Tag : twitter

Yesterday’s annoying article-of-the-day has to have been Richard Hillgrove’s piece in the Guardian in which he lays out his vision for social networking sites in the aftermath of the Ryan Giggs comedy road show.

When I got my iPhone, one of the first apps I installed was Mappiness. There was a bit of buzz about it in the office at the time. I was intrigued by the idea - to map your happiness over time - and also into supporting the research by LSE. It all seemed so easy. Mappiness pinged me twice a day between 8am and 10pm and I dutifully answered the 6 questions on my level of happiness, location, activity and company. 

Signing up for Quora has made me stop and think about whether I live in a connected world. All my friends are online, or at least have an online presence. I have mobile phone numbers and email addresses for my friends, sometimes once, twice over. My friends have presences all over the web, on Facebook and Twitter to name just a few.

Or do they?

I found finding my friends and contacts on Quora quite tough. Admittedly because the service is only beginning to catch fire (or spark at least) but also because my digital connections are nowhere near as complete as I inherently believe they are. With this mind I’ve stopped to harvest my address book, Twitter feed and Facebook friend list to find out where my friends are. How often do I interact with them digitally and in the real world? How easy are they to find and contact? Am I connected?

Last week, I was on the panel for the ‘Digital Marketing Agencies Pitch’ session at the Marketing Movies Online conference. Adam Rubins and Alice from digital PR agency Way to Blue and Nik Roope, founder of Poke, were on the panel with me. It was a fun session – how it worked was we each got a film beforehand that we had to pitch a 5-minute digital marketing campaign for, as if we were re-releasing it today.

I picked Bambi – the 1942 Disney classic, much loved (indeed it often makes the top 10 list of all time in the ‘animated film’ category in surveys), with the universal themes of love and loss.

No explanation necessary! We thought we’d give everyone their Tuesday laughs, that’s all.

When @stueccles first encouraged me to enter the 10k apart competition (to create a web app in under 10 kilobytes) I wondered what was really possible in only 10k. After a little tinkering I realised quite a lot.

Introducing the 10k Feed Board

About a week ago (August 5th) a new Twitter account appeared. Nothing strange in that. But this one belonged to John Hegarty, Worldwide Creative Director of BBH. The BBH whose offices we share.

His account accumulated over a thousand followers in a matter of hours as word spread that one of the most well known ad agency creatives in the world had joined Twitter.

However, within a day or so people began to suspect that this wasn’t the real deal. The language was poor and the tweeted quotes hackneyed. “Not the language of Hegarty” people cried via Twitter.

On Monday night I tweeted that I was unfollowing the account. The 1990s management speak and trite ‘creative’ blatherings were too much. This was obviously an imposter. And I think I know who it is…On Monday night I tweeted that I was unfollowing the account. The 1990s management speak and trite ‘creative’ blatherings were too much. This was obviously an imposter. And I think I know who it is…

Bud Caddell’s collaborative Kickstarter project has three days to go but his backers have more than doubled the initial target amount $5k. I just upped my contribution to $100 so that I can fully participate in the adventure.

While the news of Twitter Annotations has been around for quite a while, it was announced at Chirp in April, outside of a geeky developer audience it hasn’t captured the imagination of the Twitter global echo-chamber. For me the potential of Annotations could mean, for Twitter, this changes everything. Again. At the same time it could lead to a lot of divergence and confusion in the client marketplace.

Twitter Annotations allow metadata to be delivered along with a tweet, that is additional structured data outside of the 140 character limit. Now some Tweet metadata already exists, such as geolocation and a specific tweet you may be replying to and there is also some unstructured user created metadata such as #hashtags and @replies. Twitter Annotations is going to allow developers through the API to deliver any form of structured metadata

Twitter’s new and native URL shortening functionality (t.co) is going to make other URL shorteners such as ow.ly, is.gd and bit.ly totally obsolete.

I guess those businesses could see it coming. URL shortening is fairly basic functionality. It would take a decent developer a couple of days (if that) to comp something together that works well enough. It seems morally bankrupt of large social networks to toss aside small apps that add value to their platform by blatantly copying functionality.