How NOT to Use Twitter

Stumbled across this today: it's a blog post describing 10 tools to "manage your followers" on Twitter--well you can see it for yourself (view on Google Sidewiki), however the practices and "tools" described there are exactly how you should NOT use Twitter. Ever.

Number one says "mass unfollow those who are not following you back"... why? Unless you're a bot, a spammer, or running a pyramid/gifting scam, you would never want advice like this. Twitter is about following the people that interest you. It's not a popularity contest (or at least people need to stop treating it like it is). Unfollowing because someone is not following back is just bullshit. Get over yourself if you do this. Furthermore, this only affects who you're following, not your followers. The post was supposed to be about managing your followers, right? Not who you're following so much, or so I thought.

Next, "automatically unfollow..." I'll stop there because, again: this post was supposed to be about who is following you...right?

Skip a couple of very obscure and iffy suggestions for tools and you come to "unfollow people who have not updated" ... well, again wasn't the title of this blog post something like "manage your followers"? By now, I'm not even sure anymore.

Next we come to "find out which tweet made you popular..." yeah, OK, that might be interesting information--if it's even accurate--but the site is in German! Not worth the trouble, sorry.

Then, we have "find out your retweet rank". I don't know, I'm not terribly concerned about how often I get retweeted. I mean, it's nice when my followers retweet something cool//funny/important I said, but even so my worth is not a measure of my retweetedness. If your self-esteem hinges on how often people are retweeting you, go see a therapist, because your "retweet rank" is the least of your problems. This is another one of those things that really only bots, spammers, and scammers would need to be this concerned about.

Which brings us to number 3--no, I mean 8. Wait, is this in here twice? "Find out who's following who"? I swear this blogger just recommended a tool that did the exact same thing for #3. The interesting part of this tool's mention, however, is where the author writes, "if you want to steal a power users 'precious friends', this tool comes in pretty handy". Come again? Steal a... wait, what is this blog post even about? I'm completely lost, now.

Well, moving on, I suppose... "find out common followers..." naw, don't care. Why would I need to know this? If they were a friend of mine, I'd be following them already. If they're not a friend, but turn out to be interesting, I'll find out about them through the friend we mutually share. I don't need a tool like this... unless I were a bot, a spamm--oh, you get the picture.

By the time we get to tool number 10, we don't even care anymore. So, to sum things up. If you want to be a bot, a spammer, or a pyramid scammer, you'll probably love this article. However, we learned exactly zilch about managing our followers. But wait, don't go just yet... There's a bonus 11th tool! Hey, wait! Where are you going!?...

in reference to: 10 Twitter tools to effectively manage your followers (view on Google Sidewiki)

My position on Twitter

I use Twitter to keep in touch with friends as well as share news and blog posts I found interesting. I recommend you go through my "following" list and add most of these users I follow.

I don't follow-back bots or spammers, and in fact I don't follow back regular humans who aren't that interesting to me. It's not my way of being snobbish or elitist or anything like that, I just don't want my twitter feed cluttered with useless garbage, forcing me to wade through it to find the stuff I really want to read/know about. If I follow you, it's because I think you have something to say worth hearing and/or I like you on a personal level. I check every user that follows me to see if they are saying something interesting and do not hesitate to follow those who are. I don't think this policy is selfish or elitist, I think it's just good sense and I recommend everyone on Twitter adopt a similar policy.

When I am just browsing Twitter (i.e. users I don't already follow), what I do is search for a topic I like and then go to the profile of users I found that had an interesting tweet on the subject, then I start browsing who they follow. You can usually find some curious oddities and occasionally people worth following.

in reference to: ch3mical fusi0n (ch3mi0n) on Twitter (view on Google Sidewiki)

Boxee is teh pwn. (My new HTPC setup)

I just set up a new Home Theater PC this weekend. I was actually just going to use XBMC, which is what I would normally use for just such a task, but I saw the link to "Boxee" on the xbmc.org website and curiosity got the better of me. I'm really glad I decided to check it out.

Let me back up a little bit, though. For the HTPC, I dusted off my old AMD machine (I believe it's an Athlon XP 1500+ 1333MHz), which has an old ATI All-in-Wonder 9600 Pro video card. It has, between its two internal HDDs, approximately 370GB of storage, which will mostly go unused since all of the data is stored on our file server or streamed from the internet. Since the ATI card doesn't support any HD outputs, I only have standard definition going for now. I guess that will be something for when I upgrade the HTPC, but for now it's fine as it is.

So I went with OpenGEU (Linux) for the base operating system, for no reason in particular, just on a whim. I figured on the rare occasion that I do switch out of the Boxee interface to use the standard GUI, it's a nice one to show off on my TV (OpenGEU uses Enlightenment DR17). Well I installed Boxee and had to play around with Xorg's display (resolution) settings and Boxee's own resolution settings for a while before I could get it displaying correctly on my TV. Apparently, and I think this may have something to do with the TV, I had to independently set the Xorg and Boxee resolutions in order for the display to fit the actual size of the TV's screen. Xorg is set to 800x600, while the Boxee settings are 640x480, yet the TV is displaying in 480i 16:9.

Moving on now to Boxee itself, as I said I have never used it for HTPC setups before. Normally, XBMC is my primary choice. Now, before you say it, Boxee is based on XBMC, but adds a whole lot of new functionality to it in the form of pluggable "applications", which are basically channels you can add or remove according to your tastes, thereby customizing your content completely (in addition to your personal collection of media files). These applications are essentially just RSS feeds that point Boxee to online content. These will serve up media content, not a typical text feed, such as videos, music, pictures. There is also support for services such as Last.fm and Pandora, as well as your Netflix and even podcasts. Boxee even connects you with your peeps via popular social networks like Twitter, FriendFeed, etc. Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, there is an app available for for iPhone/iPod Touch to allow you to remotely control your Boxee, no server-side setup required and the app also automatically finds your Boxee server. I just so happen to have an iPod Touch, so it now serves the purpose of being my Boxee remote. Awesome.

I'll stop rambling on now, but just keep this in mind: if you ever decide you want to set up a media server/home theater PC, check out Boxee (www.boxee.tv). It's available for other operating systems, though I haven't tested it on any other system, and honestly I don't know why you would want to run anything other than Linux for a server anyway.

Bringing AI to Twitter

So lately I have been thinking a bit about egg-fu; what direction I should go in or if I should even update the source at all. I had been thinking of different ways to implement egg-fu in today's cyberspace. The internet has changed, obviously, in a lot of ways since 8 years ago when the project first began, so I was pondering on ways to bring egg-fu back into the mainstream a bit. One possibility I thought of was porting egg-fu to Twitter. I figured (at least for the development instance of egg-fu) if I direct him to follow the right people he could emulate a certain amount of intelligence quite easily. Of course, I could have him learn from dumb people as well, if I wanted him to. It would not be hard at all to have egg-fu follow certain trending topics and give his unique input in the form of replies and quite possibly formulate his own original tweets based on the things he picks up from other twitterers. The difficult part though, which I was having trouble convincing myself wouldn't be too much work to make the whole thing worthwhile is the fact that I would have to deal with the Twitter API. I wasn't entirely convinced this was the best way to code a simulated-AI bot. I just had my doubts and this feeling that there had to be a better way to accomplish this. So I let the idea receed to the back of my thoughts for a while, to stew.

Then just the other day I was browsing through hundreds of apps in the Android Market, ever curious about what is out there, and I came across something that piqued my interest. I discovered the app LinkDroid, which uses webhooks to manage data. Here is a quote from the app's description:

"Webhooks (webhooks.org) are user defined callback URIs that receive HTTP Posts in response to user actions or system events. For example, LinkDroid (linkdroid.org) can post media, such as images, to defined Webhooks when users selects the Share With option. LinkDroid can also post broadcasted events (by Android, or other programs) to target Webhook (via a background service) as specified by registered IntentFilters."

What intrigued me was the touted ability to define these webhooks in this way, but I was ignorant of what webhooks were or what they really do. So I did the research and found out what I needed to know, but even more importantly I realized this was probably exactly what I was looking for to port egg-fu as a Twitter-enabled bot.

So what I'd do next would obviously be to start outlining and brainstorming on this idea. More to come.