Twitter – social glue that is here to stay

Today, while playing around with the Lovely Charts, I decided to make a quick diagram of a few social networks that I use.  The purpose of the diagram is to illustrate why Twitter is here to stay.  Here is the diagram itself.

As you can see, I use Twitter as a glue.  It aggregates favorites, likes, shares, bookmarks, etc from all other social networks that I use.  These are all gathered together and automatically published back into my own blog as ‘Day in brief’ summaries.   This way, I can own most of my social activities in the space, which I actually own – my blog.  So even if a social network dies out and disappears, I still have bits and pieces of content in my archives.

As for the Facebook, I don’t really use it so much myself, but a lot of people find it more convenient to follow me there than anywhere else.  So I configured Twitter to forward all tweets there too.  And since my WordPress blog is tweeting every post I publish, I get a very nice exposure overall.

Since Twitter is so simple and popular, pretty much every web service and social network does some sort of integration with it.  It would be way more complicated to configure integration between my WordPress blog and each and every social network that I use.  I’ve recently learned that quite a few people use Twitter the same way.  That’s something that no other social network gives you yet.  Google+ is a good potential candidate, but it still has no APIs.  And Facebook could do it easily  if it wasn’t for their moronic attitude towards exporting users’ own data.

P.S.: Thanks to all those people who made the social networks logos that I used in my diagram.

Unix learning tips from Miguel de Icaza

Miguel de Icaza – a very well known programmer in Linux circles – shares a few tips to having a better experience in Unix environments.  Here is a summary of what he recommends:

  • Read, learn, and memorize the “Unix Programming Environment” book by Kernighan and Pike.
  • Read and learn the “Unix for the impatient” book by Abrahams and Larson.
  • Learn Emacs.
  • Use Midnight Commander, which Miguel is the author of.  Here is a handy manual.
  • Keep a copy of the “Unix Power Tools” book nearby.
  • Learn touch typing.

These are all solid recommendations.  I’d suggest to use Vim instead of Emacs, but that’s more of a personal preference – learn one or the other.  And I can’t agree more on the touch typing.  That is indeed the most important skill that you will ever learn.  Right next to the camp fire starting.

At this point you might be thinking “I am awesome”, “the world is my oyster” and “Avatar 3D was not such a bad movie”.

But unless you touch-type, you are neither awesome, nor you are in a position to judge the qualities of the world as an oyster or any James Cameron movies.

You have to face the fact that not only you are a slow typist, you do look a little bit ridiculous. You are typing with two maybe three fingers on each hand and you move your head like a chicken as you look at you alternate looking at your keyboard and looking at your screen.

Do humanity a favor and learn to touch type.

Day in brief – 2011-09-07

50 must-see documentaries as per New York Times

Via Kottke.org I came across the New York Times recommendation of 50 must-see documentaries.  Looking through the list, I see only a few that I’ve seen.  The rest should provide me with a few hours of entertainment and learning.  To make things slightly more useful, I’ve created a new public list on IMDb, in which I’ve put all the recommended movies in the order that they were recommended.

Which ones have you seen and which ones do you recommend I start with?

Update: There were quite a few critical comments to the article, suggesting even more documentaries that should have made the list but didn’t.  I decided to keep the original list intact and created an additional list – Must-see documentaries. I’ve put most of the suggestions from the comments into this list and I will keep updating it with other documentaries which I get recommendations for.

Day in brief – 2011-09-06

  • Shared: SSH configuration: single host, multiple users. http://t.co/0PxJ0Gj #
  • Laughing at: 15 Funny Exam Answers http://t.co/HGXpBrm #
  • The only time I'm happy that my mouse is not wireless is when I accidentally drop it off the table. #
  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/Hkc2Zqb Oscilaciones de la cuerdas de una Guitarra #
  • @steverubel I wish more publishers had such balls. we'd live in a different world then. #
  • @titanas @gmail dude, start using a real OS already and stop worrying about such nonsense as viruses. :-) #
  • @ektagon good idea. I tried to push a couple of companies to do that, bur they turned out to be too conservative. :-) #