4 posts tagged “twitter”

A quick post today...
Last night I sent a text message to Twitter.  Something like this:
"Picking up all the cliche valentines day gifts for my wife."

My phone (a Mogul) automatically put an accent on the e of "cliche", (which was the correct thing to do).  I sent the message and didn't think anything of it.

Today my friend (and co-host of Whats Up with Tech -- which we'll get back to soon hopefully), Tim Fisher (@TimFisher), asked me, "What was up with that post from last night?"  Then he showed me how the message was delivered to him from Twitter:

@P@i@c@k@i@n@g@ @u@p@ @a@l@l@ @t@h@e@ @c@l@i@c@h@?@ @v@a 

It was the same way on the Twitter web site. Uuhhh, what?

The only thing I can figure is that Twitter couldn't deal with the accent on that e.  Between the @ symbols in the messed up post you can see that all the original characters are there up until the accented e which is replaced by a question mark.

So when Twittering, if your phone automatically changes standard English alphabetic characters to ones with accents, tildes, umlauts, or that backwards "c" thing under the c in Francais, and the like, you might want to undo that before sending it on to Twitter.

I have too many things I want to blog about today (an unusual concern at times and probably a good problem to have), so I'm just going to start with the first thing on my mind.

I attended the first ever Des Moines Tweetup last night.  There were about 6 of us there.  I had previously met only one: blogging evangelist Mike Sansone (@mikesansone).  Also in attendance were: Nathan T. Wright (@nathantwright), the organizer of the Tweetup; Andy Brudtkuhl (@abrudtkuhl) (I'll need to learn how to pronounce that one) who's a fellow developer and tech blogger; Mike Templeton (@miketempleton), a marketing specialist at The Members Group trying to infuse new media into the company; and Scott Phillips (@scottatdrake), who I didn't get to talk to much, but I expect I'll see him around.

Pretty much everyone who attended is a blogger of some form.  I learned much more about the Iowa blogger community than I knew previously.  Through some of their blogs and other people we discussed last night, I discovered the I-List, a list of Iowa-based bloggers being maintained by Focal Point.

We discussed how we each use Twitter and very few of us actually use text messaging, which is usually the one part about Twitter that people know about.  Some use the twitter web page, but have to refresh it every so often because it doesn't auto-refresh (something we complained about).  Others have messages routed to IM clients.  Some use twitter-specific applications like twitterrific (on the mac) or tweetr on the PC.  I'll probably install and start using tweetr pretty soon.  I currently miss out on a bunch because I only have a notifications sent to my phone via text for a handful of people I follow.  I of course have unlimited text messaging on my mobile plan.

One cool thing that happened (for me) is that several of the attendees had read that post I made yesterday about the tweetup before we got together, having never met me before.  There's something to this whole new media, blogging, social networking thing! ;)

Another outcome of the meetup for me is that I'll start using RSS more again.  Previously I got so overwhelmed that I stopped using an RSS reader altogether.  I'm going to look into Cullect, something I learned about last night that helps separate out the good stuff in your RSS reader from the noise.

Wow!  Two posts in two days.  I'm pretty sure that's a first for me (but probably not the last).  Thanks to everyone last night for the inspiration!

I recently heard about a TweetUp happening in Des Moines tonight.  I'll have to go check it out.
A Tweetup is a meeting of people that use the online social networking/microblogging tool, Twitter.

It's happening tonight at Shorty's bar in downtown Des Moines at 5:30 on Feb. 7th, 2008.  I heard about it through Nathan T. Wright of LavaRow.com. 

The way I heard about the TweetUp is because I track "Des Moines" on Twitter.  You can track any phrase you want on Twitter.  Then whenever someone sends a tweet, or twitter message, with that phrase in the message, you will get a copy of the message.  It's a great technique for finding people (at least Twitter users) who have similar interests as you.  You can track a certain phrase, then when you get a message about that topic from some random person you can start following that person, too.

Because I tracked "des moines", I got Nathan's tweet that said: "Don't forget: The first ever Des Moines TweetUp is tomorrow night (Thursday) @ Shorty's at 5:30pm! Who all is coming?".  Before that moment, I had never heard about the TweetUp (or any TweetUp for that matter).  The tweet said it was sent by nathantwright.  I then replied to Twitter with a "follow nathantwright" message and now I'm a follower of him.  Incidentally, he is now a follower of me, too.

Since I've never been to a TweetUp, I'm not sure what it will be like, but I hope and expect to meet a bunch of people interested in new media and internet technologies.  In a recent blog post, Nathan gave a shout out to Mike Sansone of Converstations, who taught me a bunch about blogging. 

Not actually knowing anyone who's going to this thing, hopefully I'll be able to find the right people.  I expect to just look for all the people text messaging.

I first heard about Twitter from Leo Laporte probably close to a year ago now.  I just never signed up.  Leo tries everything and I figured I'd give it time and see if it caught on some more.  Boy did it ever.  I just started using it about a week ago finally and I'm hooked.

Twitter is a web-based application that basically links your mobile device (phone) with SMS to a mini blog.  You send an SMS message (a "tweet") to Twitter and it posts it to your blog.  It also sends that message to the Twitter users that "follow" you.  Often, people just post an update about what they're currently doing (like your Facebook status).

Leo doesn't use it much anymore because of possible intellectual property confusion with his TWiT brand.  He talks about using Jaiku instead (pronounced like Haiku with a "J" (JI - koo), even though I think the creators are something like Danish, not Japanese).  Jaiku looks more mature and seems to have more features, but Twitter has the crowds.  So for this type of social application, it looks like Twitter's still on top (for now).

One cool thing about Twitter is that since the messages have to be short (140 characters or less), it's not that intimidating to create an entry.  Since I'm "twittering" multiple times a day, it's not that much of a stretch to create a regular blog entry (here on Vox, for example) a bit more often.

A feature they just added is the ability to track any given key phrase.  Then any time somebody made a tweet with that phrase, it would be sent to you.  Then you could find more about that person and perhaps follow them and become twitter pals.  I'll probably start tracking "Des Moines", etc. and see if I can meet some fellow Twitter users in the local area.

If you want to find me at Twitter, my username is just jakekerber.