Twitter philistines

July 5, 2009, 10:00 am

Yesterday I read yet another article in a paper publication proclaiming the uselessness of Twitter. As always, the banality of the majority of posts was called into question.

“This sadly typifies much of Twitter. It is largely inane ramblings or ‘microblogging’, with such gems as ‘having a coffee in the M1 services – not very good’” (BMJ News, Voicebox, July 4th 09)

Ironically, in this case, the author is dead right in this quote. Most of the posts are dull. But that doesn’t make the service useless.

The majority of what I read in the paper is dull. The majority of what I see on TV is average. When I have a conversation, it’s not all gold. That’s the point.

Twitter reflects reality. Most of the tweets in my stream float by without catching my attention, much like channels on TV. Every now and again, though, I genuinely laugh out loud or am redirected to something fascinating that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

If you don’t want to use twitter, that’s fine by me – your loss. Just don’t complain when people talk about it in the pub because you don’t get it.

TwitaSong.com – A Twitter WebApp

July 4, 2009, 8:57 am

twitasong_screenshot

Yesterday I put together a simple web app for twitter that allows you to schedule one tweet a day, posting a song that you love. All songs will be posted with a URL and the “song of the day” hashtag (#sotd).

My inspiration came from wanting just such a service last week. I listened to a string of great songs by less well known artists and I wanted to spread the word, but posting 10 songs in a row to twitter would only annoy my followers! I also knew that if I didn’t write them down I’d forget them myself pretty quickly. And thus TwitaSong.com was born.

The application is programmed in PHP using the oauth system to authenticate users.

Thanks must go to a few people for their help: