Posts tagged with twitter

Tools for Spreading the Word

I’m talking about the buttons that read ‘save to delicious’ or ‘digg this’ or ‘stumble this’

People who don’t frequently tweet or save to delicious won’t start because of a huge button on your website. The ones that do, already have their own tools and MO for doing so.

The services that don’t provide cool bookmarklets or API’s or tools are the ones that benefit from those buttons. People appreciate the time saved, but are those services really worth the real estate their buttons take up? I mean, have you ever used Fark?

Why not make your site cleaner? Those buttons are almost always hideous, save for some very few, but very cool, designs. Plus, they steal attention from your own call to action buttons. Like ‘comment’ or ‘buy’

People who don’t use twitter or facebook or digg or delicious or what have you are simply nauseated by the constant ‘Tweet This’ call out they see on sites. Wouldn’t you be?

Posted on the 4th of December, 2009 | Feeling Smart? Comment!

#lunilazece2012

So, we’re having a movie night. Monday night, at ten. We’ll be seeing 2012 at Cinema City( Iulius Mall )

I’ve booked 14 19 20 seats for the show, but there is room for anyone who wants to come. People that have RSVP`d so far:

Me +1, obviously
Jimmy +5(!)
Dora + crinutza
Raka +1
Adi Eblog
Clawd
Camytzi
Nebuloasa + Raul
Richie
Dan
UOvidiu +1
Ovi Sîrb + Corina
Anda +1(ily)
Paul +1(Dani)

Edit: made additional 5 seat reservation.

Edit: we’re now 20 on 19 seats. I’ve already made three reservations… anyone else?

You can RSVP here, by commenting, or via twitter, using the #lunilazece2012 hash tag. Edit: we’re already overbooked!

Edit: Jimmy decided to go with his own gang some other time. Sorry about the mess.

We’re meeting at CinemaCity at 21:20

Well, thank you, one and all, for coming.

Posted on the 12th of November, 2009 | 17 Brilliant Comments

How Software Gets Done

Today, we saw the release of the PocketFox logo. We’re all anxiously waiting for this mobile version of Firefox. We’ve actually been waiting too long. And that’s a problem.

It seems to be taking forever. This means that the developers are busy polishing the product, getting it up to 99%. It will probably be released then, almost bug-free. But what are we to do in the meantime? Ever heard of Release Early, Release Often? The sooner you get your product out to the masses, the sooner it’s used, the sooner you get feedback on it, the sooner you can focus on the 20% of the functionality that will please 80% of the users.

Worse is better, kinda like less is more, is a model that holds in this fast changing world. We are already used to bugs, aren’t we? We don’t care. We just want those nifty features. That’s why Opera has taken the browser market by storm. They’re pushing Beta’s to users. And we love it because we get to play with the new toys, not to mention have a say in the final product through our feedback.

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When you’re taking forever planning the perfect first kiss, you’re missing the point. The point is that it’s supposed to be a kiss that you’ll enjoy. It does not have to be one to tell you grandkids about. You’ll have plenty of other stories to tell them.

In life, like in software, too much planning and polishing hurts. It’s quite rare that someone discovers a gem of an idea, spends years turning it into reality and being a total hit.

The things we use most today, all started as rough products, that were then blessed by progressive improvement. Twitter, facebook, youtube, yahoo, gmail, telephones, TV, pens, paper, houses, clothes.

It’s through progressive improvement that relationships will grow. The first step is to plant a seed, take some action, make a choice!

The rest will follow.

Posted on the 9th of November, 2009 | 2 Coarse Comments

The Beauty of Typing More

Well, that’s all gone to shit.

After reading Atwood’s tweet: “even Hungarians are not using hungarian notation any more.”[sic] — I got to thinking.
People have stopped writing properly.

I know what Hungarian Notation is, sillies. And I know it’s has nothing to do with grammar or spelling things right. But then, few things today have to do with proper spelling. And I’m not talking about English, either. I’m talking about mother tongues. The beautiful ones, with funny letters and groovy sounds.

Languages will tildes,breves, carons, cedillas, circles and other diacritics. Those are the ones I’m talking about. They’re not dying. Their writing is.
The process itself is called Romanization. It basically means that you can only use the letters found on standard qwerty keyboards plus a few French-ish letters.

The Romanians have long adopted this trend. Now, most of our online writing would sound funny if read out loud and with no interpretation. The Hungarians too have fallen to this group. It’s understandable, since their letters are damn funny and tough to type. The Dutch, too. Their cosmopolitanism is what caused that stroked out o to vanish from the online. And the French? Well, they’ve been eager to leave all those damn accents behind since the day they were forced to start using them.

The Ruskies, zhe Germans, the Norse and the Asians have yet to be Romanized. And that’s good!
It makes inter-cultural communication a bitch, but it’s well worth it. People will have to study, translators will be hired, eyes will be pleased. That’s what the Japanese say when they’re asked why they don’t switch to the Latin charset: ‘Ours is so damn prettier!’

Granted, adding the special letters is cumbersome, at best. And sometimes, the wrong letters are added. Sometimes we’re just too lazy to switch between keyboard layouts. Sometimes, money gets printed with the wrong diacritics because of bad character support on Macs. Some bastards will write in English because they just feel like it.

Whatever our excuse is, it stands. But we’re still on a very slippery slope.

And yeah, Jeff Atwood’s twitter account is @codinghorror. A must-follow for any developer.

Posted on the 30th of September, 2009 | 6 Smart Comments

Twitter versus Yahoo!

When I switched from IRC to Yahoo!, the one thing that was most annoying was how intrusive IM windows became.
You’d be minding your own business and then, suddenly, the center of your screen was covered by a chat window saying ‘Hi’. Well, I eventually got used to that.

Then came the Age of Mass. Skillfully tailored mass messages, made out to look like they’ve been meant only for you. And then, people just got lazy and started blurbing out all the inanities they could come up with. All ending in ‘sorry for the mass’. It was a dark age for communication.

Then twitter came along.
All the messages were mass messages, they were meant to be mass messages. You knew that upfront. The one monumental advantage? you could check your mass messages whenever you felt like it. I don’t know about you, but I like most things to be unobtrusive.

Also, twitter has reduced the number of chain-mail messages I receive. It’s way easier to drop a bit.ly link into a tweet.
So, even though twitter still annoys a lot of people, it has brought some good into this world. Whether you realize it or not.

Now, when I get a mass message, I don’t mind anymore because a warm feeling of nostalgia sets in.

Posted on the 26th of September, 2009 | 4 Exquisite Comments

Twitter Tools and Rules? Come on!

I’ve seen a lot of rules on how to use twitter recently.

I though I’d join in. The problem is, I don’t see how I’d have the authority to tell you how or whether to use twitter.
But I do have one guideline I’m quite fond of:

Follow a person because you like what they say, not because you like or know them. Use Facebook for that.

Or better yet, try using a good ol’ fashioned beer and chat-about.
Seriously, twitter is a great toy, but toys don’t come with a web of rules. Twitter is a great tool, but tools come with instructions on how to make them work for you, not the other way around.

So, if you’re already using twitter, you’re doing it right. And if you’re not, your social life is probably more animated than mine.

Posted on the 14th of July, 2009 | 4 Arrogant Comments

The Power of Twitter

If you don’t know what twitter is by now, you should. And here’s my profile: @hdragomir.

What surprisingly many twitter-ers don’t know about is search.twitter.com. Imagine being able to know what the internet-broken world is thinking, saying, sharing, on any topic, in real time. It’s not just about the links, and their indexing — it’s about everything. Think about the twitter revolution, or the #SaveJon campaign.

Google needs some time to crawl pages, index them, calculate their rank and even after that, older results may still be ranked higher — so you’re not to trust google.com for insight into what’s hot now.
twitter search is like a realtime google.
What’s also notable is that twitter search isn’t competing, shouldn’t and most probably won’t compete with google for searching. For searching the web, google is king and will be for a very long time. Twitter is doing something else.

My wet dream about this has to do with localization. Imagine searching twitter for a phrase and having the option for it to return only results from your area. Imagine how fast information would travel then, and the ease with which you can find it. It’s totally possible, even right now.

When you tweet, twitter can access your browser’s geolocation API and see where you are. Some browsers support this out of the box, like Firefox and Opera, many new cell phones come equipped with GPS and, for the rest of the people, twitter could use an IP to location service — plenty of them available. If this happens, twitter will know where you are when you tweet and when you search. I’m pretty sure twitter can put two and two together for the rest.

Of course, this idea will never fly because some people are too concerned with their privacy. But maybe twitter could add an opt-out for this feature.

Like I said, it’s just a wet dream.

Posted on the 7th of May, 2009 | 3 Sexy Comments

n00b versus hax0r

Some weeks ago, Twitter was hacked.

Some prick thought he was cool and launched a dictionary attack on Twitter’s login page. He managed to brute force his way into the admin account. Prick!

I’m not calling him a prick because he hacked a site or because he broke hacker ethics. I’m calling him a prick because he had access to all twitter accounts, chose to tweet in Obama’s name, could write anything he wanted, and all he could come up with was: ‘get your free gas coupon’
You pimple-faced, sixteen-year-old, stupid prick!

Now, I just read a nice article whose title read: DDoS attack boots Kyrgyzstan from net. Here’s the article:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/28/kyrgyzstan_knocked_offline/

In short, some Russians were bored and decided to take!a!whole!country!off!the!internet!
You hear that, prick?

Posted on the 29th of January, 2009 | Comments Off