All is Fair in Love and Twitter The origins of Twitter are steeped in drama, betrayal and intrigue. Why the Government Never Gets Tech Right HealthCare.gov is just one of a number of major government tech projects that have failed. Here’s why, and how it can be fixed. Why didn’t the White House use WordPress? Five of the 14 states running their own exchanges use WordPress, with much greater success than HealthCare.
The Family That Tweets Together Stays Together [NPR: Shots] Silicon Valley’s All Twttr [GigaOM] The terrorist as rock star [Dave Fargo] The Problem With Medium [Medium] Mission Creep: When Everything Is Terrorism [The Atlantic]
A few months ago Twitter finally turned on the ability for users to download their entire archive of tweets. It’s been a feature many power users have been longing for, and Twitter did a nice job with implementation. Rather than simply giving the user a JSON or XML dump, they build what amounts to be a self-contained web app of your entire tweet history. It actually doesn’t even need a server - it’s just a bunch of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that your browser can handle all on its own.
I got a tweet this morning from a Twitter account I didn’t even know existed called TwBirthday. The service apparently tracks when you signed up for Twitter, and messages you on your Twitter “birthday” - kind of a neat idea. @cconover Happy 4th TwBirthday! You've been around since 21 October 2007! http://t.co/tf5ugZgL — TwBirthday (@TwBirthday) October 21, 2011 Does this give me free reign to be a precocious and finicky toddler on the Internet?
As you may or may not have heard, a cobra in the Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo escaped from its habitat over the weekend. The Bronx Zoo has taken precautions to avoid the possibility of visitors encountering the snake, and they believe it’s still in the Reptile House, so it’s not a huge deal. Still, there’s a lot of comedy to be found in the situation, and somebody has apparently taken to starting the latest Twitter sensation around it.
I recently learned of a clever plugin for WordPress that embeds tweets in an attractive, fully functional manner into a Wordpress post with just tweet URL. It’s called Blackbird Pie, and it appears to work really well. All you have to do is install the plugin & it adds a button in the native editor in WordPress. Click it, paste the URL to the tweet you want to include, and it does the rest.
In the early days of social networking (read: 2005) when it was starting to come mainstream, I was a skeptic. A couple of my friends had MySpace accounts & took great pride in customizing them and distributing their MySpace URLs. I thought it was a waste of time, and was still sitting behind the privacy curtain judging MySpace as a place for emo kids & pedophiles to hang out. To be honest, I still maintain that particular opinion about MySpace, but that’s irrelevant.
On recommendation/action of @AsianMartin the Twitter hashtag #BMWMonday, which has been used to connect a group of BMW enthusiasts on Twitter, is being renamed/regrouped under the new hashtag #BMWBunch. His explanation was the following: There are other days than Monday, therefore I am labeling the #BMWMonday crowd the #BMWbunch , if ya'll don't mind. Pass it along. — Martin G. (@AsianMartin) March 22, 2010 So…I’m passing it along. It’s a good point and a good idea, so let’s run with it.
I’ve created a new Twitter account dedicated to all things BMW relating to me. You can find it at @conoverbmw. I’ll be using this Twitter account in conjunction with this blog, and to post anything I find or do involving BMW, including finding and propagating other BMW-related Twitter accounts. Update: My BMW Twitter account is no longer active. I decided that it was counter productive to compartmentalize my various interests on Twitter, so I’ve consolidated back to my original, primary Twitter account.
Peter Mello over at Sea-Fever found a service that translates whatever ye type into scurvy pirate shout. It gunna also message your scurvy pirate message directly to twittArrr, PirateSpace, or send an e-mail. I can see myself usin’ this a lot, fer no reason at all. Avast!
