On Being a Twit.

I've been on Twitter for a while now -- my first Tweet was on April 1st, 2007. I didn't really get into it much at first, for two reasons: 1) I didn't see any real reason to sink large amounts of time into it, particularly since I was already blogging my random thoughts on MySpace (ugh) at the time; and 2) I know that I have a very bad tendency to sink large amounts of time into things once I get into them, even when there's no good reason for me to do so, and I did not want to fall into that trap at the time (same reason I have not, nor will I ever, get involved with World of Warcraft and the like). So my Tweets were few and far between. The fact that my job's web filters started blasting Twitter three days after my first Tweet helped, too (although now Twitter is unblocked, go figure).

Well, now I'm starting to fall into that trap. Lately the things I would like to do with my (admittedly limited) online presence have grown well beyond the limitations of MySpace and Facebook and probably even this blog, and as I'm able to sneak away more time in front of the computer (not an easy task with a toddler), it will continue to evolve. So I decided that being more involved with Twitter would be a step in that direction. Plus, it's kinda fun.

Part of my reluctance to get sucked into the vorTwex (see what I did there? It's like vortex, but unnaturally mated with Twitter) was my inability to find interesting people to follow. My followers seemed completely random until I realized that they were probably just executing a search on certain terms and following anyone whose profile included any of those terms. I didn't want to cast that broad of a net. I also didn't want to put in the time or effort towards doing it the right way (see point 1 above).

Now that I am Tweeting more of my silly little life away, I have run across a number of web applications that have made Twitter a little more useful to me. In the open spirit of the Internet, I shall share them:

Twibes allows you to hand-pick the 10 Twitterers (Tweeters?) you are following who you think deserve to have more followers. Mmm, word-of-mouth advertising.

Twittelicious is a similar service, encouraging you to submit individual Tweets or Twitter sites that you find interesting (or amusing or whatever). They're even separated into sub-groups like "Weird" and "Famous People." There should be a "Creative Profanity" section.

WeFollow is a user-generated Twitter directory. Twitterers (look, I just prefer "Twits" so I'll use that from here on in) list themselves under different categories so that other Twits can find them easily. Most popular ones bubble up to the top of the listings.

TweetScan searches Twitter and other microblogging sites for given search terms and spits out a list of all the recent Tweets (or whatever other sites call their posts) that match the terms. Great for following hundreds of conversations about waffles, for instance.

Twubble digs through your existing friends and gives you a list of other Twits you may want to follow, based on what it discovered whilst interrogating your associates.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on my mood), these services are helping me rediscover Twitter and keep it from being the next stale account that I never log into anymore (I'm looking at you, Friendster). I'm certain there are more which I haven't discovered, but there you go. Of course, now the problem I find myself running headlong into is that I have to sink more time into Twitter just to keep up with all my newfound friends. You'll recall, unless you're a turnip, that this is the reason I kind of stayed away from Twitter in the first place, treating it more as a curiosity than a vital social tool.

I've decided that I need to be more selective with my circle of chosen Twits. Now that I'm following a few companies, online magazines, news aggregates and such, it occurs to me that it makes no sense to do so. I see no advantage to following these entities' Tweets that can't be gained with a plain ol' RSS feed reader. There is, however, one major disadvantage: the sheer volume of these Tweets makes it so that I have to scroll through multiple pages of material just to catch up on the Tweets of regular individuals. So, new rule: no following company Twits who have functional RSS feeds. Eliminate redundancy.

True, there are Twitter clients I can install that will help me keep corporate(ish) Tweets separate from Joe Blow Tweets, but I find the notion of installing a local application to keep up with a web-based application... unappealing. Maybe I'll try it out, but I promise nothing.

There is one thing that can save me from my impending addiction to Twitter, and that is my other annoying tendency to quickly get bored with things and walk away from them when the effort required to maintain an addiction reaches an even remotely uncomfortable level, or (more often) when a new shiny object slides into my view. I have a feeling the next shiny object will be finally learning Drupal, or Django, or Joomla. Who names these things?

F My Life

Today I discovered F*** My Life, a site that's kind of similar to One Sentence, which I've blogged about before, except on this one you can use more than one sentence, the stories have to be about horrible things that happened to you to make your life suck, and people cast votes on your stories, either showing sympathy or telling you "You deserved that."

A lot of the stories seem like they are either: obviously made-up, or told by complete imbeciles. It's surprisingly therapeutic to click through the site and tell these people, "You deserved that one." Try it, you'll like it.

I like to imagine the look on the face of (for instance) the fat girl who posted her tale of woe about how her boyfriend told her she was fat just because she asked him seventy-eight times in a twenty-minute period if he thought she was fat, when she revisits FMyLife and sees that 14,297 people think she deserved it, not for being fat, but for being fat and irritating, while only 114 people have read her story and said, "aww, I agree, your life sucks." I think of that face, and it brings a warm smile to my own.

The Magnolia Situation

Gonna take a detour from the blog I intended to write today to talk about the whole cluster-eff that has happened with ma.gnolia (hereby to be referred to as simply Magnolia, because I hate superfluous punctuation).

It is now day seven of Magnolia's outage, with no end in sight, and hope seems to be fading. Now, this isn't a national catastrophe or anything, but I had some really interesting bookmarks there and now I'm bummed that I may not get access to them again. I can't exactly stumble around the web looking for them all again, because I don't even remember what all was there.

I have been able to uncover a bunch of my bookmarks using the magic of Google cache, although I haven't started the process of transferring them to Delicious yet. So I'm happy about that. There are also a number of other recovery options being discussed on a thread that's been opened over at Get Satisfaction. I'm pissed at myself, though, for not being a little more forward thinking and having some sort of backup to my Magnolia stash. I never bothered setting up an RSS feed to dump into anything, and never once exported my bookmarks to a plain HTML file, because I'm lazy. I just figured, hey, it's an online resource, they've got to have their own backups if something goes wrong, right? Plus, at the end of the day it's only bookmarks. It's not like it's my bank account being compromised, and the content of those bookmarks is still floating around out there in the 'tubes.

I've learned my lesson, though: I pointed my Delicious RSS feed toward Google Reader, and I'll probably set up a reader on my own PC when I get home, to have a local backup. Kind of defeats the purpose of an online store of bookmarks, but I don't want to get burned again. I might check out other social bookmarking sites - Diigo was suggested by Magnolia founder Larry Halff, but it seems iffy to me. Lacks the simplicity I loved about Magnolia.

Anyway, the point of this post is to highlight a different posting, on the Get Satisfaction thread. Most of the conversation focuses on various methods of data retrieval, all from external sources like Google cache and FriendFeed, so people can get their bookmarks back. One guy, however, chose to go on a rant, quoting one of the first messages on the Magnolia homepage that discussed the severity of the outage. I'll just paste the whole thing here:

onionsformagnolia replied 9 hours ago

Larry, on your home page, you wrote:

"So far, my efforts to recover Ma.gnolia's data store have been unsuccessful. While I'm continuing to work at it, both from the data store..."

How is that possible? What is this "data store" you're talking about? Was there no back up?

"In this past year, many of us have seen much loss around us."

What does this have to do with the current problem, other than a lame attempt at deflection?

"While bookmarks seem small on the national or global scale, I know that many of you had built intellectual and social capital through the bookmarks, groups, and connections you made here."

A blinding flash of the obvious. So far, you've said many words without saying anything.

"Ma.gnolia was approaching the third anniversary of its public launch; for me, it was the project and people to which I'd devoted most of my time, energy, and love for nearly four years. It's still a little too soon to give word about the return of Ma.gnolia the service and the future of the M2 project, but I will keep this site and our Twitter account updated as those decisions are made."

You have nerve to even talk about the return of Magnolia and M2, whatever that is/was. Forget it. This "business", if it ever was viable, is now dead all but in name. I wouldn't entrust anything to you any more because of the way you've bungled this. You've been quite evasive in answering direct questions posed to you about what happened. If you owe at least one thing to Magnolia users, it's an honest explanation.

At the moment, it looks like I've lost thousands of bookmarks that I've added over the last couple of years and I did not have them anywhere else because I was foolish enough to assume that Magnolia was being run by competent people! To say that I'm pissed off is an understatement. The irony is that I had evaluated and rejected Delicious and SimpPy for reasons that I don't even recall any more. I've lost something of tremendous value and by the looks of it, I will not be able to recover anything since none of the "solutions" that you have posted so far work for me. I'm working on the assumption that any competent system administrator would have been able to get a server running by now and restored from a backup, even if *some* data was lost.

What happened? Your server got seized by creditors? You had a nervous breakdown? Ex-wife got the server? Your dog ate the server? Your server got abducted by aliens? You had a disk crash and hadn't done a back up since, well, ever?

It's hard to imagine how you could look any worse so I suggest you just come clean. If it's a matter of money, I'd contribute toward a solution but not without knowing the whole, unvarnished truth. So, how about it? Are you going to explain exactly what happened or are you going to continue your "keep 'em in the dark and feed them horse shit" communications strategy?

Harsh. I won't say this guy (girl?) doesn't make good points, because they are very good points. I had the same questions myself, once I realized that this wasn't a case of someone saying "this issue may take several days to correct" just to prepare people for the worst, only to have the site back up by noon the next day.

But let's have some perspective. You're talking about using a free online service (those who did pay for Magnolia's "premium" services will receive a refund, according to Larry) to keep track of information that you found useful on the Web. When you use something that's given away for free, your complaint leverage is greatly diminished. Especially when the tools were always available for you to backup your thousands of bookmarks.

I had a little over 300 bookmarks on Magnolia, well short of Mister Angry's thousands, and while I am miffed about potentially losing those, I'm more upset that I didn't give myself a fallback option. No contingency. My fault. If I had thousands of bookmarks, and if they were all that important to me, I would have made sure to have a backup. It would never occur to me to go on this kind of rant against a guy who's watching years of his hard work circle the drain and is already fully aware that the situation has upset a lot of people. I mean, I can get on a pretty hellacious rant, don't get me wrong, but over this?

Yet within hours this rant was upvoted as one of the "best points" on the discussion thread (albeit by a whopping 6 people as of this writing), above and beyond the actual constructive suggestions, and is featured at the top of the thread. It's a fine illustration of the testicular-inflation effect of the Internet.

The One Sentence Blog

Recently I discovered a site called One Sentence that asks you to submit a true story from your life in the form of a single sentence, and I found the idea so brilliant in its simplicity that I had to share it in my blog.