The Twitter Cycle

I've been meaning to do a comic on this blog for a long time, and comic turned out to be a loooong one too, so long that it had to be broken in two. :)

Disclaimer: The events depicted in this comic are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.

So, twitter!

So, the thing is you don't know you're hooked on twitter till you're waking up everyday and unwittingly checking twitter before proceeding with the rest of the days business... twitter can be useful in many ways, some of which have been highlighted in this article. Some of them are:

Getting Feedback: like you want to ask what the best phone in the 15-25k price range is, and someone (I'm willing to bet on Jerry) would instantly send a tweet your way giving you some info on the matter...

Direct traffic: using your twitter account to get more people to visit your latest blogpost or something... overdoing this is usually frowned upon (that doesn't stop *SOME* people though). Sharing links can also be listed under this category, so if you see a funny article or listen to a good song, you'd tweet the link and send peeps that way. Can also be used to rickroll someone! lol ;)

Read News: when a natural disaster happens, twitter knows first! when an important government announcement happens, twitter knows first! twitter users tweet from the ends of the world, so you know everything that's going on first hand...

Make New Friends: yeah, I can testify to the fact that your twitter buddies will prolly end up as real-world friends! :)

also something they haven't mentioned: twitter relieves stress! trust me on this, you get stuff like this sent at you, bam in the middle of a depressing day at work, and you just look at it and ROFL! instant stress reliever! :D

So, how do I get started?

First, follow people: Most bloggers and websites display the link to their twitter account prominently. Follow the likes of @cracked for ROFL tweets, @mashable for news on social networks and the internet, @cnnbrk for breaking news stories, @kottufeed for the latest posts from Kottu, and also follow our blogging community! Click on the reply button to send replies to any of their tweets that you find interesting, start a conversation! Retweet (which is basically repeat a tweet) any tweets that you feel you want to share! twitter is all about interaction, you have to actively tweet for it to be fun...

What Client Should I use?

Well, when I first started tweeting, I used their website mostly... and stuck with for ages, till I moved to my ever-faithful twitterfox (now called Echofon). I chose it over the other contender (TweetDeck) because it was lightweight and it sits neatly in the bottom corner of your Firefox window:

see, the little blue circle in the corner

The only major complain you'd hear from a Firefox user is the fact that it only updates every 3 minutes (which is waaay too slow in the twitter world) and that when you close your browser, twitter is gone too (minor concern since most people never close their browsers these days), and the most common complain you'd hear from users of other browsers is that they can't use it 'coz they don't use Firefox! well good for them! :P

Now we come to the stand-alone twitter applications: DestroyTwitter, TweetDeck (which I personally used and disliked) and Spaz are 3 that seem to be popular among our bloggers... Seesmic (which also has a desktop app) and Brizzly (still invitation only, but those aren't hard to come by) are 2 popular and easy-to-use web based clients, which means you can access them from anywhere and everywhere! I'd recomend Brizzly if you're already used to the twitter web interface and only looking for more functionality... You may also like to check out the recent Lifehacker poll on the most popular twitter clients.

Caution: Twitter is extremely addictive! Use with care! ;) :D

If you need any assistance feel free to send a tweet my way to @darthchavie! :)

(and no I didn't type this out at 2 in the morning, just trying out scheduled posts to see if it works! lol)

random post #59

random post #57 can be found here
random post #58 can be found here

I didn't have much to write about recently, well I did, but I chose not to on the blog, since the whole thing is kinda a fluid situation. Once it resolves itself (peacefully I hope! lol) I'd be really happy about it and then forget about it really fast as well! :D

Ok, I know that paragraph didn't make any sense but I'll keep it anyways for future reference... ;)

since this is a random post, it doesn't really have any topic, but looking at the last random post, I dunno, I feel like it's gotta have one, so here goes:

Blogger is finally growing up!

My favorite blogging service turned 10 just 3 days ago, and it's rolling out some impressive stuff to celebrate its birthday. Already we've seen hubbub (an impressive new feature that will turn your RSS feeds into real time streams! or in non-geek language: deliver your blogposts to your blog's readers lightning fast!), one click sharing of your favorite posts on Google Reader via blogger or twitter, and a new label cloud feature, but non of them have been as impressive as I anticipated. Plus, my flash based moving tag cloud (does anyone over at Wordpress.com have this? no? hoo hoo! :D lol) makes the label cloud redundant...

So here are my bets on what they're going to roll out in the next few weeks (or rather what I want to see them roll out!) -

• static pages (w00t! w00t!)
• better (ok ok Wordpress-style then) comment moderation (not that I'm going to use it! I don't delete comments... EVER! - unless they're spam)
• nested comments
• aand greater Google Analytics incorporation (something like a traffic info gadget...)

A complete list of suggested improvements can be seen here.

This was a useless post, but I'm going to publish it anyway! ;)

Footnote: just found out that the people who first created Blogger at Pyra Labs, went on to create Twitter... interesting! :)

twordle?

My favorite Twittebrity @Pseud0random tagged me and so here's the wordle of my tweets:

Wordle of my tweets via http://wordle.net

Interesting Stats:

• I have 26 twooshes (tweets where all 140-characters have been used)
  
• My top five words are: lol, rt, good, hehe, haha. (I'm a happy fellow no?)
• My top five hashtags: #pakcricket, #t20, #xkcd, #internetbeatles, #stupidthingsido.
• I have tweeted exactly 2222 times in the month of July! :D

Complete stats can be viewed here

So I'm going to take a leaf from 'Ze Book of Dili' and not tag anyone... coz it's way too much work to do the whole thing (tweetstats, then wordle, then screenshot, then upload) but if you think your up to the challenge, then consider it an open tag... ;)

I will never love you more!

I like SoKo... something about her makes me want to... I dunno, it's complicated. She's cute!!! :D (and somehow reminds me of John Mayer! hmmph)

If you prefer the live video:

I will never love you more than the drummer of flaming lips
I will never love you more than Woody Allan movies
I will never love you more than the White album of the Beatles
I will never love you more than God only knows

I will never love you more than DVD's night with my girlfriend
And we talk about stupid things like feelings and men
I will never love you more than my boyfriend when I was 14
Even if he's now an asshole, I will never love you more

And you say, you love me more than everything
And compared to me everything is nothing...

I will never love you more than meeting Paul McCartney
And we asked him to play a song on my Ukulele
I will never love you more than Scandinavian Tour
Which was more than paradise we shall remember it too

I will never love you more than dancing to Phil Spector
I will never love you more than my Casiotone keyboard
I will never love you more than Daniel Johnston himself
For me he's more than God, I will never love you more

And you say, you love me more than everything
And compared to me everything is nothing

Ohh this is sweet, I just wonder what it means

You say you love me more, than all the girls you have before
Even more than music, even more than yourself
Even more than everything, but it's just a lie
So I will never love you more, than anything

I will never love you more than singing in the shower
I will never love you more than my Mac computer
I will never love you more than having a daughter
I will never love you more than peanut butter

I will never love you more than kisses all day
I will never love you more than cuddles all night
I will never love you more than kissing girls lips when they're really pretty

I will never love you more
I will never love you more

p.s. twitter should stop going down like this! curse the idiot behind these attacks! :@

Design Changes for Summer 2009

Yes, I have an exam tomorrow...

Yes, I missed the match last night! :( Daaaaayummm!!!

Yes, I've been spending way too much time combining BTemplates' 2 Plus and Floral Concept themes into the one you see right now...

Yes, I love the fact that red, white and blue have become the main colours in the blog... Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité! :)

Yes, I've managed to make myself a twitter blogroll of sorts! I dreamt that up in my sleep last night... :S If you're not on it, then prolly means your account is protected... sorry!

Yes, I'M A BAD BAD BOY! Going off to study now... :(

My two cents on social networking

The Whackster wrote about twitter some time back, and these past few days of twittering non-stop has made me appreciate why we fall in love, and out of love, with social networks. Does anyone remember the day you first joined Facebook? I do... It was at the school computer lab sometime in Mid-2007... a long long time before Facebook became popular with the average Sri Lankan school kid (and that explains why it wasn't blocked at school, unlike Hi5, the dominant social network among us at that time) and I remember just why I joined (yes, it involved a girl... duh! hehe) and I have been through a lot with Zuckerberg's contraption: 3 major design changes, the rise and takeover of applications, pokes, superpokes, walls and superwalls, threads, groups, photo tagging (something I had never seen before that, although I believe it had existed much earlier) and yes, the relationships and the breakups that took place on Facebook. And when I first heard about twitter, I was confused as to how a social network could grow based solely on 140-character updates and messages. Then Facebook changed it's design to mirror twitter, and I was furious that this had happened. The homepage became cluttered and all sorts of bull started appearing on it.

So it was with very low expectations that I joined twitter, and that too only to follow 'famous' people... Now, one month and 1057 updates later (mostly @ replies though), I have gone through making new friends, finding out stuff (did anyone else know about fingermonkeys?? I sure didn't!), analyzing Kottu bitchfights (that was fun!), sharing hugs and other 'moments', debating television shows, movies and music, being at the receiving end of quite a number of old 'Thomian jokes', and of course that one instance of getting caught twittering at a class! The sheer number of updates show how addictive twitter is, and it doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon! :D
So, all-in-all, If you were a guy who should be studying for his final exams happening in less than 5 weeks (!!!), I wouldn't never never never ever never ever never (even if I hated you!) suggest you join twitter! Don't!!! Seriously! :P

Edit: St. Fallen shared this video poking fun at twitter-culture with me, and I wanted to post it here