Zilele trecute am colindat printre oamenii de pe Twitter, ajungand pana la conexiuni de gradul 4-5. Cum am un numar destul de mare de followers, mi-e destul de greu sa vad daca o anumita persoana ma urmareste. Cel putin, direct din Twitter. Cred ca problema asta apare imediat dupa ce depasesti pragul de 200-300 de persoane care te urmaresc, fiindca Twitter nu a gasit inca o metoda de organizare mai buna a followers-ilor. As putea sa ma duc pe site-uri ca friendorfollow.com si sa vad acolo cine ma urmareste si cine nu. Mi se pare o problema de uzabilitate a site-ului si cred ca solutia e simpla si la indemana. Read more »

I think it’s a good thing that I’m starting to analyse a service before using it. I’ve had a few bad experiences with social services because I impulsively signed up. My inbox was filled with spam messages coming from these services, privacy issues appeared, and if I used some service, it turned out to be a total bore after some time.

The worst decision you can make when choosing from this ocean of social services is to use a service just because “everyone’s on it” and it’s cool. If you are choosing a service, analyse the advantages it can offer you and then decide if it’s worth it.

These should be the main questions you should ask yourself when signing up:

• Why should I create an account on “New Social Network X“?
• What are the advantages of this service?
• How can it help me?
• How will it affect my online privacy?

Read more »

I decided to install the Blackbird Pie WordPress plugin and play a little bit with it. The WordPress plugin was created after Twitter created the Blackbird Pie service. It allows you to embed tweets into your blog posts, just like you would do with other embeddable media (flash games, videos, etc.).

The plugin gives you a few possibilities to embed tweets. The most easy to use is to take the complete URL of a tweet and paste it into your blog post. I added the following two tweets by using the complete URL and the id of the tweets.

Here are two embedded tweets from my timeline:

A tweet in Romanian:

Nu înţeleg de unde a apărut ideea că oamenii nu visează în culori. Se leagă de faptul că uităm parţial visele, a.î credem că-s în alb&negru.

May 22, 2010 10:48 am via SnaptuReplyRetweetFavorite

@danielvoicu

Daniel Voicu

And one in English:

Use the force, Luke! Use that fucking thing, you moron! Oh crap, you're drunk.

May 21, 2010 6:46 pm via SnaptuReplyRetweetFavorite

@danielvoicu

Daniel Voicu

I used [blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/danielvoicu/status/14483309763"] for the first tweet and for the second I used [blackbirdpie id="14439778971"].

When you use these commands, you will notice that the plugin creates custom fields. You can edit them afterwards. I didn’t edit the first tweet just to show you the plugin has a small issue when it comes to special characters, in this case some Romanian letters.

You can find the plugin here, and if you want to read more about it, visit the developer’s site.

We share so much personal babble about us on so many social networks. The internet has become the marketer’s dream, if one knows how to use it in one’s interest.

We’ve started to shed the clothes of anonymity, thinking that the Internet will give us at least a small amount of fame. Those 15 minutes of fame, at least. Or 15 MB of fame, if we move the whole thing online.

I am witnessing – as we all do – a complete renunciation of privacy in favor of a weird transparency that on the long run will affect our relationships, whether they are professional, love or family relations. We’re in a fast-forward medium that also allows us to skip moments. We only want the start and the end, forgetting about what’s in-between.

We share pictures on Facebook, let the whole world know we’re in a relationship with another Facebook user, tweet about things that a decade ago were considered intimate.

That’s why I am asking you: where are we heading? What’s the future of “sharing” and how does the current state affect us on the long run?

Everyone talks about Twitter these days: personal branding on Twitter, making friends through Twitter, finding new stuff on Twitter… Twitter, Twitter, Twitter!

As one of the somewhat-early adopters of this service, I noticed that Twitter is – actually was – based on the concept of simplicity. In time, along with the features introduced by users (conventions like the @ sign for replies) noise was created and the need to separate the interesting, juicy stuff from the mundane, boring things appeared.

Buuut… that’s not the subject of this post. Still, I want to relate to simplicity. We all have a favorite Twitter client which we use on our PCs or Macs. For example, I have two of them: at the office I use Tweetie (for Mac) and at home I use an app I just discovered, called Ada.

Ada Twitter from Madan

Before Ada I used Twhirl on my home computer but it kinda got too bulky for my taste. Many buttons and too many features doesn’t mean an application will satisfy everyone.

Ada is a small, simple, AIR-based app that won’t bother you with notifications while you’re working. The most recent version is 1.20 and you can find it here. It has a few themes that you can use and a drop-down menu from which you can choose what to see: main timeline, mentions and direct messages.

Although it’s pretty minimal and it won’t bother you like other apps, it still lacks some basic features. For example, I think that it wasn’t necessary a button for marking favourite tweets but one for sending direct messages to a tweet’s owner. I also don’t see why a “favorite tweet button” exists as there is no way to see the tweets you favourited through Ada. Or maybe I haven’t discovered it yet…

Another much needed feature would be using different colours for replies and direct messages. This would help out users who follow a lot of persons to differentiate replies and DMs from normal tweets directly on the main timeline.

Anyway, this little app is lovely and I would recommend it to everyone who wants a multiplatform Twitter client based on the concept of simplicity.