Thoughts on Twitter

I’ve been using Titter now for almost two months and find it to be the most useful social tool out there. It has an amazing ability to allow people to connect that would otherwise never communicate. I don’t post very much to my account but always have a client, Twitterific, running on my laptop. I also have Twitterfon installed on my iPhone. Being able to check Twitter while mobile is surprisingly the most useful.

I follow a couple of Twitter feeds for transit updates in Toronto, @ttcupdates and @ttcu_community. @ttcupdates is an official feed from the TTC and @ttcu_community is a user feed that aggregates everything with a #ttcu meta tag. Both of these feeds have saved me time and aggravation by informing me of problems on the system that I can then avoid.

The only annoying part is that spammers are now creating fake accounts and then following people. While not a big problem it does highlight some growing pains that Twitter is experiencing.

The platform has a huge amount of potential for both individuals and companies a like. It will be interesting to see how Twitter the company will be able to monatize the service. I wonder how long until Google or a similar company tries to buy them.

Twitter

I created a Twitter account about thirty minutes ago. The concept of Twitter seemed a little daft to me when the service started but today I read an interesting piece by Wil Wheaton that convinced me otherwise. I made the assumption that it’s used for opinions that you want to quickly express or the “what are you doing now” post. Wheaton made the interesting point that it’s very effective as a stream of consciousness medium. All those quirky thoughts that are only good for a moment and generally shared with others when they are around. Well with Twitter, they are always around and so humours moments from your life can quickly and easily be shared with those that are interested.

The novelty of this will either quickly disappear (probably due to frustration over the iPhone app I’m using) or I will become a mad micro blogger. Quirky ideas is one of the reasons I started this blog but quickly discovered that it is not a very good avenue to express those thoughts. This is primarily due to me forgetting things before I get back to my computer. No, I don’t like the WordPress app for the iPhone.

So if you wish to follow my quirks and odd ball humour, you can find me as @lcoker on Twitter. I almost took the account name @asspunch because it was available and pretty funny.

National Film Board of Canada

The NFB has put a tonne of their catalogue online at their web site.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one of our national treasures. It’s fantastic that they have decided to share it with everyone.

EDIT: It seems that their link id’s may not be entirely correct. The video I tried to link to was “The Cat Came Back” but it seems to be “Universe”.

EDIT2: I tried using a different link that shows up on the page instead of the one inside the player. We’ll see if this one is correct.

EDIT3: The embedded video is now the correct one and I’ve submitted a bug report to the NFB.