tech ronin

Added my Twitter feed here in the side bar

Hi folks. I just added my Twitter feed (the feed will always show my latest 5 posts) to the sidebar near the top of my page. For the most part, these are my 1-liner ideas as they occur to me. Some of ideas the I post on twitter may later appear in a blog post where I have plenty of room to do them justice.

One of the things that stops me from doing some blog posts is that the idea is either too short or too involved. Now I have a place to put my quick insights, opinions and finds.

Lately, I've been surfing the social web. These are the sites that take advantage of exciting social web and web 2.0 concepts like friends, groups, ratings and comments. The top one at the moment is Twitter. I like following the thoughts of smart and interesting people who are interested in some of the same things I am.

If you are going to use Twitter as an information source, all you need to do is find people whose thoughts and discoveries you want to follow. A good way to do that is to use TweetScan or Summize to find people who are engaged with some of the things you are.

If you just bought an iPhone, you'll probably want to search for the word iPhone. That sort of thing.

Oh, you'll want to get yourself a free Twitter account, of course.

The second thing you can do with a Twitter account is to post your own thoughts and discoveries in 140 character blurbs. You can include URLs by typing or pasting them in.

You'll want a Twitter client if you get more serious about it just because then you have a more powerful tool at your disposal. I'm using and enjoying Twhirl on my Mac these days.

As far as what to post, the rule that unless you are only trying to communicate with close friends, don't post about the mundane things you are doing, is a good one. If you are going to watch or finished watching a movie and can add some interesting comment about it that's good. You can really post whatever you want. Maybe just type something in for now.

Later on, if you enjoy writing to an audience, you'll be thinking of them when you write and that will guide what to post. If you use Twitter professionally or want to build up your blog readership, this could start feeling like work. That's OK in those contexts, but otherwise, have fun with what you want to do and if something seems like a good share, share it.

This really wasn't meant to be an introduction to Twitter, but I wanted to explain what the Twitter posts are doing on my blog page and while writing, thought of a few tips for those of you who are interested in what Twitter is all about.

TweetClouds for Twitter are here

The more I use Twitter as a microblogging tool, the more I want features that I've come to take for granted in the blogging realm. One of those is tag clouds. TweetClouds to the rescue.

If you use Twitter as a microblogging platform rather than a shared virtual space among close friends, you might want your own tweet cloud.

Just go over to tweetclouds.com and enter your twitter account name and press go. As you can see above, it took 111 seconds to calculate my cloud. That's how long it took with 150 tweets to process. Tweetclouds have taken off in the Twittersphere this week so going is a little slow if you have a lot of tweets. But, how cool?

After it is done, you see your tweetcloud and get your own page and URL. Here's the tokerud cloud URL.

The next step from my point of view is to have links in each of those cloud words so I/you can click on a word and see the tweets. I'm thinking everyone on Twitter needs a dynamic cloud that is connected to search.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter is above all fun. But, part of using Twitter as an information aggregation tool is building a good list of people to follow.

I am following about 100 people right now. I spend a bit of time each day browsing for new people to follow. These tweet clouds would be a boon to this endeavor.

If every tweeter had his or her own searchable cloud, I could tweetscan for people based on my interests and some resourceful twitter developer could match my cloud to other tweeters' clouds and give me friend recommendations. Wouldn't that be fun?

Can Twitter Replace IM on the iPod touch?

Ever since I got my iPod touch during the holidays, I've been websurfing and tweetsurfing to learn about it. By the way, tweetsurfing is done by using Terraminds' free twitter search engine. At least, that's what I have been using quite happily.

One common complaint about the stock iPod touch is that it doesn't have an IM client built in. The iPhone also doesn't have an IM client but at least it has SMS as a substitute.

I have an iPhone and an iPod touch and I carry both around with me whenever I leave the house and most times in the house. So, I always have the SMS client of the iPhone. But, I also have twitter which I check regularly.

Maybe twitter can serve as a more generic, web-based way to stay in touch (no pun intended). I do think if you have an iPod touch, some kind of web-based IM or Twitter client would be essential. Of course, since everyone has a cell phone and a lot of people use SMS on whatever cell phone they have, I guess my iPod touch pals are covered there.

Now that you can make a webclip button for your favorite twitter client, you are set there.

One last issue is connectivity. Unfortunately the touch doesn't have Bluetooth so you can't get connectivity from your cell phone. That sucks and of course is almost certainly due to the demands of AT&T to keep the that sort of functionality for the iPhone only. Of course, too the iPhone's Bluetooth is crippled.

All this leads me to mention my hopes that somehow we can (1) be freed from the cellular provider obstruction of free wireless access or (2) we can get a lot more wi-fi hotspots out there. I have to believe the cell providers have killed the wi-fi proliferation that we used to see.

Finally, I can't get a decent AT&T signal in my new condo in Tiburon. Why oh why can't I talk on the phone using wi-fi in my house? I am very encouraged to see that T-Mobile is offering just that now with some phones like the BlackBerry Curve.

Update Jan 31: I am using wi-fi to make any calls outside my local calling area when I can with Skype. To clarify, I want the wi-fi in my iPhone to be able to use wi-fi to fill in when my EDGE voice quality drops. I believe that is what T-Mobile is starting to offer.