Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.
Not to scare you away from WordPress, but… I got 13 spam comments in the last 12 hours after my install (moderated and hidden for now, but still clogging up my inbox with notifications). Looks like it’s already time to check out anti-spam hacks. That was quick.
Meanwhile, I want to direct you to danah boyd’s analysis of Twitter, the source of those “web pings” at the top of my blog. A related topic? Yes. Twitter, to some, equals opt-in spam, and there’s some debate among tech geeks over whether it will survive the test of real social communities after the novelty has worn off.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Let me back up. Twitter is a new publishing platform that merges blogs with IMs with text messages. Basically, you can post as much you want (supposedly about “what you’re doing”), but each post has to be less than 160 characters. Why 160 characters? Because that’s the limit on most cell phones’ SMS text messages. So yes, you can do this from your phone. And you can receive your friends posts as text messages on your phone. And if you get a lot of friends who like to post a lot, that’s a lot of text messages.
Cell phone companies love Twitter. And speaking of which, I’m over my max of 500 this month thanktwitterverymuch, and need to increase my plan to unlimited text messages.
Twitter got a lot of action at SXSW. It was really an ideal machine for solifying quick hallway connections and keeping in touch about which panels/parties/dinner joints were worth the time it took to get to them. But now, away from SXSW, it has a different purpose. It’s more like listening in on acquaintances with myspace or livejournal, but with a louder megaphone.
danah pointed out some key gripes with Twitter, and I want to respond with my wishlist for feature changes:
- Multiple levels of filtering for outgoing tweets, a la livejournal (uses of this could include: topic of interest, geographic location, personal closeness).
- Multiple levels of filtering for incoming tweets.
- The ability to mark an outgoing tweet as important versus regular (with an exclamation point before the post, perhaps?), and the ability for tweet recipients to decide if they want those categories filtered differently.
- An alternative to Twitterific that allow for full 160 character display and respects the “leave” command.
So far, I like Twitter, and my appreciation for it actually has less to do with the network than with the medium. I’m using it to augment this blog with more frequent, current, and pithy thoughts. And it makes me pretty happy that I can do it from my cell phone.