twitter

Today is the day of Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC keynote. Very exciting! But it's a sad day for Twitter fans who are watching the service, already suffering from weeks of intermittent problems, collapse under the load of people who are tying to use it to talk about the Stevenote.

There are at least two initiatives for people, like me, who can't just walk away from our old friend: Summize and Twiddict.

Summize is a Twitter search engine. It can read what's happening on Twitter and is a bit easier to deal with than the intermittent Twitter.com. … Read more

This year many riders in the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's annual 7-day AIDS LifeCycle bike ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles were toting iPhones - tucked away in their spandex or in their Bento boxes on their bikes.

The iPhone was the mose commonly spotted PDA, but man riders had Blackberry devices too. In any case, having a PDA was a great way to keep up with news and to send out updates about our trek's progress. Each day the Ride featured 2500+ riders cycling more than 70-100-plus mile routes. … Read more

Microblogging service Twitter is a central hub of geek chatter, and if there's anything geeks love to chatter about, it's Apple news.

Consequently, Twitter has bolstered its servers in anticipation of Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), at which healthy doses of Steve Jobs announcements are expected.

"We are expecting approximately 10 times our normal daily traffic so we've made some plans to accommodate this dramatic surge," a post on the company blog explained. Last year at WWDC, the service crashed--as it's often prone to do.

In an extreme situation, the service can go … Read more

Twitter went from being the ultra-hip, high-flying service to semi-defeated in the span of just a few months.

I personally went from nay-sayer to enthusiast in the blink of an eye. I enjoyed seeing what my friends were doing and found that most of us could communicate effectively within the 140 characters.

One of the first guys who I followed was Rafe Needleman, who is a friend (and my editor in the past) and is a very informed consumer of technology. Rafe is calling for Twitter to shut down and remodel. While that sounds great in theory, it's unfortunately … Read more

As I write this, Amazon.com, like Twitter, is offline. Amazon's outage is the big news Friday morning. But what of Twitter?

I used to love Twitter. But the site's pogo status--it's up! it's down! it's up again!--is driving me away. I've removed the Twitter sidebar from the Webware home page, and I've stopped religiously updating it. Because I figure its users, and my followers, are learning to not trust it, to not bother visiting the site since it's likely to be down when they visit. Chances are fewer people are … Read more

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

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

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

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.

See also:

Gillmor Gang: Inside FriendFeed

Jeremiah Owyang: What FriendFeed's Micromeme means to you, brands and the Web