February 5, 2008 at 11:24 am · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Politics
Somebody with more programming chops and time than I have needs to create a real time twitter voting tracker!
Bryan Person smartly set up a ivoted twitter account. You don’t have to add him just twitter @ivoted (adding who you voted for is optional) and he’ll get the replies. Sadly he didn’t take it that one extra genius step and create a graphing tracker.
Ideally this graphing tracker would show @ivoted replies (and maybe “I voted” search totals) charted by time and with candidate totals for ivoted posts that mention a candidate.
Until some code monkey warrior takes up this challenge, you can watch the replies yourself in real time using a tweetscan search for ivoted or a tweetscan search for “i voted”.
Also Bryan has mentioned that he will publish the results on his blog, The Bryper Blog.
p.s. I also highly recommend Politweets, the well designed political twitter aggregator.
p.p.s. You can follow the actual results along with watch twitter feeds via the Google Super Tuesday Map or add the election results gadget to your blog, or read up on the news at Google’s Elections section. (tip thanks to Laughing Squid)
August 24, 2007 at 12:46 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Blogging about blogging
SFSlim has been sending tweets (aka twitter posts) from Black Rock City. Proving that the playa isn’t as remote as it once was. As more people and their wifi devices start arriving, there will probably be more tweets coming from the people’s dusty tents.
As Laughing Squid recently reported, there is now a Twitter Burner group. In order to post to the group you need to first follow the group and then just write a tweet like normal but add BURN to the start of your tweet. It will then automatically be added as a Burner Twitter (be patient it might take a couple minutes to appear).
Now what makes this kinda cool is that Twitter doesn’t have group functionality. This is all done with php/sql wizardry thanks to Kosso and Raines. Kosso worked out this TwitterGroups hack for Gnomedex and wrote up how he did it in a post on his blog: How I created a TwitterGroup for Gnomedex.
The only flaw I see in this technique is the potential for a massive flood of Burner tweets completely drowning my friend’s tweets. It would be better if Twitter had built in group functionality that you could keep separate from your friend’s posts. However, this hack works and is pretty cool. My thanks and geek respect go out to Kosso and Raines for whipping this up.
On Edit: I’m less liking the twitter group in practice. Whenever your friends post to it you see their post twice (once normal and once reposted to Burner twitter). It just adds clutter and kinda ruins the simplicity that makes twitter great. Real Twitter groups would be great but this hack is not it.
August 23, 2007 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
- dead simple and so easy you’ll barely know you’re using it (which is what really makes it work)
- a constant stream of banal life snippets of the world in 140 characters or less
- shouting out to no one and everyone with little expectation that anyone will read it or care
- a digital location-less replacement for the the social awareness of the village*
* In the village, you always knew
…that Agnes always went to the grocery store at noon on Sunday, and Old Fred’s hanging out at the tavern later than usual lately. In our messy chaos of busy urban life, we only run into most of our friends every week or so. We try to catch up but usually we only remember to mention the big things — not the little banal things which also make us who we are. As result, there’s something missing in our interactions, and we end up lacking that ambient social awareness that helps bring people together.
Not everyone “Get’s it”
While not perfect, Twitter somehow fills this gap in social awareness. You don’t feel it right away, which is why some people try it out for a week or so and then stop saying “I don’t get it!?!” However after a couple weeks of gleaning the stream of your friend’s twitters, you start to feel it. There it is out of the corner of you vision — you somehow feel closer to those people even though it’s hard to put your finger on why. And the next time you see them, the tension of “catching up” is softened.
What about LiveJournal?
For some LiveJournal works in this manner, but LJ is also as the name implies a journal, and it too often becomes a forum for melancholy narcissistic griping and the ubiquitous replies of *hugs* and commiseration. Not to mention, the flood of inane LJ memes (what CareBear are you?) which are a poor substitute for social bonding. It’s hard to really pour your heart out in 140 characters or less, and this limitation grants Twitter to fill a different role.
Floating In My Twitter Stream
I have to say that Twitter is more relevant when mobile (via sms or mobile browser; my iPhone is great for it), but it still fills it’s purpose on normal computer. I check my twitter stream every now and then and see my friends and my family (yes my parents have jumped on twitter and it’s fabulous). I also follow a couple other bloggers and people I find interesting or funny like Othar who writes what can only be described as Twitter fantasy fiction. With only the simplest perusing, I have a slightly stronger connection with all of their lives.
Links:
March 22, 2007 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
Lots of things on my plate right now. So I figured I’d go on the hunt again for a good todo/productivity web app. I’d love to just use the awesome omnioutliner, but living on two laptops one mac the other pc makes this rather impossible.
There are a lot of solutions, most using some form of the GTD approach. Many of them are overcomplicated or nonintuitive (like most of the tiddlywiki based solutions). Call me silly, but I think entering items into your to do list should take less effort than the task itself. I’m not going to review all the ones I tried out cause it’s a waste of time. If you want you can do your own research by reviewing all my productivity tagged del.icio.us links or you can review Lifehacker’s excellent list.
The one I finally settled on is Todoist because it’s clean and simple with nested todo hierarchy functionality, and it makes good use of keyboard shortcuts. I’d say more about it but that would be hypocritical since I’m talking about efficient use of time.
Speaking of clean and simple but in a dumb way, today I joined up on Twitter as Catcubed. It’s like nano-bloging/IMing about nothing but you’re saying it to no one and everyone at the same time. If you combine it with IMified your setup to easily shout out your boring life to the world in two seconds flat. And for you wordpress geeks there are a couple good plugins (twitter tools, twitter updater).
As a voyour, Twitter is the shortest way to waste the most amount of time in the world—especially if you stare dumbly at the twitter/googlemaps mashup twittervision. Check it out! You to can read that pdimeglio“Skipeed class today, feeling better. Now watching daily show” or that fast640kdsl is “Going to bed.” Worldwide blipverts from peoples boring lives in realtime!
p.s. Twitter’s servers are getting smacked hard at the moment due to it’s popularity, so their page loads may be a bit slow.
