. Rather than always be connected to the net when the console is on (like modern computers, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), the Wii attempts to connect to the game servers at the time you wish to play the game. This leads to the very frustrated experience of wanting to play online, loading up into the game you want to play and then realizing that the system is having problems connecting to the Internet. So you have to back out to the Wii menu and trouble-shoot the problem. This wouldn’t be so vexing if it didn’t take the Wii ages to load games, including the “don’t throw your effing Wiimote around” warning every time! Even in games where it doesn’t make sense! (Like Rock Band)
Pownce is Dead, Long Live Twitter
As I mentioned in my post Micro-blogging: One Month Later, I hadn’t really used Pownce much at all. Even now, 4 months later, I haven’t touched it. In fact, ever since that post in August, I only used it once to transfer a file to my brother. I thought there wasn’t much room on the net for so many micro-blogging services. Most people, including CNN’s Rick Sanchez, use Twitter. And if you’re hard-core into libre software, there’s Identica. So I didn’t see why anyone would use Pownce. On top of that, Pownce was supposed to make money by getting people to pay for extra services. I just didn’t see any value in what they were charging for. So, I wasn’t too surprised when I got an email last Monday that Pownce was going to close shop.
Micro-blogging: One Month Later
It’s been about a month since I signed up for a bunch of micro-blogging websites. So what do I think after about a month? Let me start off with Twitter.
In my first look at the micro-blogs I had some pretty good feelings about Twitter. That has basically carried over for the past few weeks. I added a Twitter plugin to my blog, using it for quick thoughts I don’t want to elaborate on with a blog post. I’m also using Twitux on my Linux computer for posting without having to load up the Twitter site. I haven’t really been using the Flock Twitter plugin because it doesn’t seem to update correctly or often enough. I’m enjoying using it for those quick thoughts. I’m definitely going to keep using Twitter for the foreseeable future. So I feel the way about Twitter as I did a month ago - I like it.
A Macro-blog Post about Micro-blogging
I’ve known about micro-blogging for 1-2 years now - ever since I first started hearing about Twitter. Up until now I’ve been vehemently against the whole micro-blogging trend. To begin with, it requires anyone who wants to keep up with my writing to check yet another website! On top of that, I just can’t see a point to it. I even told my brother last weekend, why can’t I just have nice, short posts on my blog? But recently I’ve been hearing more and more about these micro-blogging services. It keeps being mentioned over and over on the net, in podcasts, pretty soon I’m sure CNN will be doing a piece on it. I know I’m late to the party when, according to Wikipedia, Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton have Twitter accounts. But, still, I hear all these complaints micro-blogging overload and people talking about ridiculously inane things such as what they just ate for lunch.