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Is Twitter bringing out the twit in you?

Wallowing in my neophytical state with respect to technology, I remain fascinated by the demons of humanity that take new inventions and use them to bolster their own deficiencies.

Last night, my news.com handler, in an attempt to thrust me into the bosom of Techworld, led me by my shortest hairs to an elegant launch reception for Charlene Li's book "Groundswell", a measured and soothing work about the Twilight Zone that is social media.

There I encountered surprisingly well-dressed people, some of whom appeared to be famous and others who told me they were.

I also … Read more

Disney World preparation 2.0

SAN FRANCISCO--It's hard for me to believe, but in only three days, I'll be hopping on a plane and heading east for the beginning of Road Trip 2008, my journey through the American South to write about and photograph many of the region's most interesting destinations.

One of the very first stops will be Disney World, in Orlando, Fla., and over the last few days, I've noticed that there are at least a couple of new applications that can help people like me get ready for the total immersion experience that is a visit to Florida'… Read more

NASA spawns smart twin in 'Second Life'

First it started tweeting, then it bore a twin.

NASA is trying all manner of Web 2.0 software to promote its science to the tech-savvy crowd. Months ago, the media director at the space agency's Jet Propulsion Lab began sending out Twitter messages, or 140-character digital notes, about the Phoenix Lander mission to Mars. Now, NASA has created a so-called cybertwin for the Phoenix rover in the virtual world Second Life.

Even though the term "cybertwin" sounds very Web 1.0, the technology is based on techniques in artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing. Instead … Read more

FriendFeed summaries coming soon

Former Googler and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor in this video offers his views on Twitter and describes the new summarization feature coming to FriendFeed soon. Taylor said he was not interested in cloning Twitter, but in improving FriendFeed's communications tools. The next major FriendFeed improvement is an algorithm that processes signals from inputs, such as comments and "likes," to surface the best-shared items from a user's set of friends.

Plurk: Like Twitter, in good and bad ways

Twitter's recent reliability issues and downtime have left a hole in the nanoblog market, to the extent that such a market actually exists. Among the bloggerati, FriendFeed is filling in the vaccuum and could become the new Twitter. It's got a good feedback system and it also has features that make finding and adding friends very easy. And FriendFeed reads in Twitter content, so users can have the best of both worlds.

Now there's an even newer Twitter clone: Plurk (about the name). Its big advantage is its user interface. You get a slick timeline view of … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 736: Plurk that Plurkin' Facebook

Facebook comes under attack by Canadian privacy groups, but everyone's already moved on to Plurk. Er...maybe. Also: self-destructing DVDs are back! Yay! They were such a good idea the first time around, we're betting they'll be a monster hit, what with their wasteful, throwaway nature and ridiculous pricing and all. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 736

Mars lander’s robotic arm makes contact http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9956964-7.html

U.S. town tells Street View to push off http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/02/north_oaks_street_view/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9956753-7.html

Motley … Read more

If Twitter weren't bad enough, now there's open-source Twoorl

So, less than .0000000000000000001 percent of the world uses Twitter. Even fewer get any value from it. (Note: I am not among that group.)

Now, to make it even more obscure, there's a new, open-source Twitter called Twoorl. I have nothing against Twoorl (other than its a clone of a service that I already dislike), but given how narrow the Twitter network is already, Twoorl's will be even smaller.

With that said, at least now someone will be able to tweak the source code to turn Twitter into something useful. Like how about a better way to contact … Read more

Twitter: Ruby on Rails rules, but we're buckling from growth

Are Twitter's performance problems due to flimsy engineering or the choice of Ruby on Rails to build the application?

In the Twitter developer blog on Thursday, an engineer said that Ruby on Rails still rocks as a Web development platform. The service's woes are due more to a creaky architecture, he said.

Twitter performance problems have brought heaps of scorn from the busy Web 2.0 digerati. That has prompted the company to disclose more technical details like today's Q and A format blog.

Many people have questioned whether choosing to write the application using Ruby on … Read more

Twitter too big for you? Try one-word-wonder Adocu

Twitter clones have been aplenty since the service launched in mid-2006. Many have come out offering more, foregoing some of the simplicity that made Twitter popular to begin with (see Poodz and Pownce). However, one that's just cropped up, called Adocu, is almost a joke, ditching the 160-character cap and only limiting messages to whatever you can fit inside of one (sometimes giant) word.

Users are encouraged to string multiple words together. You can fit nearly whatever you want as long as there are no spaces. OK, however, are dashes, apostrophes, commas, and periods--meaning you can add some order … Read more

I just got off the TwitterFone...

Let's say you are so busy, you don't even have time to type in your Twitters. Then you might want to take a look at TwitterFone, which lets you, literally, phone it in. You talk. It Twitters.

I tried it and found voice recognition surprisingly good. It got my name wrong, but I've been called worse. I suspect that TwitterFone is using human-assisted voice recognition (see ReQall), which would not be an untenable strategy if the product actually generated revenue. And on that part of the equation, I'm stumped, unless TwitterFone is getting a per-call bounty … Read more