Sebbie on the Webbie

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

We all love Facebook, and a lot of us like Twitter, and now there’s the next one – I believe; FriedEggs.com. It’s kind of a combination of the two, and also updates both of the above if you wish it to.

Compared to Facebook

If you’re like me, you like to limit who sees your Facebook, but it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have anything public to say. That is where Twitter or FriedEggs would come in. If you want to address a larger audience and get followers that are not your personal friends, this is it.

Compared to  Twitter

You will have more room to write, should you need it, and you can add multi media straigth into your message, kind of like on Facebook. You can also comment on a… an Egg? directly, or just “like it” just like on Facebook.

Compared to Both

You get a front page list of the latest eggs with and without photos/videos. I really truly miss this feature on both Twitter and Facebook, but the Eggs has it. I really like Fried Eggs as an addition or link to both Facebook and Twitter.

Follow my eggs. XD

As a collector, I of course follow the keyword “Barbie” on Twitter. The last few weeks it’s been all about the freshly released Computer Engineer Barbie. Naturally, as the web is full of geeks, they are impressed by the new release, but at the same time hesitant to believe it would have any significant impact on children’s minds. Their concern makes me smile.

A friend of mine had the Astronault Barbie of 1985. We thought she was the most beautiful Barbie ever made, but I don’t think she ever got to the space. My fashion model Barbie, officially named Magic Moves Barbie from the same year did one session of modelling straight out of the box in Christmas ’85, but that was the last of it. After that, she did a lot more camping than modelling. I loved that doll, but not for what was written on her box.

I think, in that regard, the Computer Engineer Barbie has a lot more chances to actually get to practise her occupation than many of her earlier name sakes did. I doubt it very much that the Presidential Candidate Barbie was campaigning much in kids plays, or that Becky the Para Olympian Barbie stayed in her wheelchair for much longer than five minutes at a time. Computer Engineering doesn’t have to take away from the play, it can actually add to it. Even though the focus of the play might be dating and doing exciting stuff, I can easily see the Computer Engineer actually popping in for some work while she’s busy with the other parts of her life. The reason being, that a lot of kids have computer engineer -parents, so they know what the heck it is about!

I don’t know about you, but I love this doll, and I’m so getting one as soon as I can get my hands on one. Even though I am 33 now, and have been obsessed with Barbie my whole life, this one is the closest to being my kind of a girl – right out of the box.

Related Blogs

• Playing House With the Drapers: The Mad Men Barbie Collection …
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• Mad Men inspires new Barbie line
• The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » “Black Barbie Sold for Less …
• Mad Men – Barbie Dolls – Coming Soon | Geekosystem
• Barbie, computer engineer « Women & Mozilla
• Mattel's Newest Doll: Computer Engineer Barbie | Open The Dialogue
• Opinion: Why Computer Engineer Barbie is Good for Women in Tech |
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• How relevant is computer engineer Barbie? – Veronica Belmont
• Mattel To Make “Mad Men” Barbies | GirlsTalkinSmack.com …
• Mattel To Produce 'Mad Men' Barbie Collectible Dolls | YouBentMyWookie
• Mattel Releases Biologically Inaccurate “Mad Men” Doll Set …

It is of general knowledge that Twitter is hard to understand. Why is it so hyped, when there’s so little to do? On Twitter, there is two things you can do to make it valuable for you: Be interested or be interesting. If you can’t be neither, there’s nothing left for you on Twitter. You can’t go on polishing your profile endlessly, nobody looks at it more than once anyway. You can’t spend your time taking tests of what type of a flower you are or which movie you should see next. You can’t spend your time posting links to your friends who will comment and “like” them out of responsibility toward you. On Twitter, you have to get to the point and get it there fast or you’ll sink into the oblivion in no time. Frankly, even if you do get to the point fast, you still sink into oblivion quite fast, and that is bad for your ego. That’s why you have to be interested in what others are saying too, in order to “get” twitter. And you have to know what interests you, and what type of people interest you, or you will randomly follow people who really are not interesting to you. Would I be so bold as to suggest that Twitter is a tool for smart people with a healthy ego..? (Not counting celebs and companies into that though.)

What people with a fragile ego will do to attempt to fool themselves into believing that they are interesting, is to follow a lot of people hoping to get a follow-back, especially those that use auto-follow tools if they spot one, and seek ways to “get thousands of followers automatically.” I doubt very much that those functions have much to do with practicality, but a lot to do with ego stroking. (I’m sure they explain it to themselves that they are doing it for business.) They are for people who don’t think their tweets will get them far enough fast enough for their own liking.

It is also quite an ego-bashing idea to believe that people would actually be interested in what you are doing right now. It won’t take you long to realize that NOBODY gives a damn about what you had for breakfast (unless you are a celebrity) and you will decide that you “don’t get” Twitter. Some people might have decided before trying it out that they don’t get Twitter, because who in their right mind would be interested in the daily activities of millions of nobodies around the world?

Twitter needs to be redefined so that people actually know what to expect of it. To me it’s a tool to broadcast 5 types of messages: Headlines, questions, one-liners, aphorisms and celebrity updates. Everything else is pretty pointless to put on Twitter. I admit I may have missed a type or two, if you can think of something else that is useful on Twitter, please do mention them in the comments!

About a year ago we were going through the process of migrating to Australia. In the process, to prove we are a genuine married couple, we wrote the last will in which we left everything to the other in case of death. However, while writing my will, I noticed a lot of quite unusual things that needed to be wrapped up in the case of my death. Like who is going to notify my online friends that I’m dead. At this point of one’s life it is pretty theoretical anyway, so it’s a safe distance from the actual event.

So I started writing down my passwords and user names for different websites I administrate and online profiles that I have, giving instructions to people in the case of my death. I wanted to make sure that my online friends and followers would not have to wonder what happened to me, but someone would be updating my profiles with a link back to my blog explaining what happened. The real life friends will be told naturally, but who’s going to tell the hundreds of people online that are waiting for you to get on Twitter finally!

So I made the Internet Instructions an appendix to the will, only stating in the will who is responsible for the updates, and that only they should be given the sealed envelope. But isn’t it quite amazing to think that these days, pretty much all of us need a press release to the world notifying what happened? After all, were still a bunch of nobodies. One of the things I put in mine, was that you have to submit my MySpace profile to MyDeathSpace.com. As chorny and hmm.. tastless as it may be, I want my update.

So who’s going to update your Twitter with the words: “If you are reading this, it means I’m dead… http://tinyurl…”

If you are serious about your online presence or otherwise just everywhere and want people to recognise you outside your normal circles, avatar is the best way to do this. Online world relies heavily on written word and images. Images, I think we all agree, draw our attention more efficiently than text. This means, that when people are reading your words, they won’t necessarily spend time memorising your name but they will probably at least take a glance at your avatar. In addition, your user name might not be always available for every website you want to join, but your avatar will be. That is why you should have a bit of a think about your avatar. What do you want people to remember you by? There are some types of avatars that tend to give a negative impression of you at first glance:

Baby photo on man’s avatar. Probably the last time any woman told him he was cute.

Baby photo on woman’s avatar. A stay at home mother who has nothing else to talk about apart from her kids. (Probably uses a screen name such as “MomOf2″.)

Just the eye. Seeks a deep contact with people while trying to remain anonymous and appear soulful. Kind of works but is quite unoriginal and thus utterly forgettable.

Popular cartoon character – A male who is trying the “boyish charm” angle although it has never worked for anyone. We’ve seen enough of Vinnie the Pooh and friends already! Original cartoon characters by the man/woman behind the avatar, such as Tony’s are encouraged though!

Disproportioned photo - An avatar of a casual Internet user who hasn’t yet found the delights of Photoshopping. (Has uploaded a photo straight from the camera, without shaping it into a square first.)

Logo – impersonal. Is here to sell me something.

The vast majority of people prefer the picture of a person in an avatar over a logo or other graphic. People want to speak to people. If your avatar is listed amongst several others (like recent visitors list), the likelihood that you’ll get a click is higher if it’s your face in there. But, sometimes you need to put that logo up there. Another thing is, that if you’re using your photo, it gets boring after a while, and intolerable to you when you get a better photo of yourself. But the problem arises, that people get confused if you change your avatar. They won’t remember who you are for a while, until you say something really characteristic to yourself. I believe I found a solution to both of these problems. You are not likely to change your logo too often, right? So why not use that together with your photograph?

Here are some of my recent avatars:

See what I mean? There are elements in the avatar that stay constant while I get bored with the rest of it – me. :p This of course requires some Photoshop skills, but nothing too complicated. What do you think? If you decide to give it a go, please post a comment after uploading your new avatar to SezWho, or to Gravatar if you don’t use SezWho. (SezWho will override Gravatar on my blog.)

I’ve been actively using Twitter for about two weeks now. I’ve been reading blog posts about it, checked services, downloaded “Tweet Clients” and what not. Somehow, the short-worded world of Twitter didn’t really open up to me that easily. I tend to be wordy, as you know, so the 140 marks -limit really didn’t do it for me. But, I think I finally got the gist of it – in the bloggers point of view.

Frankly, if I had stayed on Twitter.com alone, I still wouldn’t get it. Twitter.com is very basic compared to all the services surrounding it. Who has time to hang out on one site all the time anyway? Not me – and I’m not doing anything that important. Twitter is supposed to keep you up-to-date to the minute, but who on Earth has time to stare at the public Twitter update stream to come up with something even remotely interesting? So I downloaded a couple of desktop Tweeting programs to make it easier to update and follow. But quite frankly, even that didn’t really get me much anywhere.

Then I found Tweetlater.com and their keyword alerts. It sends me an email summary of tweets that have certain keyword in them, every 4 hours. I can quickly read it through to see what people are saying right now about social networking for example. Most of the time, they don’t say anything that interesting. It only takes that one tweet though, that will spark your interest and get you somewhere. The thing is that the bulk of bloggers don’t say anything interesting or helpful either. Most of the time, they write the same stuff over and over – 10 steps to successful blogging, 13 great tutorials, 15 rules to great web design blah blah blah, heard it all before and wrote about it already. It takes you a lot longer to check if a blog has any useful information to you, or anything you’d find remotely entertaining, rather than read through a bunch of Tweets.

Sure, you may miss a great article on Twitter because of a badly structured tweet, but if the tweet is good, chances are that the blogger can actually write – something that you can’t take granted these days. Being witty and to the point in 140 marks or less is a good test for your self-expression skills.
You’ll also be able to quite quickly put your finger on the latest trends. For example, I have a keyword “Finland” on my keyword alert. It took me one summary to learn, that postcrossing is huge in Finland. About 70% of Tweets concerning Finland were about writing a postcard to Finland or receiving a postcrossing-card from Finland. (After I learned this, I told Tweetlater to ignore messages about cards thank you very much.)

During the last 2 weeks I found out that promoting your blog on Twitter is more effective than StumbleUpon – at least if you’re a small-timer like myself. Stumble relies on thumbs up and your readers stumbling your posts, while Twitter… You tweet it, and if you’re lucky (good) someone will retweet it, because it’s easy. It takes about half a second compared to properly stumbling it (for the first time). My advice: If you have those share-buttons on your blog and you had to choose only one, choose Twitter.

Another important thing to know as a blogger, is that you can automatically tweet your blog posts by using TwitterFeed. In addition, there are few services that will update your Twitter status, but a word of warning… Avoid loops! I went tweet-rss crazy myself, and added every feed I could think of to every service I could, and ended up having the same update appear first on Facebook, which updated Twitter, which updated Facebook, which updated Twitter… And so forth. You don’t want to annoy your followers by doing that! I was lucky nobody reported me as a spam bot before I realised what was happening!

The most awesome thing about Twitter is that it is actually very social. A lot of other social networks could easily just drop the “social” off and be more accurate. Because there’s nothing else to do on Twitter than send messages to people and read them, you won’t get side tracked by millions of applications and editing your profile all the time. How many of you confess to staring at their own profile page thinking what else to add, while hardly ever visiting other people’s profiles? Twitter has stripped everything else off the menu and sticks with the main thing: Socialising. On Twitter, reading other people’s content is even more rewarding than sending out your own. That’s just fantastic.

And for some reason, hearing “follow me on Twitter” isn’t nearly as irritating as the normal “add me as a friend” even though you can’t possibly know who I am. Twitter is public by definition, so following thousands of people is completely allowed, unlike on many other social networking sites. So, follow me on Twitter, only if you want, of course.