Showing posts with label identica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label identica. Show all posts

31 August 2011

Welcome to Moody's Microblog Daily Digest

I joined Twitter on 1st January 2010 as an experiment. I wanted to see whether this trendy thing had any real merit, or was simply the latest fad that would come and go. I was was soon disabused of my prejudices about it being just for posting about what you had eaten for breakfast. Indeed, I discovered that the presence or absence of such culinary info was a very quick way of deciding whether someone should be unfollowed or not.

I was particularly impressed at the many different ways that people used Twitter. For some, it was truly an online diary, recording what they did, often in exhaustive (and exhausting) detail. For others, it was a way of passing on news far faster than traditional outlets. And for some it was evidently a real microblog – a way of publishing extremely short piece of information with optional comments.

This turned out to be the way that I felt Twitter was most useful, and my own use soon conformed to this model. I realised that it solved a problem with blogging that I had been wrestling with for a while. I frequently came across stories that warranted passing on, but which looked decidedly thin when posted to one of my blogs. What I wanted was a quick way of saying: “hey, take a look at this – it's good/bad/stupid/funny/horrible” without needing to come up with anything more detailed in terms of analysis. What I wanted, it turned out, was Twitter.

As my followers there (and later on identi.ca and Google+) will know, I soon lost control completely, and started posting dozens of microblog posts a day. Indeed, I have had several people unfollow me because they say I post too many interesting links, which stops them working....

But for all that I feel my microblogs work well on their own terms, there is one huge problem. I have apparently posted some 43,000 of them in the last 20 months (really? How posts fly by when you're having fun...). Quite a few of them have useful information that I like to refer to. But it is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter's search function is pretty useless. Even though I have supplemented this with bit.ly, which has its own search feature, it frequently happens that I can't find that super important link I posted a few months ago.

This is not just frustrating, it is becoming a serious problem. It means that the not inconsiderable effort that I put into choosing my links and commenting on them is effectively going down the digital drain.

So, in an attempt to preserve at least some of the more interesting posts, I have set up a new blog called, with stunning originality, “Moody's Microblog Daily Digest.” As its name suggests, each day this will provide a digest of those microblog posts that I think are worth keeping. These will be posted in an entirely minimal format, simply a paste of the microblog content – don't look for any prettiness here.

This will, I hope, have two advantages.

First, it will allow Google's not inconsiderable search engine capabilities to index stuff on the new site. That means any post should be retrievable by me and anyone who feels the need. Secondly, it offers an alternative way to deal with the Moody flood: not only will it be a pared-down list of microblog posts, but it will be one-per-day (I aim to update it during the day, and then close it at the end, although I'm not sure if that will mean multiple appearances in RSS readers...) This might help those who find that you can have too much of a good thing....

Obviously, I'll be reviewing how things go, and would appreciate any comments along the way as this latest experiment progresses.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

12 July 2010

Time for Free Software to Square up to Foursquare

I've never been one to follow the latest digital fashions immediately. I didn't start blogging until November 2005, and I only joined Twitter in January 2009, and identi.ca in May 2009. And so it is that I haven't joined Foursquare, or any of the other location-based social networks. That's partly because I like to wait, to see whether it's just a passing fad or something more enduring, and partly because I frankly haven't seen the point. Maybe it's about this:

On Open Enterprise blog.

06 May 2009

What Happens if Microsoft Buys Twitter?

Here's a nasty meme that's beginning to swirl around:

Microsoft (MSFT) is about to finally consummate a search deal with Yahoo -- and that's great. But if Redmond really wants to carve into's Google search business over the next 10 years, it needs to offer whatever it takes -- $800 million? $1 billion? more? -- to buy Twitter right now.

Eeek - that could be problematic, and I don't just mean because Twitter is built on open source software. The idea of Microsoft controlling my twittering is too horrible to contemplate, so what could I do?

The obvious answer is move to Identica, which is free software. The only problem with that is that I would probably lose most of the people following me. No huge disaster maybe, but going from 1000 followers to zero is not the most motivating of situations.

Ideally, there would be an easy way for my followers to opt to follow me on Identica - as easy as them clicking on a link in a tweet. Anyone know if that's currently possible, and if not, whether it's even plausible? But even then, there's the question of support for Identica in Twitter clients (to say nothing of the main Twitter site).

So what would *you* do if Microsoft bought Twitter?

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody.