Colin Charles Agenda

I’ve found Twitter to be an amazingly useful web service. So useful, that I’ll dedicate a blog post to them. If you haven’t already read Anything Could Happen, do yourself a favour and get reading. Its an interview with Evan Williams, who founded both the ever popular Blogger, and now Twitter.

Tim Bray, brings up the general idea that succeeding in this world, is all about being first, no matter what. Its where the community is at, right? It doesn’t matter if there are better, competing services, its where the community has gathered, and who’s first. Time to Market or Time to Twitter?

Its probably true. Twitter has had its fair share of problems, mostly around scaling their application. Yet, people stick with Twitter, no matter what. The community of users have already got a vested interest (all previous “tweets”, favourites, a community of friends, et al) and there’s no point recreating it in Pownce or Jaiku. I’ve got accounts on those two other services, and I pretty much never, ever user them beyond the initial review period.

In other news, I found this tip to be useful:
curl -u username:password -d status=”so, you can make twitter updates via the command line and curl?” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Even comes back with about 19 lines of output, in XML, telling you that your update has been successful. Shows that you’ve updated from the web, in terms of status. Now, if only I had ubiquitous Internet access everywhere…

Technorati Tags: twitter, evan williams, command line, interview

Illegal downloading
It seems like March has clearly become a dark time for illegal downloaders. With Exetel in Australia willing to disconnect offenders, following on what seems to have started on in Japan and Sweden (where the ISPs can give to the courts, information on suspected file sharers). The United Kingdom is not far off. Encrypted P2P would seem like the way to go, along with port randomisation, and maybe even using tunnels?

Bloggers to pay a more important role in Malaysia?
It seems that the newly appointed information minister, Ahmad Shabery Cheek, wants to have a meeting with bloggers, as they play a role in nation building! They surely played a role in brining down the coalition. The important thing is that they’ve realised that they, the government of the day, will not control bloggers. Nothing to realise really, that’s what the MSC Bill of Guarantees provides: “7. Ensure no Internet censorship.”

Zimbra, and quality
Upgrading Zimbra has scared me in the past. This time, another problem cropped up with the ill-fated 5.0.3 release, which was pulled almost immediately. Good thing 5.0.4 has also been released. I cannot wait to have “online backup” in the open source version.

Bloggers feel more connected?
Recent research in Melbourne show that bloggers feel happier and more satisfied with their friends. Swinburne University studied new bloggers, and found that within two months, bloggers felt more socially connected, and generally felt part of a community. However, its not all bells and whistles – bloggers might also be more psychologically distressed? Or maybe, they’re just MySpace bloggers ;)

You weren’t meant to have a boss
Paul Graham tells us that having a boss, isn’t the natural scheme of things. Reading the sub-heading, on Trees, definitely makes a lot of sense. A bold statement, yet true: “You can feel the difference between working for a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.” I can already say I can feel myself resonating with it. As always, a good piece of advice: “A lot of people in their early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school. At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be zero rather than negative.”

Technorati Tags: illegal downloading, p2p, bloggers, internet censorship, zimbra, quality, social, community, boss, startups