Posts tagged “Twitter”

Twitter has a feature that I really like that is sorely lacking in both Facebook and Google+, and that is the “favorites” feature. It’s simple. Click the little star next to a post, and it is added to your “favorites” list. Then you can look at your list and see all of the posts to which you’ve ever added a star.

It’s exactly like the star system that Google already uses in Gmail, which is why it’s so mystifying to me that it isn’t in Google+. When you click that “+1″ button on someone’s Google+ post, it seems to vanish into the ether; there’s no way to see a list of Google+ posts to which you’ve given a +1. Facebook’s “likes” have the exact same problem. I needs me a page that lists out everything I’ve ever “liked” in chronological order.

So Twitter wins this round!

Here’s how I personally use the Twitter favorites feature: When I see a post that has a link that looks interesting and that I might want to watch/read/listen to but for some reason I am unable to do so at that time (I’m in a hurry; I’m in the car (as a passenger); I’m on the john; I’m at work; It doesn’t work right on my phone; etc), then I just click the star. Later when I’m in a better position to look at it (i.e., I’m at home on my laptop), I’ll go into my list of favorites and peruse the links at my leisure.

So here are all of the tweets that I favorited in the month of August. What do they say about me? I have no idea. They are presented without comment:

There. I thought that was kinda interesting. That was my August in tweets.

We all know that Twitter is kind of a place where you can blow off steam. You can say stuff you normally (probably) wouldn’t say in polite company. It tends to get a bit inappropriate and/or profane.

So what happens when you take some really funny tweets, then find some appropriate panels from old Peanuts comic strips, and then replace the dialogue in the panels with the funny tweets?

COMEDY GOLD, THAT’S WHAT.

Also, one of my new favorite websites, Peanutweeter!

Warning, much of it (like much of Twitter) is NSFW.

Something completely adorable happened on Tuesday. See, musician Molly Lewis is a big fan of Stephen Fry — and why shouldn’t she be, really? Why shouldn’t everyone be a fan of Stephen Fry? No good reason as far as I can see. Anyhoo, a while back she wrote a song for/about Stephen Fry called “An Open Letter to Stephen Fry,” and last week she got about to releasing a recording of it. Things moved rather quickly after that.

The Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard announced that they would be honoring Stephen Fry at an event on Tuesday evening. Similarly, Molly Lewis posted a cryptic plea on her website asking if her fans could perhaps help with airfare so she could fly out to some event in Massachusetts…

Well, tl;dr — I’ll let their own Tweets tell some of the story:

And now that your curiosity is no doubt piqued, here is the serenade in question. There’s no video of the actual event, but you can watch Molly Lewis’s original video (or if you don’t want to watch it, you can just listen to the song below the video).

Adobo, no? Here’s a nice recap of the whole event. Now be a good little jellybean and support Molly Lewis by tossing four quarters into her coffers: Buy that song!

Stephen Fry, the lovable rapscallion often thought of alongside cohorts Hugh Laurie and/or Rowan Atkinson, has been in Louisiana for a few days doing various bits about life in the N’Orleans area for a project of his. Well, life got very interesting for Mr. Fry very quickly on Sunday afternoon, and because he is such an aficionado of Twitter, we got to see the excitement first-hand.

The day started off pleasantly enough:

But at 2:39 in the afternoon he tweeted a rather more ominous message:

He tweeted again in the next few minutes (titling them simply “Uh-oh” and “Snaking its way down…”). Each tweet was accompanied by a photograph showing the progress of the tornado:

Then Mr. Fry’s tweeting ceased. This caused a bit of a sit in the Twitterverse—had he been swallowed up by the meteorological menace? Eventually, just over a half-hour later, Mr. Fry returned to reassure everyone:

Whew! And here we have another example of what a wondrous future we live in, wherein a man armed only with an iPhone and a Twitter account can give an immediate account of astounding weather phenomena. We don’t have to rely on the hope that someone caught some footage of it that might make it to the local news that evening, which might then possibly be picked up by a national news (or perhaps end up as footage in Mr. Fry’s Louisiana project a while down the road). Instead the connection is instant between the witness and the audience, without need for any pesky middle-men sticking their thumbs in it.

It also helps that I just so happen to have an incredible fascination with tornadoes.

Yesterday afternoon (as most of you are aware since most of you live/work in the greater Puget Sound area) there were two really loud booms in rapid succession. It honestly sounded quite a lot like when the Atlas foundry blew up a couple of years ago, they were so strong.

What happened was this: Obama was in Seattle. Wherever the president goes there’s very restrictive airspace rules; you can’t fly within a certain radius of him, etc. This is to prevent suicide pilots from crashing into whatever building/vehicle he happens to be in. Well, some doofus who probably didn’t even know that POTUS was in town was putting around in his little pontoon boat and strayed into restricted airspace. Immediately two F-15s were scrambled from the Portland area, and pushed over 800 MPH to intercept the offending airplane. Going that fast makes some gigantic sonic booms, which were heard for a couple hundred miles in every direction (I think the booms actually formed between Olympia and Tacoma).

In the moments immediately after the booms, though, nobody knew what had caused them. I walked outside and saw that everybody else (who was home in the afternoon) was also standing outside their houses. “Any ideas?” I called out to a neighbor.

“Nope,” was the reply.

Carrie got on the laptop and looked at the news websites: King 5, Komo 4, Google News, Tacoma News Tribune, etc. But this had happened only maybe a minute earlier, so there was no actual news yet.

So then I remembered that we live in the future, and I got on the computer and logged into Twitter. I typed “Tacoma” into the search bar and sat there while the tweets started pouring in from every corner of Puget Sound, from Olympia to Seattle and beyond. Immediately the two rumors were (A) some sort of gas explosion and (B) some sort of sonic boom. After a short while tweeters quickly realized that if it were an explosion then someone would have actually witnessed it and tweeted about it, which didn’t happen. So a pair of sonic booms seemed more likely. Eventually re-tweets started coming through about official word from the FAA being sonic booms. And then quickly the real story started taking shape on twitter long before it ever appeared on any news website.

This is what it’s like to live in the future. Instant information about any major event from those who witnessed the event. Sure, you have to sift through the speculation and rumors, but you don’t have to wait around and wonder what happened until the 5:00 news that evening anymore. News comes directly from the witnesses now.

Link of the Month:
Brizzly
Brizzly is a Twitter interface that does all of the things that Twitter should be doing anyway, like in-lining all linked pictures and videos so that you don’t have to click to a different website just to view them, and showing the full URLs of all links instead of the shortened ones so that you don’t have to click blind and get sent to a potentially dangerous redirect. I use it as my default instead of the actual twitter.com.

Album of the Month:
Terrapin Productions: Sketches of Perfect Landscapes
40-some minutes of good, dreamy, mellow, spacey, noisy, (mostly) instrumental guitar rock. Much layering and echoing and building of atmospheric walls of sound. I like it. It’s groovy.

Game(s) of the Month:
Bloons Tower Defense
A horrifyingly addictive series of games from Ninja Kiwi, the Bloons Tower Defense games are about various types of monkeys trying to pop balloons (“bloons” as they call them). There are 4 of these games released so far, and they get steadily better and better. If you like Tower Defense games, well, then here you go.

From his Twitter feed last night:

What a pleasure it is to be quite enormously and unrepentantly drunk. Hic! xxxxxxx 

Then a couple of hours later:

I am now putting my rather fragile and oopsy self gently to bed. Love to you all and then more love and a spot more just for luck.Oh dear x 

And then again this morning:

Right. Well. Water. Down throat. Splashed on face. Bwaah! Better. Not too grim a hangover. My room a bomb site. Two hours to pack for home x