Tag: twitter

LeWeb'09: Queen Rania of Jordan [en]

Live notes from LeWeb’09. They could be inaccurate, although I do my best. You might want to read other posts by official bloggers, in various languages!

*steph-note: photographer madness for the arrival of Queen Rania.*

Doesn’t mind us looking at our computers, tweeting and blogging, etc. Remainder of the speech will be in 140-character sound bites.

Did MJ change the course of the Green revolution in Iran?

We’re part of the new field of digital anthropology.

It can be hard to connect to people when you’re a Queen. Position clouded with protocol, but online people are not afraid to speak their minds. Has created a space where titles mean little. Direct and personal connection that lets people reach out to her, and lets her spread ideas she is passionate about. Monarch on a mission? Takes it as a compliment.

Can the real-time web bring real-world change? Can it tackle the challenges facing our community? Her Oracle of Delphi is Twitter, that’s where she takes her questions. Surprised that the majority of her followers on Twitter thought digital advocacy could not translate into real action. Difficult the get their butts out of their computer chairs!

Green revolution at the front of Twitter, until Michael Jackson died, and took over the Twitter trending topics.

Of course he didn’t change the course of it, the revolution was much more important than that.

With little offline personal involvement, online activism becomes bleating.

We’re at the tipping point. Real-Time is the new prime time. Examples of what she learned of things going on in the world, through Twitter.

All this has hightened our feelings of selflessness, but what we need now is action.

One topic @QueenRania feels strongly about is education, girls in particular. Many statistical advantages to education, but behind the statistics, there are little girls and boys. Personal stories. Most people don’t realize the power of education.

Global campaign for education.

One day for one goal to help children who are locked out of school and in poverty. join1goal.org

Je tweete, tu tweetes… merci de laisser les twits au vestiaire [fr]

[en] About the correct way to say "to tweet" and "a tweet" in French. No twits, please. Or even twitts. It just sounds plain stupid.

J’ai beau être une horrible bilingue qui parsème allègrement mon français d’anglicismes et mon anglais de gallicismes, et mes deux langues de néologismes et de stephanismes, il y a un certain nombre d’abus linguistiques qui me hérissent sérieusement le poil.

Une des derniers en date? L’utilisation par les francophones de “twit” ou “twitt” pour faire référence à un message envoyé sur Twitter. (C’est quoi, Twitter?)

Je m’explique — parce que ce qui me tient à coeur, c’est qu’on reste un peu linguistiquement cohérents.

En anglais, “to twitter” (le verbe, donc), signifie “gazouiller” (on va pas pinailler sur le sens). Le nom qui correspond à ce verbe, et qui fait donc référence à une “instance” de cette activité (dans le contexte de Twitter, donc, à un message envoyé), c’est “a tweet“. Notons, pour ceux qui s’intéressent à la prononciation, que le verbe contient un “i” court (le phonème qui n’existe pas en français — on sait ça parce que le “i” est suivi de deux “t”) mais que le nom, lui, se dit avec un long “i” (comme le “i” français).

Prenons un parallèle bien connu: “to blog” et “a blog”. Voilà, très bien.

En français, on importe directement le nom, sans autre forme de procès. Un blog. Un tweet.

Et puis on forme un verbe à partir de ce nom: bloguer, tweeter.

Mais il y a plus grave, en fait. Parce que “twit“, voyez-vous, qui se prononce avec un “i” court (même si on l’écrit “twitt”), c’est un mot qui existe déjà dans la langue anglaise.

“A twit”, c’est un imbécile. Ouille.

Quitte à importer des mots d’une langue à l’autre (ce qui ne me pose aucun problème), essayons d’importer les bons, voulez-vous?

Je récapitule.

Quand j’utilise Twitter, je tweete. J’envoie des tweets à droite et à gauche. Parfois je reçois un tweet privé, mais la plupart sont publics et je n’arrive pas à suivre. Et j’évite de passer pour un twit en appelant ces messages des twitts ou mon activité twitter (ce qui, en passant, prête à confusion avec le nom du service… et donne des noeuds à la langue, prise dans le doute prononciatif!)

Six Twitter Tools [en]

[fr] Une série d'outils/sites autour de Twitter que vous trouverez peut-être utiles.

This is just a small list of links to more or less useful Twitter tools and sites, that you can use (amongst other things) to figure out if this or that new (or old) follower is a spammer or not. I find that kind of information useful when deciding to publish or not “Twitter comments” here (they come in through BackType Connect). None of these ask your your Twitter password, they all use OAuth (you should not be handing out your password to any third-party service, by the way).

  • TwitBlock goes through your followers and tells you (with extensive details) how likely it is that they are spammers or bots. You can block them directly from the site (be careful!) You can also just ask it to check one specific account (this is how I know that there is very little likelyhood that @stephtara is a spammer, cool!)
  • Tweet Blocker also goes through your followers to chase for spammers, giving each of them a grade (I’m an A+ student). I find the explanations given for each evaluation less clear than with TwitBlock. Again, you can block people directly from their site — don’t go overboard.
  • Foller.me gives you information about a given Twitter account, which can also come in handy when trying to figure out if somebody is ham or spam. Again, example with @stephtara.
  • Follow cost is rather basic, and will tell you how “chatty” a given user is. This is how I know that I average 13.6 tweets a day (ouch!).
  • Favstar is interesting, as it centres on favourites, telling you which of your tweets (or any user’s, for that matter) were favourited by whom. I’m less excited by their “100+, 50+, …” leaderboard (the popular just get more popular).
  • When did you join Twitter? tells you exactly that. (Me? December 8th, 2006.)

Any other ones you find useful? Link to them in the comments. (Yeah, there’s a wave, too. Who’s going to write a plugin which creates and links post-related comment waves automatically?)

Extracting Web Apps From the Browser: Fluid and Prism [en]

[fr] Prism et Fluid sont des applications OSX qui vous permettent de créer des mini-applications qui sont en fait une fenêtre de navigateur (Firefox ou Safari) qui n'ouvre qu'une seule URL. Pratique si vous avez l'habitude de consulter Gmail, Twitter, Digg etc. via leur interface web.

This has been a productive morning for a lazy Saturday. A tweet from Tom Morris put me on the track of Fluid, and then Prism. (This is for Mac users, by the way.)

Fluid and Prism are both site-specific browsers, the first based on Safari, the second on Firefox. If you’re the kind of person who always had a Gmail tab open in their browser, and maybe another for Twitter, and for blog comments, and Google Docs, and for Friendfeed, and god knows what, you’ll like this.

Personally, the reason I like desktop clients is that they separate the web service I’m using from the browser. I can Cmd-Tab to it. I don’t see it all the time when I’m in my browser. I don’t lose the tab when my browser crashes.

Site-specific browsers basically allow you to create a simple application which is in fact a single browser window that opens up one single web page. Links in that web page, when clicked, get opened in your default browser.

I have now created “apps” for Identi.ca, Wave, and Gmail, so far. It’s as simple as filling in a small form with URL and title fields.

My only gripe is that I haven’t yet figured out how to replace the URLs favicon by another larger one as the app’s icon. Blown-up favicons are really ugly. I’ve found some sources of icons online, but am not finding all those I need, and clearly not managing to “install” them (I’m sure I don’t need to re-create my apps).

Survivre à l'heure du trop d'informations [fr]

Lors du très sympathique Bloggy Friday d’hier soir, la conversation est à un moment donné partie sur les fils RSS, Twitter, le temps que ça prend, et la quantité d’informations à s’enfiler chaque jour, si on rentre là-dedans.

Je vous présente donc ma recette pour survivre à l’heure de la pléthore d’informations à portée de nos souris qui est la nôtre. Elle est très simple, la recette:

  • lâcher prise et abandonner tout espoir d’être “à jour” ou de “tout lire”
  • mettre l’accent sur les connexions et le réseau (quelles personnes je suis sur Twitter, connexions facebook, abonnements RSS)
  • considérer que tous ces flux sont comme une rivière où l’on fait trempette de temps en temps, ou comme une station radio diffusant en continue et qu’on allume lorsqu’on en a envie.

Quelques éléments supplémentaires:

  • si l’information est importante et que le réseau est de qualité (voir le point ci-dessous), elle vous parviendra par de multiples chemins (exit donc l’angoisse de “rater” quelque chose de vital)
  • la qualité du réseau est cruciale: ce n’est pas juste une question de quantité de connexions ou de contacts (même si cette dimension joue un rôle), et chacun est entièrement responsable du réseau qu’il construit et maintient autour de lui.

Pour ma part, j’ai depuis longtemps accepté que je ne suis pas une lectrice régulière de blogs. Je sais, cette information en surprend plus d’un, car je suis perçue comme une personne très connectée et “au courant”. Mes lectures sont des butinages, incités par ce que je vois passer dans ces différents flux (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, surtout). De temps en temps, je vais expressément voir le blog de telle ou telle personne, ou son compte Facebook, ou son Twitter — parce que j’ai envie d’en savoir plus sur ce qu’elle raconte récemment.

Mais je ne cherche pas à “tout lire”, oh non, au grand jamais. Et je m’en porte fort bien!

Musings on Twitter and Identi.ca [en]

Ever since the #fixreplies debacle, I have been distancing myself from Twitter a little. Don’t get me wrong: I’m still enthusiastic about Twitter, encourage people to join, and hope that new people I meet have an account there. But I’m slowly moving my eggs out of my one single Twitter-basket and starting to use identi.ca.

For those who missed it, the #fixreplies thing happened earlier this year. Twitter suddenly and unilaterally changed the way one viewed @reply updates sent by people one was following. Previously, there was a setting of sorts allowing you to control if you wanted to see @reply messages only when they were addressed to a person you were also following (the default), or if you wanted to see all of them (that’s the way it worked before Twitter “implemented” @replies, by the way, when it was just a user hack), or if you just do not want to see @replies (probably because you believe that “Twitter isn’t IM” or something).

Over the previous year, Twitter contended that the @replies setting was confusing (I think it was, but more because it was poorly worded than because the functionality itself was confusing), determined that for some obscure technical reason (we still don’t know which one, to the best of my knowledge) that the setting had to go, and noting that a full 98% of people were using the default setting anyway, they simply scrapped it.

Followed a huge uproar, lots of lamenting (by myself included), requests for Twitter to change things back the way they were — to no avail. Twitter apologized for the poor communication around the issue, told us they couldn’t keep the setting because the technical cost was too high, and basically suggested that they would offer grieving fans of that setting other exciting options to discover new users.

Only, it’s not just about discovering new users. It’s as simple as wanting to see all the tweets of people I follow, not just those Twitter considers relevant. In this case, they happen to consider that partial conversations are irrelevant. They’re relevant to me because they’re part of the lives of the people I follow (discovery of new users is just a really fun and valuable by-product of that).

So, enough of this already. The point here is that Twitter decides something, and Twitter does it. We are in a benevolent dictatorship position here, as we are for many of the tools we use online everyday. It’s a risk we take and I’m generally happy to — but when the benevolent dictator of a tool I rely upon as a backbone of my online life starts making changes that upset me, I start looking around.

Enter open source, interoperable standards, etc.

Identi.ca is an “open source version of Twitter”, one could say (the engine running it is called Laconica) — it basically works the same way and has the same features (at first view in any case). Contrarily to the vague of Twitter rip-offs or clones we started seeing all over the place, the important thing to note is that this project is open source. I know I’m not an open source expert and I happily mix up things that are important distinctions for people who are more involved in the “scene” than I am, but here’s what it means for me, as an end user (fellow geeks, correct me if I’m saying silly things here):

  • people can contribute to the code
  • people can take the code in another direction if they’re not happy with what the main development group is happy
  • who knows, maybe some kind of plugin architecture will be implemented (this is a wild guess of mine)
  • it’s based on an open, interoperable standard
  • think “GTalk vs. MSN”

There are of course certainly a full pile of other advantages to Laconica (the fact that it’s decentralized for example) but I’ll stop there.

The big problem, of course, is the people. Most people are on Twitter. Today, I’m following 567 people and am followed by 2481 on Twitter. On identi.ca, despite my best efforts, I’ve reached the staggering figures of 95 (followees) and 127 (followers).

So, should one “move” to identi.ca?

The answer is yes, and “move” is a bit of a dramatic word here.

Identi.ca acts as a Twitter client, which means that all to notices you send through identi.ca are automatically sent to Twitter too, and you can subscribe to your Twitter stream in identi.ca. You can in fact start using identi.ca without abandoning Twitter.

Twitter settings - Identi.ca

The best way to do this is to register the same username on identi.ca as you are using on Twitter (I’m @stephtara on both, here is my account on Twitter and my account on identi.ca). Head over to the Twitter settings tab to connect your accounts. Identi.ca will help you add people you know on both services.

Of course, there are caveats:

  • identi.ca is not your favourite Twitter client (if you’re using something like Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, Twitterrific, Tweetie, etc.) — I’m personally waiting for identi.ca support in Seesmic Desktop and Tweetie on the iPhone
  • the site will sometimes throw errors at you (but on the other hand, Twitter is regularly down, isn’t it?)
  • “Twitter” and “tweet” are really the better names
  • it’s a tad more work than just continuing to use Twitter, but remember, you’re in the process of moving your eggs out of the proverbial basket.

I’m personally pretty happy with identi.ca, and like the way it seems in active development (Twitter is too, but it’s a mammoth now that Oprah‘s been there).

I’m all the more happy now that I’ve read that Twitter plans to implement support for retweets, and that it seems this will happen by removing the “RT @whoever:” intro from the beginning of the tweet, and add that information in a small byline after the tweet. My semi-automatic screening of retweets from compulsive retweeters will be a thing of the past!

So, if you haven’t done it yet, go and claim your username on identi.ca (you can use OpenID), follow me there, and nag me to follow you if I’m not but I am following you on Twitter.

See you on identi.ca!

Twitter @Replies Kerfuffle: Not Just About Discovery [en]

[fr] La suppression de son flux Twitter des @replies à destination de personnes que l'on ne suit pas n'est pas un problème uniquement parce qu'elle entrave la découverte de nouvelles personnes. C'est un problème, parce que cela nous prive d'une partie (parfois importante) de ce que partagent sur Twitter ceux que nous suivons.

A day or so after my blog post alerting you to the change in the way Twitter showed you @replies from the people you are following, Twitter broke the silence with a blog post giving more detailed information on the technical reasons why they removed this functionality. (Don’t see a direct cause-and-effect phenomenon here — I’m not that influential, despite what some may believe.)

Though I appreciate their apology about the communication disaster, there are still a few open points as far as I’m concerned:

  • 97% of accounts did not use this functionality: this does not mean that they had chosen not to use it. Had the default setting been “show all @replies”, you can be sure that more than 3% of users would have been viewing all @replies
  • if I follow somebody, why would the default assumption be that I don’t want to see what they write to other people I don’t follow? Here’s what would make sense for me: default setting should be that if you follow somebody, you see all their tweets. Now, to cater for those who get frustrated by half-conversations or chatty followees (hey, you chose to follow them in the first place), allow suppression of “@replies to people I don’t follow” on a per-user basis.
  • the reason I am mad (and others too) about having @replies to people I’m not following stripped out of my stream is that it is depriving me of part of the public tweets of people I chose to follow. If I hadn’t seen @giagia’s tweet responding the @isntit on May 11th, I would have missed out all the fun around the heated “babies at conferences” debate. This isn’t about discovering a new person. This is about keeping up with stuff somebody I’m following (Gia in this case) is tweeting about, and involved in.

So, please, Twitter: don’t assume that all this is about discovering new people. It’s not. Since you removed @replies to people I’m not following from my stream, everything is more quiet, and I’m missing out on important parts of my friends’ lives.

Edit: oh, and while writing this post, I discovered that Twitter search does not go very far back in time. What next? are we going to discover that our oldest tweets have silently been removed from the database, one day?

Unbelievable: Twitter Hides Partial Conversations AGAIN [en]

This morning, I see a small notice on Twitter once I’ve logged in: they’ve done a “small settings update” involving @replies.

“Small settings update”? You have to be kidding me. What they’ve done is once again removed partial conversations (@replies from people you know to people you don’t know) from the stream. Yes, two years later (I wrote Twitter: We Love Our Partial Conversations in May 2007, and they fixed it soon after), they’ve done it again.

Given Twitter Support is all but nonexistant nowadays (another sad turn of things) please join us on this Get Satisfaction thread to express our disappointment at the removal of the possibility to read all @replies from our friends.

Feedly: More Than a Newsreader, Maybe Your Search Engine of Tomorrow? [en]

A bit over a year ago, I switched from Google Reader to Feedly. I have a troubled history with newsreaders: I tend to not use them, partly because I don’t really read blogs. But I used Google Reader for some time, and then Feedly. I really like Feedly. Really. (Plus, it saved 4 months of posts for CTTS after the dropped database disaster.)

All this to say that for many months, I have not really opened Feedly, and I feel kind of sad/bad about it. Twitter and Tumblr are my main sources of “new information”, and I’d love to find a way to use Feedly in a way that works for me. But it just doesn’t seem to happen.

A couple of weeks back, I saw this tweet from Ewan:

Twitter _ Ewan McIntosh: Over the hols I managed to ...

He says that he has sorted his feeds into “30 must-read-daily RSS feeds, with the other 2000 sitting behind as personal search engine”.

Whee! For some time now, I’ve been convinced that the future lies with allowing search in subsets of the web. There’s too much stuff out there, right? Also, in this era of partial attention (which I don’t consider to be a bad thing, in the “keeping a distracted eye on” sense), you often end up trying to “refind” something you know you’ve seen (but where?) — just like I had to dig out Ewan’s tweet ten days after I’d seen it in passing.

That’s why I like Lijit, for example (I’ve put the search box back here on CTTS, by the way): it allows me or my readers to do a search on “my stuff”, including CTTS, Digital Crumble, Twitter, del.icio.us… Sometimes I know I’ve said something, but I can’t for the life of me remember where (see this? having to search your own words…)

Feedly is pretty good at allowing you to search all the stuff you’ve subscribed to:

feedly | explore facebook

It offers a mix of a little bit of generally popular stuff with “your sources”. I like that. So, I like Ewan’s idea of feed subscription as “add this to my search sources” rather than “oooh, I’m going to read this every day”.

I have to say I’m interested in hearing about how you use Feedly or Google Reader (particularly the social aspects) if you’re not a “religious-daily” newsreader enthusiast. There has to be something between “keeping up with my feeds” and “never opening my feedreader”.

A Week After Ada Lovelace Day (ALD09) [en]

[fr] La Journée Ada Lovelace a été un grand succès, avec une participation dépassant les espérances. Je voudrais remercier tout particulièrement ceux et celles qui m'ont choisie comme sujet de leur article pour cette journée: Jean-Christophe, Michel, Graham, Stéphanie, Baud, et Delphine. On se retrouve l'année prochaine!

Oh heck, it’s been a week without a blog post on CTTS again. Maybe one day somebody will write a WordPress plugin to send reminders to over-busy bloggers like me. I had decided to write a post this morning before starting my work for the day, so here we are: a summary-roundup with a few post-event thoughts for Ada Lovelace Day.

First, it was a huge success. Nearly 2000 people signed the pledge. (Not that many have marked it as completed, but to be honest, I almost forgot myself, and a friend of mine had quite a lot of trouble figuring out how to mark her pledge as completed…) 1400 people signed up for the event on Facebook. On the day itself, #ald09 was trending nicely on Twitter (see Twitter search page screenshot). About 1000 people added their blog post to the Ada Lovelace Collection (the database needs cleaning up though, so if you are comfy with databases and have a little time to space, do let us know). Not everybody signed up everywhere, so the real numbers are somewhere in the middle.

I spent the day on Twitter, mainly (and writing my blog post about Marie Curie, in French). I was really impressed with the number of people taking part in ALD09, tweeting and blogging about it — clearly, the event had critical mass in the blogosphere. Many of the women blogged about were unknown to me, proof of how useful it is to sing our unsung heroines of tech and blog about these women who can then become role-models for more of us. I had a great time hopping from blog to blog reading about the Ada Lovelaces of today.

If you’d like to read some posts, the Ada Lovelace Day Collection is of course a great place to start. People have posted links to their posts on Twitter, on the Facebook event wall, in the pledge comments, and you can also go digging in Technorati or Google blogsearch. And if you have to check out only one of the creations for this day, go and look at Sydney Padua‘s web comic about Ada Lovelace, part 1 and part 2. I guarantee you’ll like it!

I’d like to thank Suw for having the brilliant idea behind Ada Lovelace Day, and organizing it. I’d also like to thank those of you who picked me as their “woman to blog about” on Ada Lovelace Day — I’m very honoured, humbled, happy, proud, and a little embarrassed. So, a particular thanks to Jean-Christophe, Michel, Graham, Stéphanie, Baud, Delphine, who chose me for Ada Lovelace Day, alone or alongside others. Thanks also to Henriette, Lyonel, and Luis who have included me in their posts and lists for ALD09.

See you next year!