Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Twitter is many things to many people.  It’s a lot of things to me too (status updates, communication channel, notes application, self-reminders, etc). But for the last couple of days I am having a new experience with it - virtual presence.

Last year I attended Greek Blogger Camp.  It was a lot of fun.  This year however I didn’t manage to get in due to some work obligations.  However those guys who are there, they twit a lot (particularly Stefanos himself).  That sort of brings me there without any travelling.

Yes, I miss a lot, I know.  But getting SMS updates with pointers to what is going over there helps quite a bit.  And not only I get a part of the atmosphere, but also some helpful tips from the presentations that are going on.  Then, with Google in my hands, I can dive deeper into the subject, and even somewhat participate in the discussion there by twitting my questions and getting answers.

This digital world sure is amazing!

There was an sudden boost in searches for Cyprus yesterday.  The reason for that was a bug in Twinkle - a Twitter client for iPhone.  For some reason, Twinkle was identifying current location wrong for a whole lot of users.  Instead of being somewhere in the States, they were said to be Nicosia, Cyprus.  That probably felt very surprising for them, especially considering the fact that not many of them knew what or where Nicosia, Cyprus was.  Hence, all the searching.

There is a rumor going around that it was the work of Cyprus government, desperately trying to keep tourism levels up.  You, of course, should believe whatever your tin foil hat tells you to believe…

Yesterday I came across a bunch of my old files.  Some things dated back to one of my first jobs in 1999.  Others were slightly more recent, but almost forgotten about.  One of these recent collections of files was the beGucho project.  I did it with a few friends of mine (Michael, Slava, and Igor - the guy who helped me with the theme of this blog), but somewhere on the way we got lost and the project faded out.  It was actually released back in June 2006 (I blogged it) and survived for a month or two.  Here is a screenshot of how it looked like (slightly resized):

The idea was basically to have a mood-o-meter of the web in a sort of Twitter style.  (We haven’t heard of Twitter back then).  People would just come in and share their mood with the rest of the world.  There were two short comment forms - one for bad mood and another one for good mood.  Scales with a huge arrow at the top of the page were indicating the current mood of the web.  History of all moods was available in archives and via RSS feeds.  The whole thing was written in Embperl and was lightning fast and extremely simple.

But as I said, the project didn’t take off and was taken off the web without anybody actually noticing it.  Still, we had a lot of fun building this thing, and I’ve learned a thing or two about team working and user interface design.

In yet another Twitter review (and a nice one at that), I caught this quote (emphasis is mine):

If you are a twitterer, you can follow my infrequent tweets under my screen name of tevslin. My last tweet is from 3:45AM this morning complaining that I was up for an early flight. Don’t know why you want to know this; don’t know why I wrote it; but that’s what social people do.

Excellent!

I just noticed that there is now a limit of outgoing SMS messages from Twitter to your mobile phone.  Current number is 250 per week.  Apparently, this was introduced some time ago (a couple of weeks?), but only noticed it now.  There is no mention of it in Twitter Blog.

Twitter is not currently running any ads or membership services, so it’s hard to see how they can pay for all those outgoing SMS, except via a few investments that they got.  So, this limitation was somewhat expected.  It’s still sad to see it come, even though it’s high enough for most people not to hit it at all.

I think that Twitter will (or at least should) introduce some commercial packages with some extra features and several options for SMS limitations.  250/week for a free account sounds like a reasonable amount.