tmoovie player is a free, downloadable, and redistributable player for use with Twitter.

 

commands:

• new <description>
• enter <user> x, y
• move <user> x, y
• walk <user> x, y
• talk <user> <text>
• point <user> <left/right> <angle>
• nopoint
• image <name> <URL> x, y
• clear

 

example:

• @tmoovie new quick presentation
• @tmoovie image bgimg http://i.imgur.com/H1wYL.jpg 0, 0
• @tmoovie enter biz 200, 200
• @tmoovie talk biz I was pretty awesome in the stoli commercial huh?

In Monday’s stunning announcement, Facebook announced the launch of
its unified messaging system. The new system will combine email and
instant messages into real-time correspondence between users. It
could have been the weather because even Robert Scoble didn’t seem to
be his usual techno-cheering self.

https://sites.google.com/site/tweetingthestories/home/the-great-technological...

USB Microscopes are a lot of fun. THE 8 SECOND RULE DOES NOT WORK!
You won't eat dropped food on the ground again, but there are a ton of
neat things that aren't visible to the naked eye. I spent about an
hour discovering cool patterns and textures in my artwork. Here are
some of the more interesting finds.

Unless you are new to Twitter, you’ve probably seen the bots. They usually appear to be relatively benign in nature. Humourous keyword retweeters (ie. Note-to-Self bot) are prolific and don’t appear to be selling much besides a few laughs.

 

Examples from Twitter:

vielmetti note to self: twitter needs a "note to self" function. 10/27/2010 http://twitter.com/vielmetti/statuses/28948165578 via: from:vielmetti

jwschultz @vielmetti Did you get a reply from the NoteToSelf bot after this tweet? I got one once but didn't know what to do with it. 10/28/2010 http://twitter.com/jwschultz/statuses/28957023140 via: to:vielmetti

 

The SPAM-bot accounts would make me feel embarrassed for the owners if they really were that pathetic. Bots typically follow an account driving up follower numbers for the host. As such they provide a marginal perceived benefit for many brands and society’s most vulnerable. In a world where almost everything is measured and compared using numbers, the perceived advantage to a higher follower count includes: larger distribution size, traffic, influence, and potential sales.

 

 

If bots strategically unfollow your account in order to manipulate your messages would you be cognizant of this scheme? Yes, YOU probably would. But for the most vulnerable users, they probably would not. This is the basic followers count vulnerability in a nutshell. While it may be only one of many manipulative strategies, it’s particularly deviant for its subtlety.

The following post presents a healthy approach to defending against follower’s count vulnerability: http://www.attentionmax.com/blog/2010/08/twitter-follower-count.php

 

UPDATES:

A twitter bot that attempts to influence climate change deniers uses an explicit conversational method of influence.  Specifically it appears to generate responses with links to web pages that provide data or debunk myths.

http://twitter.com/AI_AGW

 

The major technology blogs liberally use tweets to add a personal touch to stories.  Most of the time, it’s something that the source is happy to have included.  Sometimes though, if the title includes words like “public meltdown” or “twitterfail”, the tweet reference(s) may be hurting the feelings of the source.   Most people do understand that twitter is almost entirely public conversation.  As such, there should also be the understanding that these messages can be used in blogs, analysis, marketing, and maybe even dissertations. 

One really gray area, however, is the retweeting of a private tweet on a public account.  The source is thinking it’s like a conversation in a private party, but by retweeting it on a public account, it then becomes world stage material. World. Stage. Material.

UPDATE: For Twitter's official retweet mechanism (not manual retweets), private accounts do not have a retweet link.  This is a technical fix that can be circumvented by Old Retweet, Via, H/T etc...

 

What are people saying about this on Twitter?

 

Question for people writing their dissertations on Twitter: what are the ethical ramifications of tracking people w/o their knowledge? @carlacasilli | http://twitter.com/carlacasilli/statuses/28660677735

@carlacasilli Seems as if passively observing people in public (which includes Twitter) doesn't raise ethical Q's prima facie. Just MHO. @Editer | http://twitter.com/Editer/statuses/28662398770

I'm wondering if people would feel weird about directed tweets (those starting with @username) being sourced in blog posts? #info #nuggets @mikeweaver | http://twitter.com/mikeweaver/statuses/27948842467

UPDATES:

A new Twitter TOS change reported on TechCrunch could change blogging about Tweets:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/29/twitter-logo-rules/ 

 

Not a new policy change according to a Twitter employee:

sg True or false: Twitter issued "new" trademark guidelines on Friday? False. Made slight updates. Meat is a year old: http://bit.ly/d7Tj5H 11/01/2010 http://twitter.com/sg/statuses/29386643390 via: from:sg

 

sg Twitter is not going to bury a supposed major policy change in a post about a logo and button update. C'mon. 11/01/2010 http://twitter.com/sg/statuses/29387048063 via: from:sg

Hypothesis:

The "Taste Making" meme has approximately 6 months to operate in startups not in the beverage or food niche.

Methodology:

First approach was to study the Google Instant Auto-completions for "Taste " and proceed with sentiment analysis.  Sentiments were uncertain and biased by geographic signals.  Second approach was to study a set of random tweets containing "Taste" and compute general sentiment of the Tweets.

Results:

Of the 15 tweets examined:

Set 1 (5): 4 negative*, 1 nuetral

Set 2 (5): 3 negative, 1 nuetral, 1 positive

Set 3 (5): 2 negative, 2 nuetral, 1 positive

*Sexual/Lewd references were considered negative sentiment from the perspective of general audience for a startup's messaging.

Conclusion:

It does appear that for many people the daily associations of the word "taste" appears to be biased towards a negative conotation.  While this study does not factor  apriori sentiment over all tweets, it does seem significant. 

60% Negative

27% Nuetral

13% Positive

 

 

 

This post is the first in a series addressing memetic growth and boosting personal defenses online.  I hope to cover "followers count" vulnerability,  methods of subconscious idea transfer, and subliminal marketing techniques.  To begin with though, I present a simple reworking of the classic subliminal stimuli advertising for presenting a correlation between sugary sodapop and diabetes in a PSA format (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_messages).

 

Above threshold, followed by a more subtle version, and finally a near threshold version.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the biggest challenges in extracting long-term value from all the wonderful knowledge shared on Twitter each day is search.  For technical and other reasons, Twitter has chosen to limit the search history on the vast stream of tweets uploaded to the service each day.  Many of the tweets are of an extremely timely nature.  Much of the value of these "now tweets" does get extracted and processed within a 7-day search limit.  Tweets of long-term utility though do get lost after that point.  For example @carlacasilli's excellent post:

The battle between personal algorithms and social software

is no longer found on twitter search.  The tweet referencing the article can still be found on Google results with the "updates" view http://twitter.com/carlacasilli/status/26773289815.  This is a counterintuitive concept for many users.  When attempting to recall this tweet, a user would naturally associate the memory recall with Twitter where the data was actually observed and not on a different site such as Google.  But as a real-time information sharing network (as @ev emphasizes), culling old tweets from search reduces clutter from this week's focus. 

 

The Dawn of Personal Reference Engines

Searches for tweets on archival services generally fail to take into account areas of expertise.  Many follow specific academics, researchers, scientists, and experts they trust.  Over time, the expert has proven to be a realiable resource along with perhaps some endearing eccentricities.   It would be great to be able to distill this expertise and make it available to others as well.  Embedded next is a crude, hideous, and data sparse prototype of the concept.  

A search query is switched via a personal expertise algorithm and directed to archival search results (as shown here) or answered in a more complex manner (future).

 

 

My research involved sampling the 512 users that I am currently
following (Oct 18, 2010). For each of these accounts the number of
"friends" (the set of accounts followed who also follow back) was
calculated. Finally the mean and median was computed. The median
came to 287. The mean was 4,307. 

In conclusion, Dunbar and Gladwell numbers don't appear to scale well with current social and information exchange networks.

 

References:

 

* Guardian article (2009) reporting that the "average" user
has 126 followers: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jun/29/twitter-users-average-a...

* Dunbar number observations and the author's preference for mutual following http://tickerr.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/social-nets-and-dunbars-number/

 

Disclaimer:

The problem with all Twitter statistics is that people use Twitter accounts
differently. Many celebrities, automated accounts(bots), and
marketers follow zero accounts. Others follow as many accounts as the
tools they use allow them to follow. The incoming stream is largely
ignored in these situations and the account primarily is used for
broadcast purposes. For others though, the incoming stream is more
useful and broadcasting may play no role in their Twitter usage.

Sarcasm and other semantic spin modifiers often obscure the intended sentiment of the author in a text message.  Especially across those weak ties and cultural boundaries!  Emotional indicators and gestures can help bridge these cultural misunderstandings. 

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Assume the woman shown in the following article is from a culture you are unfamiliar with.  Now imagine what ideas she might be tweeting in each of the 6 different instances >>> Emotions and faces  <<<

YOUR RESULTS? Do you think there is value in a dynamic profile image?  If so, would you want to explicitly associate an image with every tweet?  My personal preference is to be able to set up filters that automatically display the right image based on syntax in the tweet.  For example, if my tweet contains ":)" display the happy photograph.  If my tweet contains "#coffee", cue the funny coffee photo.  And so on...

UPDATES:

One of the great values of twitter profile pics over forums and chatrooms of the past is the ability to use the images as visual markers to enquicken the processing of tweets.  With multi-modal pics, this efficiency is reduced (until common modes are memorized).  Great related tweet from Carla Casilli:

 

@AndreaKuszewski I do use them as visual markers myself, and have a hard time "finding the face in the crowd" when they change. Still, fun! @carlacasilli | http://twitter.com/carlacasilli/statuses/28864481941