Tag : twitter

Lately, there has been lot of bizarre writing on how the hotspots of the internet, be that Facebook or Twitter or anything else, is bad for you.  The Guardian covers some of the fluff here.

I must admit I am beginning to tire of the headlines, formulaic as they are. Apparently, Facebook can kill, divorce you,  deprive you of good old fashioned hugs, eat your pet and so on. (OK, so I made up the last one – slap me!)

Twitter is even more disastrous – it can give you cancer as social isolation (read interacting in online environments) alter our genes.  (PDF link to piece of sensationalist research)
I quote:

One of the most pronounced changes in the daily habits of British citizens is a reduction
in the number of minutes per day that they interact with another human being. Recent his-
tory has seen people in marked retreat from one another as Britain moves from a culture of
greater common experience to a society of more isolated experience. She is in good com-
pany, as Americans too step back from one another in unprecedented magnitude.

I feel like crying. For what exactly does it mean to interact with another human being?

Tim, Stuart, Anjali, Oli and I had an Amazing time at the London Twestival yesterday. More than 100 cities all over the world hosted a Twestival to raise money for communities that don’t have clean, safe drinking water – something most of us take for granted. 

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is today reported to have announced the service may start charging for commercial use. 

People use Twitter in so many ways. It’s a chat client, it’s a research tool, it’s a place for breaking news, it’s a way to let the world how you feel. I’m not even going to attempt to list all the uses here. This post is J U S T for those who read and write novels. Are you one?

If so, perhaps you too have got a literary pearl in the workings… But just like me… you can’t get started. The days fly away before you can catch the pen, coloured with work, work, work, drinks at the pub, friends, parties, dogs in the park, laundry, dishes … no time to write. We tell ourselves we’re very, very busy.

This is how the world has missed out on the most wonderful stories.

Yeah, good question.

It’s something we’ve been working on as a ‘fun’ side project. I’m not going to try and convince you that it’s a gently mocking critique of Twitter, or of social media in general. I’m not even going to try and sell you on it being a ‘trifle’ we created to cheer everyone up in these challenging times. We created it because we have puerile senses of humour and found it funny – you know, burping and stuff – and wanted to make something playful and plastic enough to fool around with, that would integrate with Twitter and other social services we like.

Let’s get straight into it:

1. The Whopper Sacrifice and its sad end: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency famously responsible for the Bill Gates-Jerry Seinfled Microsoft ads, came up with the concept of sacrificing 10 Facebook friends in exchange for a Burger King Whopper. In less than a week, Facebook shut the site down. If you go to the site now, you note that 233,906 friendships were sacrificed for this – kudos to CP+B and some negative press for Facebook. 

One week into 2009 and there’s enough for one of my ‘floating around the office’ posts!

1. Power Twitter for Firefox: If you use Firefox, then you should try this. Tim uses it and it’s really sleek. (courtesy Elin)

So the Twittersphere is abuzz again. This time with talks of who the people with authority on Twitter are, or, as these sites prefer to call it, Twitority or Twithority. To start with, let me point you to a few well-written blog posts – which were highlighted by the folks at Made By Many – that provide much of the food for this post: Pete Sabilla on Twitter Combinatorics, Phil Windley on Asymmetric Follow,JP Rangaswami’s experiment on the breadth of information on Twitter, TechCrunch on re-tweeting as a measure of authority, Dan Zarrella on the most re-tweeted people on Twitter and MichaelLitman’s thoughts on Twitority.

The post I made a couple of days ago about Twitter’s coverage of the sustained terror assault on the city of Mumbai was by far the most viewed post we’ve made here. It obviously struck a chord. Bits of it ended up on CNN Asia.