Scoble’s Secret to Twitter – I call it ‘flow’

Flow

I completely dig Scoble’s method of using Twitter. I’ve been wanting to consume mass tweets and watch information pass…  It’s simply not possible to ‘flow’ when you’re using apps like Twitterific and only follow a hundred people (this setup is great for smaller numbers).

I’d been using Twitterific for a while, but it was clunky and limited to an update every few minutes. This required scrolling backwards in time and seeing what people had written as I broke one hundred friends. It was neither real-time or indicitive of a large enough audience.

Twitter supports XMPP (Jabber/GTalk). I’ve set up Adium with a GTalk account and switched my Twitter connections to update to the IM account. This has made it so all tweets are in real-time. Suddenly Twitter seems terribly slow as tweets scroll by as a trickle.

I’ve gone from a hundred to five hundred connections and it still seems slow – I’ll keep growing it. The major drawback to this setup is that you can’t consume it at all times. Your phone would blow up if you had this traffic going to SMS (it’d be great if Twitter offered separate SMS and IM settings). My personal preference is to follow the flow in the mornings during RSS reading and in the evenings while writing a blog post or other catch-up activities.

Wild thought… I wonder if the number of simultanious connections in the ‘flow’ will become a sign of one’s intelligence?

Keeping an organized workflow in Safari

Cereal

Rather than letting long must-read articles interrupt my flow, I’m using Safari and tabs to keep things organized. Lifehacker got me thinking about this with their Firefox Serial Flow article, but I find it even more efficient in Safari (and I’m on the whole WebKit thing).

I simply keep a separate window and open pages I want to review later in a new tab within that window. Periodically I save the set of tabs (Bookmarks -> Add Bookmark For These X Tabs…) to a bookmark, “ToRead”, in the Bookmarks Bar. One click on that tab opens all the ToRead bookmarks when I have to time to review.

Average Twitter Age – Demographics

Age Demographics from Quantcast – Twitter.com

On Wednesday my wife and I were out at Flavor by Thai Pepper, enjoying some insanely good food and drink. Two conversations took place in adjacent booths, too loud to ignore.

In the booth behind Galina a group of late-twenty-somethings laughed loudly about replacing the contents of a box of chocolates with rocks and giving it as a gift (WTF?!) Behind me, a senior couple dropped the “T” word.

You don’t usually hear random people, especially outside of the tech community, drop Twitter in conversation. However, that’s been changing

“Twitter? What’s that?” she asked, laughing.

“It’s this web site where you answer a question, ‘What are you doing right NOW?’ – You send a message on your phone, ‘I’m standing in line for a latte’ to everyone.” he described, emphasizing NOW.

She said she was fearful of a greater and greater generational gap forming, to which he disagreed and assured her they could keep up.

Their convo reminded me of a post by Zena Weist, in which she unscientifically found the average age to be ~37. My own findings were similar but I didn’t keep track of demographics.

Most folks on Twitter are not in the high-school contingent, and judging by more scientific methods the average age is indeed in the mid-thirties. 48% fall in to the 18-34 range, but 21% are over 50. That’s a huge difference compared to Facebook and MySpace having only 8% being over 50.

Don’t let age come between you and your tweets…

Follow @sol on Twitter

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Apple iPhone Tech Talks – NYC – raw notes on new web app features

iPhone Tech Talk t-shirt NYC frontiPhone Tech Talk t-shirt NYC back

Attending an Apple Tech Talk at the Millennium Hotel New York was a good use of time today. The evangelism team, despite evangelizing, is highly competent and I came away satisfied with decent knowledge consumption.

The event had a massively different feel than John Resig described last year.

There was a lot of JavaScript hate by attendees (“blah blah… GWT is the only thing we trust… blah blah JavaScript is a stupid language…”).

This year it was all about at least 50% about the web. Apple has exposed touch events, multi-touch events, gestures, location based services, and rotation to javascript both for polling and callbacks. Some of the credit for the newfound excitement around Safari and iPhone web apps should probably be shared with WebKit’s HTML5 (file caching and SQLite)… All of which are supported in the iPhone 2.2 OS release.

Over the next few days I’ll have more details on specific highlights. For now, here are my condensed raw notes.Continue Reading

Microbailouts – the economy as a freeway

An analogy I like to use for the economy and bailout(s) is a busy freeway. We’re all out there driving, going our own speeds, choosing our lanes. Sometimes you’re in the fast lane, sometimes the slow.

Traffic is always there. You can hop lanes and try to beat the overall flow, but the speed of others affects your progress.

Accidents happen. A lane or two gets blocked as a result. Cars following in the same lane as the crash are stopped and require a merge. Cars in the other lanes are still moving, but their flow is impacted as the blocked lanes attempt to merge (and rubbernecking at the carnage).

If you’re a driver in the lane of the accident, you’re stuck until you can merge to a lane of moving traffic. Your forward progress requires a merge to an adjacent lane.

The drivers in other lanes are performing microbailouts. They’re letting you in so a portion of the freeway doesn’t stagnate.