Decentralized services, like email, have a big advantage for users. I can send email to anyone that I have the email address of. The advantage for me is that even if my friends use a different email provider, I can still send them emails. It would be a huge problem if I’d need an email account with every provider that I wanted to send emails to. That I can use one account to send email to anyone that reads email is an advantage for me....
In Tweeting about Twitter’s Terms Dave Winer writes: You can’t be half in and half out. Either you connect to Twitter, and they own you and your users, or you don’t connect to Twitter. So we can’t play with Twitter, but the other way around Twitter can’t play with us. At some point in the future rssCloud based microblogging clients will take off and Twitter will have to change their terms of service to allow us to let them play with us....
I tweeted about it before: I think the Twitter website isn’t realtime, because the little number in the title of the webpage makes people click the blue label that shows there are new tweets. It therefore increases the engagement on the Twitter website. If I have Twitter open in my browser I will click the blue box to get a few pellets with new tweets. I can’t help it. It’s also the main reason not to use the Twitter website (apart from this I actually quite like it)....
It seems it is now possible to share photos with MMS to Twitter. It’s interesting to notice that the people at Orange UK figured out that if let people send MMS messages to an interesting service you can make a lot of money. I have never send an MMS in my life and I probably never will, but if the use is interesting or valuable enough, I just might. The other important thing to notice is that Orange UK can (and probably will) save half of the money (and bandwidth) that would normally be needed to send a MMS....
This is the script that I use with Vim to send my Twitter updates. In Vim you can use it by typing !!perl twitter.pl If you then type Enter it will send the current line to Twitter. You do need to install Net::Twitter and its dependencies.
Not everyone writes drafts for his Twitter posts. It seems silly even to do this. But for the people who don’t think writing drafts is silly (and use Vim), I wrote a few lines of Vim script that will help them keep their lines just short enough. Put these lines in your .vimrc file and start writing. You should change the filename to the name of the file that you write your drafts in....
A few months ago I said that it’s not possible to spam Twitter. This is because you can choose who you follow. And people can’t send messages to you if you don’t follow them. This makes Twitter unspammable. The above is still true, with the exception that with search.twitter.com people will find messages of people that they don’t follow. This problems becomes bigger when people will start searching for their @usernames....