my first day on twitter (may 9, 2008), i posted this wired article that refers to it as a social sixth sense… i try to not spend a lot of time in front of my computer, but i have tried a few different desktop solutions to see my entire twitter stream go by in order to keep getting that ambient awareness/social sixth sense on a broader scale… but, it just isn’t the same when it isn’t hitting my phone… even when i was getting a hundred tweets a day, they just got glanced at and deleted, i didn’t read them in detail… but, i found that when someone mentioned a subject around me, i had some grasp on it… i was suddenly somewhat aware of subjects i don’t subscribe to news items about in my rss reader… i was getting a wide range awareness of what was going on in the collective mind, as it were…

btw, what i was and am lacking hat the wired article deals with is info about people i actually know in person and i was/am really looking forward to that aspect of twitter… the only person i know irl and on twitter (a ‘twitter twinner’, to adapt a concept from stephen king) is my sis-in-law in vegas… i somehow rarely have geek friends and anyone i know, if i mention twitter, they don’t know what it is… but, i figure the flow will reverse direction eventually if i keep following all the alamo twitterers…
if they don’t throw me out first for all the nasty things i say about their town :P

I tried to get one of my friends to join and he said he wasn’t at a point in his life where he could use twitter. Huh?

there are so many people i wish would get on twitter… people i don’t talk to often, especially… there are people back home i haven’t talked to in months and if they were on twitter, we’d have that wireframe knowledge of each other’s lives and wouldn’t feel so distant… and, if i bother to pitch it to them, i get a wide variety of equally ridiculous responses, often involving about how they’re already on myspace and friendster and whatever and they don’t want to join another site, proving they don’t get it…

and mobile vs. desktop, yeah, i love the stream of links and such and have to govern info overload – i said in my post i follow 100 and i noticed it is actually 137 and oh so many of them are from people/sites i’d love to read every post from… but, as i try to spend less and less time at my computer, i have to not even see my twitter stream because it will make me spend more time… again, i almost wish there were two services – one for the twitter-they-way-it-was-invented and the other for twitter-the-way-it-has-become… i have the same problem with tv – i haven’t had cable/satellite/whatever in years – not because i didn’t like it, but because i never did much else but watch tv! i just keep adding more and more interesting twitterers and, if i had them all hit my phone, they’d never stop and to see them any other way requires sitting at my computer…
i would love to have it as like a streaming picture on the wall or something :) i have been loving twitscoop, just seeing at a glance, what is trending on twitter right now… the only desktop app i have that displays it, though, is tweetdeck and it totally clashes with my desktop :P i have been hoping to be able to script a widget for rainmeter with the javascript embeded in it… but, uh, i sincerely doubt rainmeter is capable of this…

I’m curious whether the people you’ve been following have given you (indirectly) ideas of stuff to do.

erm… heh, uh, no… i guess i haven’t… admittedly, i have been having my doubts about this experiment of listening to alamogordo think… but, i have only been doing it for a month or two, i’m trying to be patient… surely, something interesting happens in this town… now, it is kinda’ nifty when the house shakes and i get a twitter telling me there will be more today… and i occasionally get the “i’m at wal-mart” when i happen to be at wal-mart and i know there is someone in here right now that i could say hi to and we know a few things about each other and say “ah, so, you’re the one who” dot dot dot, but i never have…
i dunno… i have some pretty putrid things to say about this town… i spent my teen years here and vowed never to return… and so i often have this attitude that this is just what happens when you follow twitters of people in alamogordo — you get bored… the whole idea of the fascination of looking through webcams sort of falls apart if the webcam in question is just pointing at something boring… but, i’m trying to see the people here as real people and not some caricature i have drawn in my mind that filters what i see… trying not to be so nasty in my opinion of them :P

anyway, i think my comment is longer than the post i wrote, so, i’ll abruptly end it here…

“twitter is one of those things that someone can describe for an hour to you but until you actually have it, you can’t really see the point”

Absolutely. I’m hearing this a lot and experienced it myself as well. I tried to get one of my friends to join and he said he wasn’t at a point in his life where he could use twitter. Huh?

“my cam was never off but the software i used had a mode to just take a snap and upload it, rather than have it on all the time… well, twitter is like that snap-not-stream mode…”

This. Also, I saw an article yesterday from NYT that said that this technology is the equivalent of how when you are in close proximity with someone, like at work, you pick up a lot of “ambient awareness” information about them that you wouldn’t otherwise. The reference to that is on page 2 (out of 6). (I didn’t read the whole thing; too long.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?_r=2

mobile vs not: I use the mobile to update when I’m out. If I’m out for the day I’ll turn on mobile updates. The problem is that when twitter gets too many outgoing sms messages in the queue they DROP updates. Not cool. So I have to re-read them all on the computer anyway. Since I’m at the computer almost all the time anyway I just follow it there. But like I said in twitter, if there was a good twitter client for centro that got its data from the website and show new messages over that, that would be cool too. Also, lots of people link to stuff from tweets and those are more for the computer environment. Although, I prefer plain old tweets and not links to (too many) articles to read. It’s 140 characters for a reason.

I’m curious whether the people you’ve been following have given you (indirectly) ideas of stuff to do.