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Owen Densmore

Twitter

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I've recently been thrust into Twitter:

- My new ISP/Hosting uses twitter for news updates and support.

- A bizarre problem with backspaces (me) and backspac.es/backspacesapp trying to not conflict.

- A chance encounter with the CoffeeScript author (Jeremy Ashkenas) and JavaScript creator (Brendan Eich)

- A discussion on a high performance JS stunt (asm.js) with near-C++ performance

- I'm helping a priest and some other friends to use twitter (its Lent, after all!)

- I'm looking into twitter github open source frameworks.

.. and a few more.

I'm on the bandwagon. I can't believe it. I despise Facebook .. but none the less use it (needed for a funeral/wake, and to get in touch with a high school I taught at, and to chat with a few authors, and naturally to follow Doug and some family members). G+ is FB for the rest of us.

But twitter is a really different beast and I blush to say that the Info Per Square Second is pegged to the max there. Who'da thought.

Any of the rest of us like it? Do you use tools other than the twitter.com site or their phone/tablet apps?

I'd love to hear of our twitter use.

-- Owen

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Twitter

I don't use twitter myself. Seriously. Too narcissistic.

Seriously. I don't want anybody following me.

-Doug

On Mar 4, 2013 8:59 PM, "Owen Densmore" <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've recently been thrust into Twitter:
- My new ISP/Hosting uses twitter for news updates and support.

- A bizarre problem with backspaces (me) and backspac.es/backspacesapp trying to not conflict.

- A chance encounter with the CoffeeScript author (Jeremy Ashkenas) and JavaScript creator (Brendan Eich)
- A discussion on a high performance JS stunt (asm.js) with near-C++ performance

- I'm helping a priest and some other friends to use twitter (its Lent, after all!)
- I'm looking into twitter github open source frameworks.

.. and a few more.

I'm on the bandwagon. I can't believe it. I despise Facebook .. but none the less use it (needed for a funeral/wake, and to get in touch with a high school I taught at, and to chat with a few authors, and naturally to follow Doug and some family members). G+ is FB for the rest of us.

But twitter is a really different beast and I blush to say that the Info Per Square Second is pegged to the max there. Who'da thought.

Any of the rest of us like it? Do you use tools other than the twitter.com site or their phone/tablet apps?

I'd love to hear of our twitter use.

-- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Robert Holmes-3

Re: Twitter

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 8:59 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

But twitter is a really different beast and I blush to say that the Info Per Square Second is pegged to the max there.

I'm intrigued… the few times I've tried Twitter I've found that the signal to noise ratio is vanishingly small & have abandoned it after a couple of days. But it sounds like you are finding value. Got some examples of hashtags where S/N > 0?

Brent Auble

Re: Twitter

If you attempt to follow hashtags, the signal-to-noise ratio will be pretty poor. Hashtag search is good if you are interested in a specific topic and you don't necessarily know who will be talking about it. For example, #overlyhonestmethods (https://twitter.com/search?q=%23overlyhonestmethods&src=hash) has scientists talking about how they actually do research, which is hilarious. Of course it also has people talking about scientists talking about how they actually do research (which is generally the noise). It's also good for following trending stories, like Dennis Rodman in North Korea: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23theworm&src=typd

A much better strategy for getting a good S/N ratio on Twitter is to follow people who post useful content. Tim O'Reilly (the publisher) is a great example: https://twitter.com/timoreilly

Some more examples related to complexity:

The Santa Fe Institute: https://twitter.com/sfi_news

Complexity Digest (curated by Carlos Gershenson): https://twitter.com/cxdig

or just Carlos Gershenson directly: https://twitter.com/cgershen

Pierre Omidyar: https://twitter.com/pierre

Just find people who have interests in line with yours and follow them. Most of the value from Twitter comes from links to other content on the web, unless you really are interested in whenever your favorite celebrity gets a coffee at Starbucks...

Brent

From: Robert Holmes <[hidden email]>

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 8:59 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

But twitter is a really different beast and I blush to say that the Info Per Square Second is pegged to the max there.

glen ep ropella

Re: Twitter

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

Owen Densmore wrote at 03/04/2013 07:59 PM:
> Do you use tools other than the
> twitter.com <http://twitter.com> site or their phone/tablet apps?

These tools were useful before Thunderbird included twitter access.

http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html
https://code.google.com/p/tircd/

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com
If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator. -- George W. Bush

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Ron Newman

Re: Twitter

How representative are Twitter Trends, really?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-kanalley/twitter-trends-study-public_b_2812350.html

--
Ron Newman, Founder
MyIdeatree.com
The World Happiness Meter

Arlo Barnes

Re: Twitter

In reply to this post by glen ep ropella

I thought the whole point of twitter was the noise. At least, that is what I put on my feed and how I use it - it is like the fleeting pleasure of being in a loud, crowded room. I find it indicative that most of Twitters pageviews come from external sites, being linked in from people's little embedded boxes listing their recent tweets.

-Arlo James Barnes

Owen Densmore

Re: Twitter

Administrator

In reply to this post by Robert Holmes-3

[Sorry for late replies, I've got a problem with mail being late and even out of order.]

I think its turned into a sibling of IRC, where folks chat continuously on very specific topics.

Hi S/N for me:

- I read about asm.js, so tried the official coffeescript gmail group, asking if asm.js might be an eventual target for CS. No response.

- This is important for agentscript, so decided to contact Jeremy Ashkanas, the author of CS directly. Twitter was the only option that made sense

- He answered within an hour or two, saying that only when asmjs actually was in browsers would it be considered.

- This started a small, but very focused conversation between Jeremy and Brenden Eich, JS's creator and CTO of mozilla who is supporting asm.js. I got "cc"d as the originator of the thread.

Another example:

- My ISP, Joyent, decided to shed all its shared hosting, and transferred those accounts to TextDrive, who they originally acquired to expand into shared hosting originally(!).

- Although the transfer was a near miracle .. pretty tough sys-admin task, there was a period of seemingly alarming behavior of my server .. looking like I was possibly hacked.

- The forum and other standard means of contact failed, suggesting a possible problem with their servers.

- But then I noticed that they had two twitter accounts, one for system status, the other for support.

- Between them, I resolved my problems, got my server unlocked, and was on the air quickly.

There are others, and my use is pretty focused. I also started building twitter "lists" on topics like JavaScript, TextDrive and so on.

But all this got me browsing twitter more than before, and I was surprised just how useful it is.

Stephen suggested I look at FlipBoard, the iPad app that aggregates several social media and news sources .. and in twitter's case includes the associated media the tweets refer to (tweets, being short, benefit from this expansion)

It seems a pretty valuable tool for twitter.

So good S/N does take some work and works best in very focused interest groups.

-- Owen

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 9:34 PM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 8:59 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

But twitter is a really different beast and I blush to say that the Info Per Square Second is pegged to the max there.

I'm intrigued… the few times I've tried Twitter I've found that the signal to noise ratio is vanishingly small & have abandoned it after a couple of days. But it sounds like you are finding value. Got some examples of hashtags where S/N > 0?