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Changing It Up on Twitter & FriendFeedJanuary 7

As the new year starts, I am increasingly thinking of changing my follow habits that I have maintained since I first logged in on Twitter and FriendFeed. 

Mutual Respect

My attitude was, mutual respect. You follow me, I follow you. I can learn from everyone. I still think it’s a good attitude to have, and I wish it was the right one. But increasingly, especially on Twitter, I don’t think it is. 

I’m going to rant a bit here, just warning you.

For months, I have been using FriendFeed and Twitter actively. At the beginning, I followed anyone who looked interesting and didn’t care about who followed me back. I maintained what I thought of as a fairly altruistic policy toward both services, just concerning myself with finding great people.

More recently, my active search for new great people has begun to taper. First, I found tools for both services that figure out who my ‘mutual followers’ are.. and I have to admit

SUP WordPress?December 19 2008

I came across a quick post from Benjamin Golub in his blog about SUP (no Wikipedia page yet, anyone want to write one?), a protocol developed by FriendFeed and described in their blog. 

Benjamin created a small YouTube video showing how SUP works.

Benjamin Golub demonstrates SUP

 

So naturally, I now have a bit of SUP-envy, since I run a WordPress blog and not my own home made cloud-based blog platform like Ben.  Which means my next step was to perform a Google search for ‘WordPress’ and ‘SUP’.  To my great surprise, a small SUP plugin has already been written!

Enter WP SUP, a small plugin that d

MediaRSS? Indeed!December 10 2008

I installed the MediaRSS WordPress plugin today.  Hopefully that will mean that the picture that I included will show up in FriendFeed and other places that support Media RSS extensions.

Media RSS extensions allow one to describe different types of media, such as embedded music and video clips, directly in an RSS stream.  These extensions are technically optional, so traditional RSS parsers can safely ignore them.

The Mother of All Demos: 40 YearsDecember 10 2008

I just noticed that yesterday was the 40-year anniversary of Douglas Engelbart’s historic 1968 Human Augmentation demo, affectionately titled “The Mother of All Demos.”

 

Only slowly has this demo, Douglas, and the Stanford Research Institute team (The Augmentation Research Center, or ARC) gotten the recognition they deserve for the groundbreaking work they did here.  The system they developed was called NLS or “oN-Line System.”  Many of the concept developed for and presented here didn’t even have names back in 1968:

• The computer mouse (only recently named) as a alternative input device.
• Chording keyboard technology, a keyboard where multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously to issue a single command.
• Hypertext, or the concept of endowing a word to be a link to more information *about* that word.
• Electronic colla

Short URLs Equals Expanded Browsers?December 3 2008

If you have ever used Twitter (and who hasn’t, these days), you already know about the service’s famous 140-character limit.  Similar to a cell phone text message, that’s all you get before you hit ‘send.’  Of course, you could break your message up into multiple short messages but the real effects of this limitation are two-fold:

• It forces Twitter users to think of brief, hopefully elegant ways to transmit (or ‘tweet’) their thoughts.
• It forces creative solutions to common problems such as sending an accompanying web address (or URL) with a tweet.

I could probably add a few more points on how this limit also defines how conversations happen on Twitter but that would be a whole different post, which has probably been covered many times by now.

For the Shorties

Let’s focus on the second point though.  Almost immediately after Twitter started picking up steam, URL-shortening services that