Twitter posts

Out of the big box marked ‘stuff that will blow your mind today’ busts John Kestner’s Tableau. Tableau is a night stand with a wire coming out of it. And boy, if it didn’t make me flip my lid. It isn’t the design of the stand that incited all this lid-flipping action – I’m more of an IKEA guy – but its function. Tableau is the most ingeniously-disguised Twitter client you ain’t never seen. Barring right now, that is. A hidden printer/scanner resides within Tableau’s drawer, connecting to your Twitter account and quietly printing and depositing photographs for you to discover. As well, any photographs…

This may be done tongue and cheek, but it’s not only possible but sadly it’s something that is, in one form or another, likely. As we (d)evolve as a society towards integration of the most mundane facets of our daily lives into our social stream, what’s next? Will many start auto-tracking every move they make on Foursquare or Facebook places? Will every food that we order or cook find its way onto our Twitter stream? Will it become more commonplace to post pictures of every activity on our Tumblr? “A view from the bathroom stall at Red Lobster: (Link). Clean, not a lot of graffiti.” Sigh. Our friends…

No one ever accused Alicia Keys of f***ing around when it comes to philanthropy, and if you ever felt like you wanted to, she’s about to prove you seven shades of wrong. The singer, along with a host of other celebrities, are about to pull the plug on their online selves for charity. Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Seacrest, Usher and others are among the celebs who are taking part with Keys in a campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice for Key’s charity Keep a Child Alive. The campaign involves basically what it says on the tin – the participants are going to remove themselves from their Twitter and…

A new survey conducted by Japanese ad agency Dentsu has revealed the ‘hit recognized products’ in Japan for 2010. And hoo boy, what a list it is. Smartphones, of course, have more or less been grouped into one category as they would dominate the entire list of separate. Twitter has come in at second place, narrowly eking out munchable chili oil for the silver. Yes, that’s right. Munchable chili oil. The top three ‘hit recognized products’ in Japan for the year two thousand and ten are, in order: smartphones, Twitter, and MUNCHABLE CHILI OIL. No iPads. No gadgetry. Munchable chili oil. Oh, Japan….

I remove people from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks on a daily basis — not by choice, but because there is too much information — but I never thought of the consequences. I always just assumed that there is an understanding between people in the digital age. But one day changed everything for me: I had removed someone who didn’t take it so lightly, and he made me feel guilt and pain that I had not felt since high school. What was I becoming? He was nice to me. He engaged me in conversation, retweeted articles that I posted, and joined in on conversations that really got me thinking. It…

As much as I love Twitter, these issues over stability and scaling are really starting to get to me. For the past several days, the message “Loading Tweets seems to be taking awhile” has bombarded my screen. It’s not clear what the issue is, but Twitter obviously hasn’t yet fixed the leaky pipes. The worst thing of all is that I no longer get to see the Fail Whale, I merely see a pointless useless message telling me that the website is broken. No fun at all….

According to yet another lukewarm survey by yet another random analytics company, your tweets are worthless and nobody likes you. Research conducted using 1.2 billion posts over the past 2 months found that 71% of tweets disappear into thin air. Only 6% of tweets were retweeted, 23% received a reply. Over 90% of retweets occur within the first hour. More amazingly, only 1.53% of Twitter conversations go further than two replies. It’s comforting to know that something tweeted in error after a drunken night out won’t still be a conversation point in five years time, but surely the negative implications…

Twitter has finally began moving towards paying gigs, probably fed with being only worth a paltry $5 billion. But you might not like what they have in store. Currently, Twitter sells “promoted tweets” for around $100,000 each. These are sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results, although the general consensus is that the system is experimental and not worth the investment. Well, now they have a new plan. Twitter is going to sell spots in their “who to follow” recommendation list. Twitter insists that relevance will be the key here, although this is obviously going to be the weak…

“People love hugging”, states designer Celina Alvarado. I dunno, Celina, that’s pretty broad. I mean, I like hugging – hugs are pretty fly. But to say I love hugging implies a level of commitment I’m unsure I’m ready for. …and with apprehension of that magnitude, it’s no wonder I’m not even close to married. Anyway, hugs. Alvarado is a fan of them. So much so, in fact, that she has gone to the trouble of developing a wearable device that not only logs the duration and intensity of hugs, but passes judgment on them – and tweets the results. Of course it tweets the results. Because I want to read the Twitter…

Ever wanted to know what Twitter looks like from someone else’s point of view? Wanna see what @the_real_shaq gazes upon when logging in? I, for one, couldn’t care less, but maybe you do – and apparently, so does investor Shervin Pishevar , who’s collaborated with iTunes Instant creator Stephen Ou over the past week to fart out TwtRoulette. I don’t think I’ve ever crammed that many links into a single sentence. Sorry to make a mess of your tabs. Anyway, Twt Roulette is, amazingly, not what you’d immediately think (assuming you’d think of a big button that randomly shows you a Twitter profile (which…