Monday, July 28th, 2008
There is a great post by Jason Hiner on TechRepublic if you love Twitter and are looking at other tools to make you a power user. I personally find it very interesting how many of these tools are popping each month. It seems like everyone is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.
Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream. A two page article on Twitter in USA Today by Jefferson Graham on 7/20/08 proved just that with success stories from the LA Fire Department, NASA and JetBlue.
It is interesting to see where Twitter ends up, if they can overcome their performance issues and if they can truly go mainstream. There was a day when only a few knew about Google. Will the day come when we all know about Twitter?
Monday, April 28th, 2008
On the train ride into Indigio, I read an interesting story on CNN. A Grad Student used twitter to free himself from an Egyptian jail.
If you have not heard about this story it is worth a read.
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Sunday, February 24th, 2008
Check out TweetWords. It is a great game that combines the fun of word play games like Scrabble and your addiction of Twitter. However, you do not have to be on Twitter or a tweeter to play.
For those unfamiliar with Twitter it is a micro-blogging site that I compare to instant messaging to hundreds or thousands of people all at once.
For those of you unfamiliar with Scrabble, where the hell have you been? You know how to find this blog, but never heard of Scrabble – really? Please stop reading and go to Target and find the game Scrabble. You need to start at square one. The game TweetWords is too advanced for you, sorry. 
So back to TweetWords. The basic premise of the game is that each week you are given a challenge to create words. It may be nouns or in the case of this week, it is creating the longest word. Using the basic per letter scoring similar to Scrabble, where each letter has a point value you try to create your five best words each day.
It sounds easy right? Well, the part with Twitter comes in that makes it more challenging. The more popular your word is in the Twitter public time line, the more bonus points you receive. So the more often other people are tweeting a word you enter, the higher your score. For example, “twitter” itself is always a popular word in the Twitter public time line so that would not give a lot of points for the length of a word or the value of each letter, but would give points based on popularity. However, a word like “zygodactylous” would score huge for length and the value of each letter with a “Z” and two “Ys”, but would not be something people commonly tweet about, so it would not score much there.
So who is the mastermind behind this fun game? That is the best part, it was created by our own Ryan Hadley, who is a Systems Administrator/IT Specialist in Indigio’s IT Department. He did the whole thing in his spare time based on his love of games and fascination with Twitter. Please do Ryan a solid and check it out. If you like it, play it and share the love by passing it along to your friends.
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
First, I found Twitter, thanks to co-workers here at Indigio. I quickly became addicted once I mixed Twitter with my BlackBerry.
Then, I found the Twitter API. I HAD to do something with it. So, one night I started to pull down the twitter public timeline, break each post up by words, and insert each word in to a MySQL Database. I fooled with this data for a while trying to get an idea. Pulled the top users @replied to in 24 hours, tried pulling the top websites posted in 24 hours. None of it was too interesting.
Another night, while drinking, I thought of fantasy sports games. And how horrible I am at them because the only sport I like is foosball. So why not bet on words used per day, instead of who hit the most touchdowns at the Detroit Red Wings game?
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Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
This is a great posting that shows solid, practical ways to use Twitter to promote your brand and blog. It was written by Darren Rowe at ProBlogger. This posting shows how Twitter is evolving past chatter to become an amazing tool.
If you do not read ProBlogger.net by Darren Rowe, you should. I even follow him on Twitter. He is brilliant and what I like best of all, provides real examples of ways to improve any blog.
