Twitter is taking a shower tonight
128531
I love Twitter, but there have been a lot of problems, and this is too much. They're taking it down tonight, for two hours, and we're hot on a big story, and it's developing -- on Twitter. This seems like a bad night for Twitter to go to sleep. (But there probably never is a good night.) I don't think the Twitter guys really understand how much we're doing with their service.  It's been going down a lot lately. And while other people have been complaining about it losing posts, I had never seen it lose one, until yesterday, and now it's losing them regularly, for me too. Read the first three words of this post again.  They raised $5 million, it seems now it's time for them to get the bugs out, hire some people who really understand scaling, if necessary re-implement the system from the ground up. Do whatever is needed to make it as reliable as the other tools we depend on. We need Twitter to work. It's not a fun experiment for us, we're using it.  Jack, Ev, Biz, Fred -- please take note. Postscript: The announcement changed, now they're saying it'll be down on Sunday night. Much better. Thanks!
351849
As the social space keeps developing and growing, you really think Google will just sit in the sidelines and watch? I think not. Besides Orkut, Google has been working to develop new social media projects, like SocialStream.  Human Interaction Computer Institute states:  SocialStream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master&#8217;s program at [...]
483306
Dan Farber: "It's not hard to imagine a contextual ad showing up every time you Twitter something. Twitter 'I am drinking beer with friends' and a Budweiser ad shows up. Now imagine the Twitter revolt." Oh yes there would be quite a revolt, a powerless one, unless there was an alternate service we could all switch to and then assuming we could get off our asses and actually switch. Yeah, we're good at screaming, but not too great at acting, here. I'm a bit of a Twit, myself, and I'd find it revolt-worthy if they tried to interrupt or punctuate discourse with product placements, but then Twitter's destiny is, imho, to be acquired by a phone company and sold as a feature that gives users a reason to use one brand of phone over another. Not as a way for advertisers to hitch their "messages" on our discourse. We've seen how well that has (not) worked with advertising on email. Not likely to work much better on Twits. Imagine if Nokia offered a cell phone with Twitter built-in, a checkbox for SMS users (default on?) -- "Do you want to send SMS messages to your buddy list?"  Don't you think the kids would go for that? (Maybe they can already do it, it's likely that I'm that cluelss.)
390989
The Obama Express. My latest piece on Huffington.  If you like it, please feel free to pass it on.  "cheesecake"
188077
Think you know advertising? Think again. The social web is challenging all conventions, from who creates the content to how we define media.
434276
DynamicWebPages.de has their latest PHP Usage Statistics posted today. Things just keep looking up for PHP usage - this month it gained a good chunk of domains from last month.
354680
Doing the laundry has taken on a new meaning for New Yorkers who can now watch their wash and spin cycles while listening to poetry and prose.
428466
The Zend Developer Zone has launched a new feature for their PHP Abstract podcasts to help make giving feedback on the episodes even simpler (especially on mobile devices) - a TwitterBridge.   We know many people listen to PHP Abstract on their cell phones or mobile music device. Many of you aren't near a computer when you listen. Even so, we want to hear from you about the episodes. So we've installed our handy new TwitterBridge. Now, all you need to leave a comment about an episode of PHP Abstract is a twitter account.   You'll need a Twitter account (obviously) and then set it up to follow phpa, then any comments that are sent starting with "@phpa" will be grabbed and pushed into the comment system automatically.
23541
This week's latest PHPBarnstormer has been posted.
751660
Yesterday's piece, lightly edited, on the Huffington Post. http://x98.us/jz  I think it looks pretty good over there!
311249
As I said above I'm glued to the TV, but I'm also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I'm subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I've been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They're all getting started, and eventually I'm pretty sure they'll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he's on Twitter and sometimes I'm watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn't it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there's no doubt that soon we'll be doing that. We're finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long. With the help of a few members of the community Yahoo can get there first. BTW, I read on the NY Times site that Yahoo is going to open up more to developers. Hmmm. If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run it in MSM. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don't seem very serious about it.
548511
Last summer, when I was exploring the edges of Twitter, and building a voicemail service that hooked into Twitter with BlogTalkRadio, and then hooking my digital camera up to Twitter through Flickr, it seemed inevitable that Twitter would eventually support "payloads" so that objects like pictures and MP3s could hitch a ride on a Twitter message without using up any of he 140 characters, and with a neat url-less display.  The idea just kind of sat there, we've been quietly using the services, accepting their awkwardness, but without direct support from Twitter, they probably won't become mainstream.  Along comes Twitxr, in a post by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch, and I go -- why? This doesn't seem right. Too many steps. I have it much easier, Twitter is hooked right up to my camera, I never have to get my desktop or laptop in the loop when I want to post a picture. To prove the point, I'll now take a picture of this post, and shoot it up to Twitter.  So now Twitxr basically says it's time to give up the wait for Twitter, and maybe they're right, but for this??? I don't really think this is what I want. If I have to use a whole new Twitter for photography, I probably want it to be Flickr, which I already use, whose API we've already mastered, whose scaling we trust, and even though Yahoo's future is in doubt, it's more certain than that of a startup. Choice #1, if the Twitter guys are listening, is to go ahead and help us, your developers, create something seamless out of what you already have. No matter what it's easier for users to stay with what they're already using. It really isn't, it seems to me, in your interest to have users switch?? Twitxr throws down a challenge to both Flickr and Twitter. To Twitter: Scale, scale, scale and add payloads to the API. To Flickr: Go ahead and do an event streamer for pictures.
537308
By Simon Young  On March 22 the people showed their power. Well, some of them, anyway.  March 22 was the official Bum Rush the Charts day, an initiative designed to show the power of social media.
566080
Ewww... someone is marketing toilet water!
354346
Useful Twitter feeds for people in Southern California. And useful lessons for the next disaster.
194042
Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.  Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere." Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages. And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?  The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.
41008
Dry heaving Twitterites For several days, many Twitter users in the US were unable to digitally vomit with their T-Mobile phones.â¦