"Here's my alternative proposed list of Ten Lessons from Einstein. Please feel free to create your own!" (vs http://www.dumblittleman.com/2010/03/10-amazing-lessons-albert-einstein.html which doesn't even deserve a working link, despite making Hacker News)

"The bots form a relatively closed network on Twitter, a chatbot subculture. They are able to compose Tweets, start conversations with other bots and reply to mentions, even from strangers." I'm also posting this partly because the heavy table border design of the right hand frame (and the Utah teapot as infinite scroll marker) make me oddly happy.

Megan Garber: "Almost all of the advances taking place within our established social networks have emphasized images at the expense of text. There's the rise of Pinterest, most obviously, and its almost text-free explosion of pictures and pins. And the less-meteoric-but-still-pretty-remarkable rise of Flickr and Instagram and Hipstamatic and their fellow photographic networks. But there's also Facebook, doubling down on its photo-heavy Timeline. And Google+, selling itself on its video Hangouts. There's the small matter of YouTube. And the viral profusion of Tumblr. Even Twitter -- spare, text-y little Twitter -- has, in its latest web redesign, emphasized user avatars, not to mention video and image attachments, much more boldly than it ever did before." This is a good post, with more questions than answers.

NPR on Twitter networks and their basis in real life connections. "Inskeep: Suggesting what? That Twitter connections are following the connections that we already have in the real world? Vedantum: Exactly. So that the real world powerfully predicts what kind of connections we have in the virtual world. So if you are living in New York, you're much more likely to have followers in London than you are likely to have followers in a small town in the United States." The lede posits much more of a binary nature (as if you can't mainly follow friends with an additional layer of interest-based connections on top) which annoyed me, but there's still stuff of interest here.

"Based on a large sample of publicly available Twitter data, our study shows that a substantial share of ties lies within the same metropolitan region, and that between regional clusters, distance, national borders and language differences all predict Twitter ties. We find that the frequency of airline flights between the two parties is the best predictor of Twitter ties. This highlights the importance of looking at pre-existing ties between places and people."

'Pranab Mukherjee and other Indian ministers tried to terminate Britain’s aid to their booming country last year - but relented after the British begged them to keep taking the money.' 'Last week India rejected the British-built Typhoon jet as preferred candidate for a £6.3 billion warplane deal, despite the Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, saying that Britain’s aid to Delhi was partly “about seeking to sell Typhoon.”'

"Renew currently has 50 bin/screen units in the heart of London, and this will rise to 200 in time for the Olympics. The company calls the idea 'the first of a new generation of “on-the-go” media', and says the editorial team behind the plan will cover breaking news, weather, the arts and sports."

"I’d wager that all third-party clients will be forced to display the trends and ads within a year, and what we know as Twitter today — or at least what we knew until yesterday morning — will be a distant, quaint memory: Remember when it was just people you followed?"

"An API is a valuable cure to the stagnation of growth." Thoughts on large service API design.

"The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be."

"I signed up for this product because it made mass-texting people when I was in town easy, and led to lots of serendipitous drinking and hanging out when I was in the city. On the radio last year, I heard someone explain Twitter as “a tool for following famous people and seeing what they’re up to“. It’s interesting how the product described in the new app feels like the product described by that radio pundit: a consumption tool."

"starting today, we're introducing a way to ensure that the most important Tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly, by placing them at or near the top of your timeline."

"To receive their [DMs], he had to follow them in return" "These new followers seemed out of place among the politicians, journalists, and celebrities on his list" "He made a common mistake between a direct private message and a public reply, and sent the picture out to the tens of thousands of people". File under 'tools shape culture'.

Aaron Straup Cope on URLs, Twitter, Flickr, Tower Bridge, ephemerality, permanence, things on the internet, and archives.

Various architecture critics on Twitter debating pylons and classic modern design.

The first in-depth user research study on the usage of the "Location" field within Twitter profiles has just been published by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

'In northern California, something that's cool is "koo" in tweets, while in southern California, it's "coo." In many cities, something is "sumthin," but tweets in New York City favor "suttin." While many of us might complain in tweets of being "very" tired, people in northern California tend to be "hella" tired, New Yorkers "deadass" tired and Angelenos are simply tired "af."'

"ThinkUp captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook." Like TweetNest, but more social? Also: built on PHP/MySQL, like TweetNest, unlike Diaspora.

Bruce Sterling (and Jon Lebkowsky) on Twitter, Brazil, photography, Flickr and The Future. And that's just the first nine or so posts. Goodness knows where this'll go after that.

"How much will it cost?" "Well, it's a gift; we didn't pay for it. But it will be the cost of storing what is, right now, around 5 terabytes, and the staff effort of maybe one full-time person over the years."

"Trickle is a Twitter display for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Simply launch Trickle and let it do its thing." As it says at Minimal Mac, "It’s a nice way to keep a peek on what’s happening while using another device to get other things done."

I should probably install this and have a look at it. It'd be interesting to see if I can transform my own JSON backups to it, for example.

An interesting discussion on Twitter and transience. It still surprises me that people think that posts should vanish, just because they seem to.

"I’d gained some perspective on how narrow the real-time channels were. Their steely focus on The Now neglected all sorts of other facets of human existence, communication, happiness." Matthew Ogle's call-to-arms for better access to your own, older data on web sites.

"we’re using an index that combines the IDs across different partners into one. This means you can use the IDs from your preferred partner’s dataset when using Twitter Search" Includes Gowalla and Zagat.

"All - we're looking at some short term tweaks to the Save interface today based on your feedback. Stay tuned!" Well, that was quick.

"in Smartr, you add your Twitter details to the app and it pulls in all tweets that include links or photos, displaying an inline image and a nice preview of the content on the other side" Add 'send to Instapaper' and this will be great for when I wake up to hours of stuff from Europe. OTOH: why iPhone, not web? Also, it's sad that links have migrated to Twitter from Delicious (or even Pinboard, but both are probably a losing battle, now).

"DEXTR is a full screen Twitter client. It shows one tweet at a time, filling the screen. And it accelerates and decelerates depending on how fast your Twitter stream is going." Very nice.

Looks like a useful service if you want to shortcut authentication (although Twitter already make it fairly easily by having a page that shows you an auth token for your account only). I wonder how well (or indeed if) it reports errors usefully, but even so, worth a go, perhaps.

"OK, NewTwitter is nice. But it's impossible to fullfil everybody's needs when you've got so many users to please." "This is where Fatc comes in, it's a scaffold to make your own Twitter client. There's no server code involved, just client-side JavaScript! Fatc talks to Twitter directly using the awesome @Anywhere API."

Fetching EXIF data from Twitpic to find the locations of Twitter users, even if they have geolocation turned off. This raises a few questions for me, such as "why don't Twitpic strip (or hide) EXIF". (Personally, I do use Twitter geolocation (although this seems to be rare: most people seem wary of it, for some reason), so if I posted via Twitpic I'd rather they offered to set the metadata from the EXIF location.) I note the site's been there since at least May, so perhaps nobody cares that much.

If I actually *used* Latitude, this might be useful. As it is, I'd be better pulling locations out of Twitter and Foursquare. Mind you, the moon banner is a bit Jones/Dopplr-y, although not as nice (obviously).

Lovely.

"Since we launched our geotagging API in November, we store the latitude and longitude for your tweet out of band" "Flickr has implemented our geotagging API, so if you upload a photo to them with geotagging, they'll pass it through to Twitter. And then on Twitter's side, we allow you to ask either for tweets within a certain location or connect to our geohost and get a stream of tweets subscribed to location"

"Aaron was up here, carefully seeing to the smooth operation of the engine driving the Twitter collection process for the duration." "The consumption and moderation system we have developed was christened 'Hose Drawer' by Aaron." "This ability to reach in a meddle with the guts, place yourself on a calm island in the middle of the stream, rewind the tape and alter the flow, is the next type of control we're experimenting with."

Originally entitled "Zuckerberg: People Are Comfortable Without Privacy, So We Threw Them All Over The Cliff", this is a good read on the way Facebook's userbase is being driven from default-private to default-public, and the reasons for the change.

"With ThinkTank, you can ask your friends anything and easily synthesize the responses you get back from a variety of channels" "ThinkTank will capture, archive, and organize the ephemera of status updates and create independent permalinks to those conversations." PHP, self-hosted, and interesting.

"The problem here is the problem with all mainstream, middle-of-the-road subjects: They’re not going to be surprising." "So what would be more intriguing? I think you’d get cooler trends by sampling the Twitter flow of a smaller, more cohesive group of people." Goes into a discussion of FlockingMe.

"Search your friends tweets. See popular topics among your friends."

"The Geolocation API will give us the ability to attach geographic metadata to tweets to provide additional context with your update. Along with the option to tag updates, we will be able to search for nearby tweets and view the geo metadata in user timelines." Hurrah. Opt-in, though.

Breakfast is remarkably diffuse. More people than I'd expect are up at 2am (and mainly saying "lol"). Kellan's note on his bookmark: "it takes most of the day to get bored".

"Twitter RSS Links allows you to generate a (RSS|ATOM|JSON|XML) feed from your friend's tweets that contains HTTP links." Does what it says, with OAuth (so it works for private folks). I really should do a delicious-network style un-shortening UI on top of the JSON, mind you.

"Retweeting has become one of the cultural conventions of the Twitter experience. It's yet another example of Twitter's users discovering innovative ways to use the service. We dig it. So soon it's going to become a natively supported feature on twitter.com."

Yes please. I wasn't quite aghast when I saw the username/password text fields, but then again, I wasn't far off.

I never use the homepage, which is handy, because it's just got worse. Do I look like I care about related posts on Twitter? I'm more likely to want a from-my-network filtered view of hot news. Also, non-ASCII in the URL? As Tom says, " they can't even write an urlslug generator what are they doing writing a bookmarks site?" Sigh.

"Any kind of personality would be an improvement on @lowflyingrock’s robotic language" Maybe, maybe not. I went back to @abovelondon from @twisst because I got fed up with their self-promotion and backchat. @asteroidwatch also looks overly chatty. Me, I want my bots to be, well, robotic.

Well, that should save a bunch of people scrabbling around trying to get a notification system working. Mind you, ask Tom to tell you about his experience with a DM from me on Friday morning. I think he said he got told about it five times...

"Replies to you with the name of the track and artist if you quote a spotify uri in a tweet." The use of the @reply prefix means you can follow it and only see the titles of tracks that your friends mention, which is quite handy.

Someone has finally built abovelondon right; twisst sends personalised (based on location) ISS alerts via Twitter DM. It seems to be having teething troubles with API rate limiting, but it's nice to see someone implement this with optimum usefulness.

"Messages to Become Public By Default" Facebook really are trying to be Twitter, aren't they?

'What he says next is probably not intended as his verdict on Twitter - a Kraftwerkian development, if ever there was one - but it may as well be. "Everybody is becoming like ... " - he pauses - "a Stasi agent, constantly observing himself or his friends."'

Tom explains why we're unlikely to see a Twitter client offering notifications on the iPhone any time soon. It looks right to me.

Phil's adaptation of Samuel Pepys' diary to Twitter is a lovely thing. As he says, "It’s not a way to fully understand his life, just as your tweets or my tweets aren’t a good way to find out everything about our lives. But, like everyone else, it’s a way to keep in touch with some of the things he’s up to."

This sounds pretty stupid: a teacher has a Twitter account which she posts to during the day (presumably via quick SMSes) and gets leapt on for doing so. The "teachers may access professional blogs which have educational value but are not allowed to have their own blog" policy seems somewhat draconian too.

This isn't exactly terribly friendly, but until Twitter do something to expose favourites more visibly or someone writes a nice GUI app (hard, because it requires n*following calls), this'll do for me. (I imported it into Google Reader, which I don't use otherwise.) Source on Github, naturally.

Not quite what I'd want (that's a bot that feeds an IRC channel, so everyone can see what's going on) but it's not at all bad either. I'm running it for a while to see how it goes.

"One of the best, unattributable quotes from Social Foo last year was the data point that Facebook was at one point losing up to 80% of messages across their update bus. ... That is designing with affordances. Don’t let your design make promises you can’t keep." Yet for some reason they've just changed their implicit contract. A great post.

On the one hand, I dislike people sharing links on Twitter not delicious. On the other hand, I'm guilty of it, and I wanted to build something like this (but more focussed on your personal network, although I gather if you can score an invite that does work). Score one for laziness, maybe. (I'd never have made it that slick.)

delicious have quietly changed the log in system to allow you to stay logged in indefinitely, as opposed to the two weeks they were enforcing between the relaunch and, well, today. Given it's the biggest lingering complaint I've heard since the relaunch, this should make people happy. Not sure I like this being announced on Twitter not the blog, mind.

James Stewart on a Twitter bot that posts every hour with the number of incoming and outgoing flights from Heathrow. It's a good start, but I'm not sure it's ideally suited to Twitter, and more data would be nice. (Hm, while Gatwick and Stansted are part of BAA then it should be possible to use the same scraping code...)

A list of forthcoming maintenance closures of the Thames Barrier. Like you'd expect.

I always wondered about making a Shipping Forecast twitter bot, but I've been beaten to it. A very nice writeup.

"Ever find yourself annoyed by frequent talk of elections, memes and kitty-cats on Twitter? Apply this user script to your Twitter fluid instance or Greasemonkey install to enable regex whitelists and blacklists for filtering" Well, that saves me writing it (if it works in GreaseKit).

A consensus on Facebook Connect becoming de-facto single sign on everywhere (albeit with reservations, and one vote for Google instead), with a few people talking about lifestreaming (and more importantly dealing with the firehose, so filtering/recommendation). Worth a scan through, although it does peter out towards the end.

I finally revived the scripts, an embarrassingly long time after a server move. (Lack of SMS did provide something of a disincentive...)

'"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.'

An activity stream of people talking about / posting photos of / etc Picnic. There's also a live stream, but I prefer using VLC: mms://streams.hosting.nob.nl/live01

A great talk from OSCON on how to replace RSS and polling with Jabber, XMPP and pushed notifications. Scary Flickr/Friendfeed figures on page 16 a bonus.

"I tried Twittervision on the iPhone ... Today, I see a tweet from @davetroy ... his app must have followed him on my behalf [so] he can now see all my private tweets" This is bad. I do not like Dave Troy.

Really nice Twitter visualisation using Google Charts, Yahoo Pipes and so on. Only let down, as so many Twitter tools are, by its inability to look at private timelines (bring on the OAuth already).

Thoughts on Twitter, Fire Eagle and using place IDs (as also supported by Flickr, and API-accessible) to do location things.

"jaiku is now being run as a '20%' project by the jaiku staff who joined google when they were bought out." I can't read the original post, but somehow this has the ring of truth. Meanwhile, people discuss Friendfeed as a post-Twitter site. Sigh.

Remember that link earlier about how filtering is going to be really useful? Well, this is Greasemonkey filtering for Twitter alone. Well well. (Interestingly most Twitter addons are separate sites; Flickr has far more Greasemonkey action.)

Looks like it might be a nice demonstration of tying together web apps to provide a service, but why the geographically limited alpha? Oh well, patience is apparently a virtue.

"Those of you who post daily dumps of your twitter messages: fucking knock that shit off. It's annoying" I'm not sure I agree with the rest of that, and I wouldn't have phrase it like that, but he's got a point.

Thanks to Tom for finding this evidence of self-referential automated posting going badly wrong (or, as he put it, "retwittering twitterings"). I sort of think I should write about this, but then I suspect nobody else cares much.

Twitter has really awful tools for following conversations, so Quotably tries to fix it. Unfortunately, unlike Jaiku, Twitter itself doesn't retain enough metadata: just look at Gruber. Oh, doesn't work with private twitterers either. Meh.

Tom Armitage on twitter.com/towerbridge. "just a simple case of scraping some data and outputting it" "it’s very important to me that the bridge should talk in the first person" a bit like abovelondon & friends

Is this the world's biggest spime? " I am opening for the MV Dixie Queen, which is passing Upstream."

All the "distributed Twitter" noise seems to have resulted in something that looks like working code, but (naturally) being Americans they ignore SMS. So it's useless (for me anyway).