Twitter resident social media commentator amandachapel speaks about her social media de-vangelism mission with Tom Cunniff. Social media is the widely-celebrated fad that has elevated idle chitchat to quasi religion. It is the abandonment of commonsense business that was once ruled by presentation and meritocracy. It is a stage for a cult of amateurs empowered to act out Lord of the Flies. It is the great Cluetrain ... Read full entry

Let's take shallowness and superficiality to a new low by taking advantage of Friendfeed's new fake following utility. The Friend Lists also support "Fake Following" - a seemingly unintuitive feature that allows users to look like they're following their friends without actually getting their updates. Users often expect to have their "Follows" reciprocated by their peers, and a failure to do so can lead to bruised egos. ... Read full entry

Dylan Davis published a method of routing the Facebook update statuses of both you and your friends to Twitter a few days ago as a Facebook note. I thought this was something people might be interested in trying out, and Dylan was happy to let me republish his update status routing recipe. Enjoy! Here's a recipe for routing all your and your friend's Status updates from ... Read full entry

A list of jobs where you could utilise the knowledge, and networks, you have acquired through the use of social networks and micro-blogging websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Pity the college kids who are readying themselves for the boredom of working in an office where online profile views are sharply limited or not allowed. Don't they know that there are jobs that demand this stuff? More and more ... Read full entry

So far Twitter has been relatively free of spam. Sure there's a few "bots" following large numbers of members (and hoping their following will be reciprocated) but otherwise spam hasn't been too big an issue. That could change though should more determined types exploit the "reply spam" option though. The defence against spam followers is not to click on their links and not to follow them back. But, ... Read full entry

Not that I have anything against the frivolous nature of Twitter, but there certainly are more practical ways of deploying the application, as Diana Mounter points out. This might come as a surprise to some, but the office of the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, is one entity leading the way, in its use of Twitter to communicate with the British media and community. Twitter ... Read full entry

Don't blame Ruby on Rails for Twitter's less than brilliant performance of late, blame it on the framework, and over eager developers in a rush to finish their work. Ruby on Rails is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. To build an application in Rails, you start by defining a collection of objects that model the things your application will do, then you write controllers that juggle your model in ... Read full entry

Twitter is a great messaging and networking tool, downtime notwithstanding, but why we have to refer to twittering as microblogging is a little beyond me... it's online text messaging people. Much of the Twittering crowd argues that Twitter will continue to grow in importance, perhaps rivaling other social media powers such as Facebook. "I have hundreds of friends on FB, but have done 10x the networking, connecting & communicating ... Read full entry

Twitter is Down; I Blame the Democrats Wonderful. What else can we blame the Democrats for while we are at it? The outage has lasted at least an hour at this point, and has eerily coincided with the announcement from CNN and other major news outlets that John Edwards has pledged support for Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. While Twitter vacillates between weathering major ... Read full entry

Tweet topic research results Good to see some solid facts, as a result of serious scientific research, on the matter. I'd miss this, as those Twitter tweets just fly by on the screen, but 20 per cent of them are just to say good morning or good night.