Colin Charles Agenda

This one’s too good to pass up. Jennifer Aniston (from the comedy sitcom I grew up to, Friends) has reportedly dumped John Mayer, because of his Twitter addiction. I quote:

The source said: “John suddenly stopped calling her or returning her emails and when she would finally catch up with him, he’d say: ‘I’ve been so busy with work. I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call you back.”

The source added: “Jen was fuming. There he was, telling her he didn’t have time for her and yet his page was filled with Twitter updates.

“Every few hours, sometimes minutes, he’d update with some stupid line. And in her mind, she was like ‘He has time for all this Twittering, but he can’t send me a text, an email, make a call?’.”

Twitter, used as evidence that one actually has time, to at least send a text, email or make a call, it seems. Apparently, John Mayer even took the break up like a man, and sent a message to Twitterverse: My six word story: “This heart didn’t come with instructions.” Candid!

From a quick take on his feed, it seems he uses Tweetie, TwitterBerry and the web a lot for updates. So not only is he addicted to his BlackBerry, he loves his iPhone/iPod Touch, and apparently twitter.com. Maybe someone should introduce him to desktop clients like twhirl or TweetDeck? :-)

On Twitter, there’s been some conversation about this, naturally. At first, I couldn’t believe it, but it seems its possible. We know divorce via SMS or email is shunned upon, but in this part of the world, you can divorce someone just by saying “talak” three times. Its not clear if its allowed in Malaysia or not (the BBC suggests it was OK, but is unacceptable).

This stuff is almost as interesting as getting killed over your Facebook relationship status.

Do you know of people that got together because of Twitter or Facebook? Broke up because of Twitter or Facebook? I’m interested to know the stories behind them.

I’ve seen a bunch of sites/articles that are Twitter related recently. I’ve compiled them, and commented appropriately.

• Splitweet – this is useful, as it allows multi-account Twitter management. A lot of corporations are using Twitter for business, and if you’re a small business owner, chances are you have Twitter accounts for all your businesses (if you’re social networking savvy, that is ;-)). Today? I use twhirl for that sort of thing (multiple account management, that is).
• Twitter to begin charging brands for commercial use – I wonder how this will work? Go after the folk that have trademarked their brand? Go for people with more than n-followers? I just don’t see this as completely viable, without also affecting all those pro-twits. Maybe Twitter should acquire a service like Splitweet, and sell that interface?
• StockTwits – this is Twitter search, for stock lovers. Looks like its only useful for the American stock market, but there can be lots of potential here. Some popular ones to look at: JAVA, GOOG, and even AAPL. Note the comments (looking to short, etc…) When will there be insider trading thanks to Twitter, one wonders?

I recently found out about the Facebook Lexicon. There’s a FAQ, but in a nutshell, the Lexicon tracks and counts occurrences of words and phrases on Facebook Walls (profile, group, or even event Walls) over time. It doesn’t seem like status messages count, though maybe the new Lexicon might in due time.

Searched for “the flu“, only because I wanted to compare it with what you’d get over Google Flu Trends. Facebook doesn’t have the limitation that it has to be US only – its worldwide.

Then I thought about Twitter search, since lots of people post their updates on life, their feelings, et al – look at the results there, for the flu. Look at the mashup the New York Times built for the Superbowl on Twitter. Are there graphing tools, that track keywords? It might actually be cool.

Lots of new ways to data mine, it seems. Google shares some semblance of raw data. Facebook doesn’t. Twitter has whatever is available, that is limited by its API (what, some 3,200 entries?).

Imagine all this being used to predict flu clusters, or something more close to home, dengue clusters. Or voter turnout (status saying “voted”, even).

I was reading How Twitter Was Born, a post that has been going around the Twitterverse for a while. Twitter’s initial use, struck me:

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it.

That was my initial use of Twitter. I wanted to tell my list of friends, what’s cool, where. Deals. Whom I saw. I never intended to have discussions or conversations, or do things like brand monitoring, and so on.

A few days ago, a friend sent an SMS message to five people, and in the message he said CC: followed by a bunch of names. Imagine if SMS, supported Reply-to-All? Then you’ll have “conversations” amongst many folk (SMS isn’t limited to 160 characters only nowadays – its 160*3!).

Today, my use of Twitter is similar to what it was before. I do write random thoughts, especially when I’m on the mobile web. When on the desktop, I end up using a client like twhirl, to keep track of conversations. I reply. I contribute. I ask questions, and expect to get answers from my collective network.

Definitely interesting to see how my Twitter usage has evolved. In fact, its interesting to see how Twitter itself has evolved. Its now awash with PR/marketing/business types, and a lot are using Twitter as a business tool.

Executive summary: There is now a MySQL Room on FriendFeed, as well as a identi.ca group for mysql. Community members, developers, dabblers, users, etc. should find these extra avenues useful, in addition to the forums, mailing lists, and even the Forge. Join them now!

There has been a recent uptake of Twitter amongst the MySQL community… Early adopters have been around for ages, even (as we’re slowly approaching Twitter’s third birthday).

However, I’ve been noticing that slowly, there’s a little shift of the technical crowd, to identi.ca. I’ve had an account there for a while, but never really use the service much – but they’ve had updates this past week. They have group support now.

To post to the mysql group, just say:

!mysql message

The order doesn’t matter. Just have !mysql, in the body of your message. It reminds me of #hashtags on Twitter.

I don’t know how many pay attention to FriendFeed, but there is also a MySQL Room on FriendFeed. I think its a lot more discussion friendly than identi.ca, and would like to see it used more. We always during the Conference & Expo tend to use IRC, but maybe now, we’ll use FriendFeed. Good archives, good conversation, good tracking (one can use twhirl – an Adobe AIR app), I see it as a big win.

All in all, Twitter seems like the .com boom of the early 90’s, when businesses discovered Usenet, however identi.ca seem like those private lists, where the cool kids from Usenet migrated to.

Today I read that co.mments bit the dust. Another web service (who remembers the I Want Sandy discussion a while back), ceasing to exist (though from what I see, a lot of folk are using Disqus more).

It got me a little worried. I rely quite a bit on online services.

• Bookmarking, once previously living in my bookmark.htm file, now is shared on delicious. It has proven to be invaluable, storing 3,108 bookmarks. They are a Yahoo! run company.
• Photo storage and sharing, once previously sitting in directories on my web server, are now kept on my Flickr account. Flickr is great, because I can share photos with just friends, family, or participate in a vibrant community of photo enthusiasts. I currently have 16,813 items stored there, with backups on various media sitting in my various homes. They are a Yahoo! run company, and I happily pay them for a Pro account.
• I depend on Google Reader (read my shared items) to read RSS feeds. In fact, I have been sharing items as a form of bookmarking them. Ditto with adding stars to items. Don’t say Google doesn’t close services – they have.
• I use Google Calendar, because it simply rocks. I also use Google Docs, and I also use GMail (hosted, and regular).
• I use Twitter, who has no business model, as of yet. I like it over FriendFeed for one minor detail – I can update via SMS.

Most of these services have ways for you to get your data out of them, assuming they don’t exist in due time. But what will replace them?

Sure there are desktop applications. But with the variety of devices I utilise, I’m trying to cut down from using desktop applications and just focus on working online. In fact, all that is open now is Firefox, Adium, iTunes, TextMate (where I carve this text out), Terminal, Skype and twhirl. On my work laptop, its just Thunderbird, Firefox, Terminal, and Skype that’s open.

So maybe I need less desktop applications. It’s good, because that’s the hope of online services – live right in your browser.

But in tough(er) times, what do you do if the online service you use, disappears? Where’s the continuity (i.e. will my grandkids be able to browse my Flickr photo albums?)

I do wonder, if this will lead to more open source, peer-to-peer/federated run, online services. Like if Twitter folds up, who’s to say its excellent community won’t move to identi.ca ? (till then though, the latter probably doesn’t stand a chance, besides the very geeky top-of-the-trend open source folk…)