I logged in to let my OpenID work on another site (I am not terribly active at actually writing down my thoughts) and saw that someone from the Houston Chronicle had tried to contact me a few days ago, wanting to interview me about Twitter. I have e-mailed her on this, and by posting here I pretty much confirm that it was me. I really don’t know if I’m the best person to talk to, but I do use twitter, so I guess that counts. I also use twitterrific, mobile twitterrific, twittervision, twitterlocal, summize, and I have ideas for things that are posted elsewhere on more Serious Blogs. I’m even trying to sit down and actually learn PHP/MySQL so that I can create some awesome applications for Twitter (one of the reasons I was so upset Summize got bought, I was hoping my apps would work for other services too once Summize implemented searching them, hopefully Tweetscan’s identi.ca search will turn out to be good).

Why is the Chron interested in Twitter, though? The top google hit for site:chron.com twitter is a I don’t use twitter, only self-important people use twitter story. That’s one of the questions I asked in my heart-felt 1:30 am e-mail.

Also, while checking the dashboard I also caught some other responses I didn’t expect, like a Perian developer surprised his app was being used on the AppleTV and confused about ‘replacing Apple’s H264 decoder’. I’ve since contacted him, too, and offered photographic evidence.

From today’s TUAW Live Chat with Pytey,

pytey - This is a tricky one, Apple have made some sole distribution clauses in app contracts. It is a shame, I’m guessing people will have to make the choice of big bucks or free of charge.

The confirmation of my NDA speculation (I had only guessed) helps me with my new hobby, but interestingly enough the issue where MooCow whatever’s “Band” being for jailbroken iPhones (it’s still in installer.app I’m pretty sure) and for the App Store, similar to Twinkle (except Twinkle got a major overhaul, i.e. he removed the suck and didn’t backport, lame!) has not been addressed.

Oh boy. Twitter acquired summize. We’re fucked! Summize, used to power some pretty awesome sites (like Get Satisfaction’s “overheard” feature), will now start failing more often, and the part about adding other services is now gone.

Here’s the About Summize section from the Summize.com about page (courtesy Google Cache):

Summize’s mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations.

Our home page currently features realtime conversations on Twitter. Also check out Summize Labs for prototypes that harness conversations within blogs and reviews. Additional sources of online conversations are coming soon!

Now here’s the About Twitter Search section from the search.twitter.com about page:

Keeping up with interesting news and people you care about is one dimension of Twitter, but what if you need to find out what’s happening in the world beyond your personal timeline?

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.

Notice what is no longer there? The searching of other services! I left this comment on their blog:

NOOOOOO!

Now Summize will start to fail, have tons of downtime, and worst of all, will completely drop their previous commitment to add MORE SERVICES to their search! Poor Jaiku, Pownce, and whoever else nobody cared about.

Tweetscan, you just got your lucky break to take over the Twitter & other site search market (they already search Identi.ca!), will you take it?

Will they accept it? I don’t know.

Update: Summize blogged it too, so I commented there as well. Just in case it gets lost:

I too dislike a little bit that Summize finds deleted tweets. It does help, sometimes, for conversations where one side doesn’t want to keep a record of a spat, though.

As well, I’m not happy about the acquisition. Aside from the obvious “lol now summize will failwhale”, the statement about wanting to include other microblogging services has been completely obliterated.

Interestingly enough, Summize has just made way for competition.

(Andy Mabbett had commented “Congratulations. Now please teach your software to stop “finding” deleted tweets.”)

Creating Our Own Happiness

by Wayne Coyne

There’s two firefox features that don’t exist in Safari which give it an edge, but some Safari users don’t happen to know about them…

I know this first one has caused a stir, because I saw an article that I can’t find now where someone mentioned Safari devs really don’t think much about tabbed browsing, as the “History” tab has an item named “Reopen Last Closed Window” (which comes with the back button history, very useful). However, there’s no Reopen Last Closed Tab (Firefox does have tab close undo, and it goes back a ways, I have done 5 in the past. This also brings along back button history.).

Another feature of Firefox that doesn’t exist in Safari which exists in Firefox (and Seamonkey, originally) is the ability to make items that have target=”_blank” (i.e. open in a blank window) launch their item in a new tab instead of a new window. Bug 19715 was filed to hopefully resolve this missing feature.

If you can write an iPhone app this easily, for jailbroken phones, there is no excuse. none.

I’m testing Jotting to my WordPress blog. Just making sure that it works out fine. I was interested to know if it will post an audio link of my words. And I do not like domainers. listen

Powered by Jott

You know how site finder made every domain name resolve? Well, how is it different with the dozens of parked domains that DON’T EVEN HAVE A buy this site LINK THESE DAYS so they can’t be domaining.

I came up with a few good domains for my serious blog, but they’re all parked. They’re not used properly, just parked, and with no way to purchase the domain. LAME. This should be against ICANN rules because it causes spam addresses to resolve, the main problem with sitefinder. It also annoys me.

I brought up real life social networking before in an incoherent rant, and there’s now even more proof that it needs to become a reality.

Obviously Twitter could be helping a little bit, who knows how bad it would have gotten if Twitter didn’t exist (for background, Twitter is _huge_ in japan, and seems to be slowing down the lack-of-contact social problems).

I really think that getting people together in person as well as online is mega important. Brightkite is already starting the process, and people need to stop joining just to act twittery, and start using it to say “hey! we both use brightkite! we must be into similar things!” (brightkite actually lets users tag themselves, but that’s a bit awkward)

[EOF]