I’ve been having a few chats with people recently who are starting to dabble with Twitter – They get it great but now it has come to the point where I’m wondering how do I get them to think that it is not just a way of having a conversation.
It is a transport mechanism for carrying any sort of message – be that human conversation, computer messages, collating messages or sending messages.
How can I show the value of messages?
My good friend Mike Stenhouse created Out of five – a beautifully elegant way to capture reviews. You tweet in the name of the gig/film/book with a rating (out of five) and a short review.
@oo5 Coraline 4.0 simply wonderful
You have a record of what you’ve experienced with a date and a way of getting at that data later (through your own rss feed). Also a brilliant social aspect kicks in as the reviews are trasmitted through twitter so if you are following a person who reviews something – you see their review and could find a way into OO5 that way. Also all the reviews collated together and you start to see other peoples reviews of the things you like – You could follow those people as they could be your influencers if you share the same tastes.
Nathan from flowing data has been beta testing your flowing data for a little while and now it has launched. The mechanic to OO5 is very similar but it is more open in terms of what it records – In that you can record any metric – If you want to track your weight you just tweet -
d yfd weigh 160
Again all that data you send in can be extracted and the other benefit is that data visualisations can be generated straight from the site.
Amazingly Warp records is 20 years old – DJ Mink, Two Lone Swordsmen, LFO – some bloke called Aphex Twin and a whole lot of bleeps and donks later – they’ve decided to release an official Warp20 retrospective album, the definitive ‘Best of’ from the last 20 years.
Vote for your favourite Warp tracks on Warp20.net. The top 10 (by different artists) will be combined with those chosen by Warp co-founder Steve Beckett to make a 20 track album. On the site, you can leave personal memories and messages about your choices and the best will be printed in the album’s artwork. I’ve never seen Aphex Twin described as ‘if this was the theme to thee exotic shampoo ad id never tire watching it and im sure it would sell by the bucketload’
Each user has 50 votes in total, but you cannot vote for the same track twice. Voting will be closed on Friday 8th May.
Crowd sourcing sucks for crowd? Looks like PSFK can go tell Warp this is a rubbish idea – me – I think it’s marvellous.
‘The Physical Internet’ as a buzz phrase has been thrown about a fair bit recently and only really recently have I seen things start to get interesting. I really like the idea of making the internet tangible and a flipside to this is taking a real world interaction and broadcasting this onto the net. A few things have made this much more attainable ->
1) Twitter and other systems have opened up to let other systems interact through them via an API to send/retrieve data.
2) Electronics such as arduino or ioBridge have made the geeky electronics bit much easier.
3) Programming interfaces such as Processing or Openframeworks have made the geeky programming bit much easier.
Here is a little recap of some interesting/useful/useless/fun interfaces.
An ordinary office chair – you let out a little bottom burp and a twitter status gets updated. I kid you not. It actually uses a methane gas sensor and some amazing hacking skills to work.
Fed up with waiting around for your toast to be done – well now your toaster tweets when that bready goodness is ready. Poke London did a much higher tech version of this recently – Baker Tweet.
A baby growing and moving inside a mothers womb is a special experience that the father doesn’t have to miss out on – A sensor is hidden inside a rather stylish garment which is wrapped round the waist of the mother and every ‘kick’ by the baby is broadcast to twitter.
Want to know if aliens are invading the earth? Take one fire alarm – The New York Times API and a bit of hacking and you have your very own aliens detector. The system works by monitoring the New York Times and if 50% of the articles are about aliens then 85db of screeching alarm will alert you to the fact – totally ridiculous but genius all the same.
Putting an RFID on a cat flap is a great way to keep naughty neighbourhood cats from eating their way into your house as the flap only opens if your cat is at the door – but who not hook this upto a twitter feed so you can track the comings and goings of your feline friends.
I actually would love to extend this to put a GPS or RFID on a cat and track where it goes to on its prowl – I bet this would be surprising how far they go.
Twitter has a delete button right. It lets you delete those random/drunk/nasty/misspelled tweets forever. But are they really really deleted? Well the answer is yes and no. When a tweet gets published, it gets sent to the twitter servers and the twitter search severs. When a tweet is deleted, it only gets deleted on the twitter severs.
So yep, you’ve guessed correctly that by comparing the tweets on the twitter vs twitter search database you can retrieve deleted tweets.
A very clever chap called Tom Scott figured all of this out and created Tweleted to let you have an easy way to retrieve those deleted tweets.
