By Ruben(nerd) Schade, a UTS university student and IT guy in Sydney and Singapore. c.2004
So Twitter is in the process of buying TweetDeck as well as UberMedia and Echofon, at least from what the intertubes are saying. Is their intention to assimilate every Twitter-related company out there so they have no competition and can force Dickbars on all of us?
As long as their API remains somewhat open I suppose we have nothing to worry about for now, but their confusing messages about developers and now this leaves me a little nervous. And my name isn't even Dick.
One of the features of TweetDeck is the Recommends column which displays users the TweetDeck team deem worthy of following. Most of time its a fairly random mix of folks, but sometimes you get some unlikely pairings!
Today's example as you can see from the screenshot thingy: Jamie Cullum and Lady Gaga. They may as well have put Blue Eyes alongside Lily Allen, or Jim Kloss alongside Rick Dees!
Once the initial humour subsided, I realised something truly horrifying. While Lady Gaga has 3,857,131 followers, Jamie Cullum has a measly 42,232. For that matter Marian Call also only has 6,217.
There is clearly something gravely wrong with the world that is so shocking and terrifying I'm shocked and terrified, and also seemingly incapable of coming up with original thoughts instead of rehashing old descriptions. Shocked and terrified and all that.
jamliecullum: #cheltjazzfest is fantastic this year. Many varied & brilliant sounds and a great vibe all round. Had the maddest day - will tell all later
I am as madly obsessed with Jamie Cullum as a straight guy can be (uh oh, I'll be getting into trouble for that), he's one of the few current music scene acts I listen to obsessively. If you've never heard of him, for one thing shame on you, and secondly he's a young English singer/songwriter and one of those jazz pop fusion artists who refuses to make life easy for music classifiers. At last count he can also play a few thousand instruments, give or take.
I have nothing against Lady Gaga and I really admire her attitude in light of so many other female acts thesedays, but her music and I are like a salad dressing that's been left still for too long. And while she may be an awesome person, if followers are anything to go by she is not that much better than Jamie Cullum, or Marian Call.
Just saying. You were expecting me to say "just sayin'"?
Three random and entirely pointless error messages for your consideration.
The first, pictured above, is the eloquent Neal O'Carroll from the aaaaaaaah Into Your Head podcast letting people know his site hasn't gone off the deep end. I would never be caught making a grammar mistake or typo on my own site, and I'd certainly never instruct people to "click here" but then put the link somewhere else. Looking forward to that pie though, it's going to be schweet. Wonder if I can ask him to pick mine up from the Hairy Lemon?
The second error, pictured above, is Neal O'Carroll stalling my file transfer application. I thought his error message was overly cryptic and suspicious, and it turns out I was right. He clearly planted malware on the page so when I took a screenshot it attached itself to the file. It even survived processing and file conversion in The Gimp. He's a crafty one.
The second error, wait, third error, pictured above, is from TweetDeck while I'm using the public WiFi hotspot here. Don't panic!? That's easy enough for you to say, you're not addicted to Twitter through a Twitter client, you are the Twitter client! And who do you think you are, Douglas Adams?! Yeesh.
Ever since August 2008 when I made the switch, TweetDeck has been Twitter for me. For people following hundreds of fascinating people categorised into lists (formerly TweetDeck groups) there's absolutely no better ways to use it, even if it does run on Adobe Air. Problem is, no matter what Mac I'm using it always "remembers" those red dotted lines denoting bad spelling.
Perhaps it's just poking fun at the fact I make sppelling mistakes.
I've always thought the idea of the Mashable Open Web Awards was at best just a misnomer and silly, but this year I decided to give it a try. Most of the categories had nothing I wanted to vote for, and in the case of those that did I was incorrectly informed I had already voted for it! In protest, I'm creating this post.
Now that it supports Twitter Lists, I can keep track of tweets in multiple columns from different parts of the world even easier than I could before. It single handedly makes widescreen monitors (that are otherwise useless for programming) a useful thing to have!
I originally used it because Foursquare wasn't available in Singapore or Australia, but now I reckon it's superior anyway, especially since Leo and the gang on This Week in Google said they didn't like it :).
Not one of the options. Since Tweetie's disappointing interface downgrade in version 2, Birdfeed is now by far the most polished and easiest to use Twitter client for the iTelephone. Its fast, stable and supports multiple accounts.
The official news feed for the Special Broadcast Service in Australia. Covers news going on everywhere, not just White House car and gate crashing Tiger Woods. Honestly guys, I don't care about that stuff!
A follow up would be the Deutsche Welle feed at @dw_english.
In no particular order, Marian Call is brutally honest, down to earth, funny, charming, beautiful, talented, she loves Firefly and most important of all: she's awesomely friendly! Despite having thousands of followers and a schedule busier than... somebody with a really busy schedule, she'll almost always reply to tweets from her fans, including little old me!
There are two very close follow up folks in this category. First we have @NeilHumphreys.
Enough said! Better still, it means I can follow his antics and thoughts without having to go to his website that uses Flash which I don't have on most of my computers.
The other runner up is @AlexLindsay because his tweets are ridiculously interesting and honest, and like Neil he always replies to tweets I send him.
The microbrewary in Singapore who's Twitter account is run by a real person not a bot and that if you send messages to you get cheerful responses! I haven't had the chance to enter any of their competitions or quiz nights yet, but using Twitter to announce them is a fantastic idea.
For the first time in recent memory Twitter has actually gone ahead and released a new feature that for once isn't merely the destruction of a previous feature: so-called Twitter Lists. And I love them, even if they are mostly useless in their current form.
I've been using the Groups feature in the chocolate-sounding TweetDeck for a long time now to help me organise all the trillions of tweets I get every millisecond (or some fractional amount thereof) into geographic collections that make them easier to follow, so this Lists feature seemed to be the next logical step. I wonder if the TweetDeck team will create a group export or conversion feature?
I started creating some lists this morning with my typically longer-than-necessary names. I still need to create lists for people I'm a fan of (aka: will never follow me back!), as well as for friends in Europe, Canada and the US. Perhaps it could be "the-distant-friends?"
Part of the point of Twitter Lists is allowing others to see them and subscribe to them, so ideally you're supposed to make them interesting for other people. These lists would probably only be interesting to me, but it works :).
Of all the features Twitter could have rolled out, I think this one made a lot of sense. By having basic lists become such an integral part of the service it means no longer will we be tied to specific Twitter clients with our custom groups that in TweetDeck's case require separate login credentials. For example, I'm really looking forward to having lists in full screen glory in TweetDeck on my Mac, but because I prefer Birdfeed to TweetDeck on the iPhone I'm looking forward to one day having those same lists available on that too.
Two small things that worry me about this though: first, for a mildly obsessive compulsive person like myself who's addicted to tags and metadata (evidenced by my blog's tag archive) I can see this consuming so much of my life that I may slip into a void and never return. For example, those four lists above started as eight! Secondly, the same people who are so obsessed with the number of followers they have must now also artificually pump up and abuse a new popularity metric so they continue to be CoolTM.
It's the Rubenerd Blog's 2000th blog post, and what better way to celebrate than to show my current desktop background. Yup, on my MacBook Pro which is my primary workhorse I've given up on them because as I put in this tweet here:
I just realised something: I don't need a desktop background/wallpaper anymore because I never minimise TweetDeck! #Obsessive
It looks like I'm not the only one either. Who would have thought back in 2007 how much Twitter would become such an integral part of our lives?
Happy 2000 posts everybody! Not that I'm counting ;-).
UPDATE: As of 18:21 it's all good again. Stand down Red Alert!
Once again the fragility of my current primary means of communication has been highlighted by it's absence. In this case it's not Twitter that's down, it's my twitter client TweetDeck. All afternoon I haven't had a single friend tweet, reply, mention, search, group tweet or direct message come through.
I liked to think TweetDeck turned Twitter from a fun distraction into a CNN replacement; taking up my whole 1920x1200 screen I can see what's happening all around the planet with my friends and current events in near real time. I've used Twitterrific, Snitter and Twhirl but since jumping to TweetDeck nothing has come close to replacing it.
As of 17:55 Australian Central / 08:25 GMT TweetDeck is still refusing to download my columns, and even attempts to re-download the client software result in errors.
Time to give Seesmic Desktop another try?
This is the third time I've written this post! All I wanted to say is, if I tell people I'm an atheist and they say "they'll still pray for me", I find that to be a backhanded compliment at best, and condescending at worst. They might not mean it, but motive doesn't negate the result.
Since posting version one of this though I've learned religious people are allowed to offend atheists, scientists, biologists, doctors and geologists whom they passionately (or often tacitly) disagree with, but if we're offended and explain why as I did with my post, we're called out as being rude and intolerant, along with several strings of four letter words.
It's interesting that people can discuss their favourite music, author, politician and grilled cheese sandwich and discussions can occur, but if it's about faith there's an untouchable social taboo. Often being religious is enough; if most Christians meet a Hindu for example, they'll get along just fine. If a religious person meets an atheist (or agnostic, or another non-believer) though, it's automatically expected the atheist has to defend his or her position, and then to take insults without responding. It's downright weird.
There's also a popular analogy that "atheism is just another religion". Even if we weren't to assist in the suicide of this fatuous proposition (thank you Christopher Hitchens for that line!) and we played along, why is it unique amongst religions in that it's the only one that's allowed to be criticised? If the answer is because atheists reject religious teachings, don't different religions reject each others teachings too?
Given it was just recently the 4th of July in the United States, I'm reminded of that infamous passage in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Apparently though the next passage states that if you believe your creator was the beautiful and elegant universe which evolved in space and time, this does not apply. Good to know!
As I've said before, I don't think the world would be better without religion per se (I love cultural festivals for example!), I just want the ability to one day have honest and meaningful conversations about them. I suspect that day will come, but it won't be for a while. I'm guess I'm just sick of apologising!
The Twitter client episode!
Scaring people who think I'm a chick (ha!); late Friday night train journeys; nostalgia for 2007 Twitterland with Twitterrific; TwitterFon inserting advertisements; moving over to Tweetie on the iTelephone; obsessively using the huge but efficient TweetDeck; and the spectacular cost of mobile phone company text messages!
Download MP3 to listen 21:30 10.0MiB
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