Yesterday, December 1st, was a World AIDS Day. A lot of sites on the web were trying to increase awareness about AIDS by switching to red-colored desings and such. One of the web sites apparently was Twitter. And guess what? Today morning Twitter is dead (again). Here is a screenshot of their red design from Google Cached version:
I guess AIDS is dangerous not only to humans, but to web applications as well.
Twitter is finalizing the support for groups, which they call Lists. This is probably the most useful feature people have been requesting for ages. If you currently follow a lot of people, web interface lacks pretty much any organizational functionality. That’s one of the reasons for so many Twitter applications and third-party services. But with this upcoming lists functionality, you’ll be able to group people into friends, colleagues, companies, and whatever else you’d want.
Also, see this blog post in Web Work Daily, which explains how publicly viewable list will be useful as a networking tool.
I’ve been quite silent on this blog recently. That’s because I was away on vacations. I travelled to Germany and Belgium for lots of excellent food, beers, and music.
I am currently sorting through about 700 pictures that I took, as well as going through my Twitter notes to blog the experience. Wait a bit and it will all come online.
In the meantime, you can browse through my Twitter updates, which will give you an idea of what it was like for me. By the way, I will also enable daily tweet digest, cause I have a feeling that a lot of them get lost, while there is too much silence on the blog.
Stay tuned…
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…