the Anti-Twitter arrives....welcome Woofer.

I've been a fairly vocal detractor of Twitter's relatively stupid 140 character limit (although I do have to admit that I've embraced it for SOME uses) so the news this morning (via Mashable) that someone has created a much more verbose version is right up my alley. All the more so because of my love of run-on sentences.

Enter Woofer, where your entries are held to a MINIMUM of 1400 characters. Try 'woofing' about what you're having for dinner. I dare you.

the Anti-Twitter arrives....welcome Woofer.

Teens don't like Twitter either.

A 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley was asked to write a report on his peer's media usage.

According to him, posting on twitter is "pointless". Funny...I've been saying the same thing.

I feel so young.

Teens don't like Twitter either.

social networking and college football

ESPN published the first of a 4 part series yesterday looking at the "impact of online social networks on college athletics", and it's a fairly interesting low-tech peek into how high-tech tools are being used by low-tech coaching staffs. John Calipari, who recently became the Basketball coach at the the University of Kentucky, is a particularly good example. An admitted "technophobe", Calipari is the most followed college coach on Twitter (@UKCoachCalipari) with over 350,000 followers, but apparently doesn't quite grasp the process. So he texts his tweets to his Associate Athletic Director for Media Relations, who then updates the Twitter account.

I think I'll start applying for Associate Athletic Director of Media Relations positions.

It's also interesting to see how slow the NCAA has been to address social networking. College coaches face a mountain of regulations on the manner in which they can contact potential high school age recruits. They are severely limited in the number of times they can make phone calls, or send correspondence through the mail. In 2007, the NCAA prohibited texting. There is no limit, however, to a coaches ability to direct-message on Twitter, and to send private messages on Facebook. Even if those messages are received by the recruit on their phone. And even if, as in Calipari's case, those tweets originated as texts anyway.

social networking and college football

Poor Jeff Goldblum.

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett both died today. Jeff Goldblum did not, although the Twitterverse seems to think otherwise.

So much for all that legitimacy that Twitter picked up during the election unrest in Iran.

***UPDATE***

Jeff addresses his death on the Colbert Report:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

Poor Jeff Goldblum.

Twitter is still lame.

Making fun if it? Decidedly not so.

Twitter is still lame.

can you spot the difference

...between Twitter and MyLifeIsAverage? I'll give you a hint...it's intent, and that's pretty much it. The idea behind MLIA is to be as intentionally mundane as possible - a social network as my brother would've created it.

Example MLIA post:

Today I packed a lunch to take to class, but we got done early so I took it home and ate it in my apartment.

See...that's funny.

Example Twitter post:

I'm sitting in the airport/meeting/cafe with Joe/my Dad/a hampster, and really glad it's not raining.

Not funny.

Thanks to TechCrunch for bringing this to my attention. They'd be well served to develop an interactive quiz which presents viewers with a post and asks them to decide if it's from Twitter or MLIA. I bet it'd be impossible.

can you spot the difference

is the "Oprah Effect" Twitter's death knell?

As has been widely reported (before and after the fact)...Oprah started Tweeting last Friday. Naturally, as a result of her massive reach and appeal, a lot of her devoted audience followed suit. How many? A ton. TechCrunch is suggesting as many as 1.5 million since Friday. Granted, they're using some seriously fuzzy logic to arrive at that estimate, but even if you apply a massive margin of error to that number...it's still impressive.

This is great news for me. I can now use the "mainstreaming" of Twitter as an excuse to visit it less and less frequently. Although honestly, I just think the 140 character limit is an obviously flawed constraint that only serves to impede content worthy of posting publicly.

I might just be 'wordy' though.

is the "Oprah Effect" Twitter's death knell?

the new FriendFeed just made my day

The blogs are a-buzzing today with news of the beta release of the 'new' friendfeed site, with it's associated shiny look, feel and features. The common refrain seems to be that it's a lot like Twitter. According to ReadWriteWeb in fact, direct FriendFeed updates automatically copy to Twitter by default...but my experience this afternoon indicated otherwise. Mashable too seems a little overly distracted by the visual resemblance to Twitter, advising that the new FriendFeed "feels a lot like a web-based Twitter client" except that you get to see "your friend’s activities from the dozens of different services that FriendFeed supports."

And it seems the forest is being lost for the twees. (sorry)

That distinction is what makes FriendFeed so impressive, and what separates it from the pack, in my opinion. It's an aggregator, of pretty much everything you use on the web (pix from Flickr, status updates from Facebook, Tweets, blog posts, RSS, etc). It's also now updating in real-time (by default, but pause-able). There's also no character limit meaning that you can post intelligent updates without having to use 'text-speak'.

Honestly, I've been a casual FF user, and mostly through a feed to my iGoogle page. But this new design could pretty easily convert me. The biggest obstacle for me is that I'm not sure if it'll have enough mainstream appeal to convert the masses.

the new FriendFeed just made my day