twitter

Just when you thought that your ADD couldn't get any worse, the guys at MyHome 2.0 have built a Twittering Teddy Bear. Considering that Twitter has been historically unreliable you should be guaranteed at least a bit of quiet now and then.

I pretty much gave up on Twitter after the IM shut down and the spotty SMS...maybe if I build one of these my baby will feel a deeper link to my inner-most tweets?

Via Gizmodo

A new ZDNet blogger, Jennifer Leggio, recently interviewed Biz Stone, co-founder of the popular microblogging service Twitter. Go to ZDNet for the full interview. The following is an excerpt.

Leggio: Once Twitter stabilizes, what is next on your plate?

Stone: Our first priority is reliability, and getting that nailed is no small feat. But there are a lot of new features that our users have been asking us for. We are listening.

Q. What is the most requested feature?

A. Grouping has consistently been high on the request list and is high on the list of what we are considering. … Read more

Seesmic, which recently acquired the AIR Twitter client Twhirl (download), has shipped a new version of the software. There are minor improvements in Twitter functionality, mostly designed to keep it from requesting too many updates from the Twitter API, which produces the dreaded "limit exceeded" message if you use the app too enthusiastically. The Twitter service, which used to allow clients like Twhirl to fetch updates 60 times an hour, dropped its limit to 20/hour during the Steve Jobs keynote; it's only back at 30/hour as of this writing. Twhirl can now adjust its update … Read more

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