Posts Tagged ‘ microblog

Press this – the nifty wordpress bookmarklet

Scribefire’s blogging extension for firefox was featured on thunderror.com a while ago.

I always had the press this bookmarklet on my bookmarks list, but had never bothered to use it until now. But I soon came to realize what a valuable tool it was. Instead of sending those weird bits and pieces of the internet to your tumblelog or your twitter, why not blog about them on your primary blog? Twitter as always has been a major distraction to my blogging activities. So get back to microblogging on your own blog. Thanks to Press this!

The bookmarklet allows you to post to your wordpress blog from anywhere on the web, which is as good as scribefire. All it takes is a click off the button. Like something you see on the web? Click on the bookmarklet and share it with your blog visitors.

I know most of you would already have used this tool if you own, or have owned a WP blog at some point of time. But this post is for all those people who wish to come back and blog more than they tweet!

If you have a wordpress blog, go to your tools page and you should find your press this button right there, waiting for you!

Updating.me: Microblogging simplified (Get your invite code here…)

I actually stumbled upon this one…Updating.me. First thing that impresses me is the interest domain name. And the site does just that. It is for all those microblogging fanatics who have got an account with every microblogging site in the universe….

Now, Its similar to ping.fm. But, different in many ways…I personally prefer updating me over any other simultaneous posting service…Plus it supports all those services which I need…Right now, they support

TwitArmy TwitArmy and of course,
Now, if that doesn’t satisfy you…they have their own Adobe AIR app which lets you update all these services without ever visiting their website. And, if you are on updating.me, you get to see your stream on any of these services all the time (yeah, you have to do a manual refresh, though)..
Right now, it is limited private beta and you are going to need a secret invite code to get in.
So here it is, just for thunderror.com readers
invite code: thunderror

Rejaw – the new microblogging site

Rejaw. At last a microblogging site which feels good…Well, now lets not start comparing with twitter..Considering that twitter has been around for long…but its always great to have comparison in the arena.

Microblogging has several contenders but none have even managed to shake twitter even a bit, except for maybe, plurk. Microblogging is the post of small messages, limited by character count which can be seen by the public(or maybe restricted to a group). Few of the contenders in the market other than the leader being twitter are Plurk, Identi.ca, Kwippy, Beemood etc.

Anyone who has used Twitter will find themselves familiar with the interface at Rejaw. The site is friendly, very minimalistic. No nonsense and has a smooth interface which I love. It is not that I am switching from twitter..but its good to have an alternative…Identi.ca was slow, sluggish and boring…Kwippy was good, nothing spectacular and I am already a fan of Plurk…

Join me on Rejaw!

Plurking

I wanted to review Plurk when I started using it..but never got around to writing this post…Plurk basically took the idea of using status msgs/microblogging to the next level by a little bit of social networking features as well.

Plurk allows its users to update their current status using 140 characters (just like twitter does) But, their similarities end there..Plurk uses a concept of a visible timeline (all your posts are chronologically arranged on an animated timeline) This is in contrast with twitter’s way of presenting your (and your friends’) posts in a fashion similar to an RSS feed. A follower is someone who is informed of every update of yours and a friend is a follower whom you follow as well.

The most talked about feature of plurk is the karma feature which tracks the level of your interactivity and assigns a number to it. Higher karma allows you to unlock more smileys, more interface changes etc. Karma could very well encourage people to interact more, but would also make them very well spam to increase karma. Plurk is soon revamping its karma system..so that should be taken care of..

Another much appreciated feature is the ability to carry out entire conversations over an update. This allows users to interact more freely and responses are chronologically ordered and grouped with the original status message allowing users to follow a complete conversation from beginning to end. For the first few days I used plurk, I completely ignored twitter..but after the new shine washed away…I use it alongside twitter. Plurk unlike other web 2.0s does not share its API..However, there are many sites such as hellotxt, lifestream, ping.fm which already support integration with plurk.

Join me at Plurk!

Ground control, we have an emergency: Twitter is down

Twitter is down from today morning…Out of touch with the tweet world. All I see on my twitter home are the catbot, birds and the broken piece of electrical connection..On the plus side, saves a lot of my time. Twitter is a time waster, no matter how much you try not to think that way. The morning has been really productive in the absence of twitter. Why does twitter go down? Some of the reasons that the twitter folk have given us:

  • Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart
  • This was a planned maintenance project
  • finished a major infrastructure project tonight
  • some caching issues—namely, the /home timeline cache wasn’t being updated correctly for everyone
  • and many many more…

All of the above are from Twitter’s official blog..But the fact is easy to understands, the network infrastructure is too weak to support the kind of volume which twitter handles. I read somewhere that twitter’s staff are not enough to support the network, which could be true as I note and quote from one of their official blogs

“I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That’s only a handful of people, but we were all there all night”

All said and done, I wish twitter would get its already upgraded infrastructure upgraded enough to handle the traffic or atleast give us prior information on scheduled outages and estimated downtimes (not that they have to be accurate). But, there is one thing which I read somewhere, “We need twitter more than it needs us.”

Awww…twitter is still down, ground control: “may”day…

Update June 25, 2008

Twitter now has whales instead of the bird and the broken robot. And here is a workaround which twitter has brought in to reduce load.

I cannot click on replies.

twitter is stressed out a little bit now..so replies is disabled.

Now, thats stress management at twitter. But, since we have the site status available on the twitter blog, I know that twitter is down. But, I would like twitter to do something about it, rather than telling me that the site is down…I  also note that now API requests have been limited to 20 per hour.

Twitter – the microblogging giant

I thought of writing this post when I started noticing that many of Twitter users were technological geeks whereas the tech challenged were satisfied with their myspace and facebook profiles. Twitter for me paved way to microblogging. Allows you to blog even when you are short of time, in short bursts of under 141 characters…

Updates could be posted to twitter through gtalk IM, mobile phone and many other tools such as twitterfox, twhirl etc..What exactly do people update on twitter..Just anything, anything you feel like..Its a way to rant into the web..to show your joy, to reveal yourself to the web..or simply just update a new website you have come across, your new blog post, the evening movie you are going to watch, any upcoming event you plan to visit…And all this is shared with your followers (friends)

I decide to write this blog for all those people whom I invited to twitter who wanted to know what twitter was all about…
Read the official twitter FAQ here