Post Twitter Experiment
I recently mentioned I’d perform a small Twitter Experiment. It was certainly an interesting week to dive into Twitter. The Iran elections had just occurred. Searching for Iran was worthless due to non-Iranians tweeting support, but a friend mentioned an interesting person to follow (they were on the ground in Tehran) and I felt like I had front-row seats to a revolution.
Somehow @bodc followed me on Twitter after I wrote my first post, before I even tweeted. This was the one benefit of my experiment, as I am now aware of yet another oceanographic data center. Other than @bodc, I did not gain anything by tweeting my occasional work progress throughout the week, and nobody following me replied to anything so I don’t know if anybody else gained anything either. What I did learn is that the web interface is worthless, and if you want to use Twitter it helps to have the right software interface.
I hear TweetDeck and TWhirl are excellent interfaces but they are based on Adobe Air and I am morally opposed to using Adobe products when possible… which doesn’t leave much. If you know of a non-Air alternative to TweetDeck please let me know. It turns out TweetDeck does have a non-Air-based iPhone client which is the best Twitter interface I’ve found to date. TweetDeck allows me to follow just my friends in one pane, a search for the word “Antarctica” in another pane, two Tehran-based Iranians in a 3rd pane, etc. It turns the non-stop stream-of-consciousness that is Twitter into a manageable stream of data.
In conclusion, I’m still not sure what or why, but I can tell I’ll continue to follow it and contribute via it on occasion. And due to the wide software and access support it is still the easiest way I know of to send small bits of information onto the web where they can be consumed by others devices or humans.
July 13th, 2009 at 17:59
I have tried the Air Twitter clients, so know what you mean. Sorry, I’m not going to be very helpful here, but for a Mac there are some excellent apps like Tweetie, Nambu, Twitterrific and Twittia. Coupled with Growl notifications, Twitter is slick and a joy to use.
July 16th, 2009 at 16:00
I’ve taken to using TweetDeck for iPhone or website for output, and input via command line or website.
And I’m now using Twitter extensively as a data repository and communication tool, via @mankofffoo and @mankoffdata, and http://your.flowingdata.com/ to track lines of code, build processes, lines of thesis, temperatures, etc.