New TweetDeck: more mainstream, less flexible

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

The TweetDeck desktop client has seen a major overhaul, with a move away from Adobe Air and a whole new approach to accounts and feeds. It’s all very snazzy, with a blue theme and some very welcome touches: I’ve long loved Tweetlist’s highlighted usernames and links, so they’re very welcome here, and tweet boxes that scale dynamically to the length of the tweet are long overdue. That’s the positives covered.

On to the not-so-positives. The tweet box now pops up and steals the focus until you close it. A small change, you might think, but I regularly half-write tweets while I keep reading those of others, then react as I go. Sometimes I leave a tweet for ten minutes to decide whether it should really be sent (it usually shouldn’t). This prevents that, and it’s totally unnecessary. You also can’t send a tweet using Enter, and if you think you can go to Settings and change that, you can’t – it’s been pared back to the idiot-proof basics.

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Twitter sparks London riots – #yeahright

Monday, August 8th, 2011

If you believe newspapers like the Sun and Daily Mail, the rioting in London over the weekend was orchestrated and organised on Twitter, with the Mail, for example, claiming the “violence was fanned by Twitter as picture of burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times”.

Really? So what sparked the riots of three decades ago? A ZX Spectrum and a fleet of Raleigh Grifters?

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Gatecrasher Google has clout to make friends

Friday, August 5th, 2011

Google+ has been gaining headlines this week over how quickly people have signed up for the social-networking strand of Google’s online empire.

Figures from web-traffic researcher ComScore suggest the service had reached 25 million users in just a month since launch – not bad for a project that remains in beta.

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Just how popular is Google+?

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

We keep getting told that Google+ is Facebook’s biggest threat, that it’s on the rise faster than a 1990s house price and the only way is up. We’re told it already has 10 million profiles – or is it 20 million?

But is Google+ really catching on? I mean really, as in outside this little tech industry bubble we love to confine ourselves to? (more…)

Google+: big companies can cause big problems

Monday, July 25th, 2011

In its first three weeks of availability, Google+ reportedly attracted 20 million users. That’s a pretty impressive launch – especially since it’s been accompanied by what can only be described as a negative marketing campaign. Even as millions of users have poured onto the service, Google has insisted on calling it a “limited field trial”. At this rate, by the time they officially make it available to the public, everyone will already be on it.

Everyone, that is, except for Mr Matthew Brock of Swiss Cottage. I have it on good authority that the gentleman in question, an old friend of mine, is giving Google+ a miss. (more…)

Is the new Twitter Tsar a Ryan Giggs fan?

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

Twitter is having another one of those ‘I’m Spartacus!’ moments. The last one was when the powers that be decided someone making a joke post about blowing up Robin Hood Airport was a potential terrorist and prosecuted the poor sod.

The Twittersphere responded by retweeting the posting in question, on the basis that the police couldn’t arrest everyone. The same thing has now happened following the ridiculous situation where everyone and their dog knows the identity of a footballer who stands accused of doing what footballers seem to do when not kicking a ball around and earning obscene amounts of money.

An MP even used his Parliamentary privilege to suggest the footballer in question was Ryan Giggs. Something the masses on Twitter have been doing for the past fortnight or so, with tens of thousands of tweets and retweets naming the Manchester United player.

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Berners-Lee: Stop foaming at the mouth, Twitter

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the web, but that doesn’t mean he loves everything that’s on it — and that includes Twitter and Facebook.

Sir Tim has a well-documented aversion to social networking, previously describing the walled gardens of Facebook and LinkedIn as one of the threats to the web. But those who prefer the more open-natured Twitter over Facebook shouldn’t feel favoured by the web-creator’s sporadic tweets — he doesn’t have kind words for the nature of updates being shared.

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BackupAssist and a neat U-turn on Twitter

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Ah, the power of the accursed Twitter! A few minutes ago, @zensoftware tweeted that its Backup Assist Version 4 product was at end of life.

The BackupAssist website says: “Version 4 of BackupAssist was released in May 2007 and we have enjoyed providing you with support for this version over the past few years. We’ve made many improvements and additions to BackupAssist since then, including the release of BackupAssist v5 in October 2008.

“After releasing BackupAssist v6 last year, and adding even more functionality to the software, we decided that it was time to hang up the boots for version 4 in early 2011. While you can continue using BackupAssist v4, we will no longer be providing technical support for this version and you can no longer purchase upgrades for any of your version 4 licenses; you will instead need to purchase new BackupAssist v6 licenses at the standard price.”

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Deck.ly: the TweetDeck update that breaks Twitter

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Twitter. Some people love it, some people don’t see the point. Others, like me, don’t see the point, make a song and dance about deleting their account, then sheepishly create a new one months later and admit that everyone else was right. Not my problem, Twitter must have got better in the interim.

But I think we can all agree that Twitter’s appeal lies in its short and sweet format. The 140-character limit is what makes “following” someone so appealing: it keeps things snappy, streamlined and often surprisingly creative. Even the most interesting Twitter user will post tweets that aren’t for you; the key is that every tweet is short and sweet and as easily skippable as any other.

At least it was, until a light bulb pinged on above the head of some bright spark at TweetDeck. Yes, its new deck.ly feature lets you keep typing beyond that 140th character. Instead of a warning red – you’re droning on… – you get an encouraging green: keep typing, you really are fascinating! (more…)

Embarrassing first tweets of our time

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Whenever someone follows me on Twitter (@timdanton since you ask) I always take a look at their profile and their recent tweets to see if they’d be interesting to follow themselves. (98% of the time I decide against, especially if you’re family.)

What struck me this morning when I took a gander at someone’s Twitter feed, who’d only tweeted around 15 times, is that first tweet. The “hello world” kind of tweet of someone who doesn’t quite know what to say.

Which inspired me to take a look at the first tweets of some of the world’s most famous “tweeters”… (more…)