Twitter posts

From August 16th to 19th, I attended Gen Con, a hobby game convention held in the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis. The four-day convention was attended by over 41,000 unique individuals this year, which marked its most successful year to date. Started in 1967, Gen Con is one of the world’s first gaming conventions. Unlike the NY and CA Comic Cons, or E3, Gen Con is mainly focused on tabletop games, like Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and board games like Settlers of Catan. Attendance numbers for Gen Con peaked in the mid-90s at around 30,000 unique visitors,…

Social media is fragile right now. The Facebook IPO failure (which followed several less-publicized failures by other social media sites) has investors questioning the validity of pouring money into social startups. The model went from unproven to disproven in many ways over the last couple of years after the disastrous turns that sites like MySpace, Digg, and AOL’s Netscape/Propeller took after promising starts. The news that Diaspora’s founders have “moved on” puts another black eye on the face of social media. At some point, they’re going to run out of eyes to blacken. What makes this less…

The great Twitter breakup is continuing. After kicking Instagram and Tumblr to the curb and closing the doors on developers, Twitter has taken another step in their relentless pursuit of a walled garden by eliminating 3rd party posting app attribution from Tweets. The Tweet below was posted via a posting tool other than Twitter.com. Before, the tool used (in this case, KPA Engage) would have received an attribution link leading to the tool’s homepage. Now, the attribution is gone. It’s sad to know that if In ‘n Out was open right now I’d be there. Heading to the consolation drive-thru. On my way,…

A little less than a month ago, Twitter blocked API privileges for Instagram making it unable to allow users to find Twitter friends and add them. Now, Twitter has done pretty much the same thing with Tumblr. The sign-up procedure of Tumblr normally includes a step that allows you to find friends on the service using Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. Now, the Twitter option has been removed. What is Twitter thinking? What is the purpose behind not allowing people to integrate with other services so easily? Twitter has always been an easy way for people to share their own data; by signing up through Twitter…

Life can be a hard process, with many roads to ride, crosses to bear and obstacles to test your abilities to cope. Talking about how you feel is not always as easy to some in person; there is an alternative, share your emotions online. We all have issues that arise, circumstances that occur in life that jolt us in ways that are difficult to express, it is easy to be happy and positive, it can be quite difficult to share the true realities of hard times. Even harder when others around you are dealing with the same issues, therefore social media has given us an outlet to express ourselves openly, with the likeliness…

People are getting very upset over how other people are resharing photos that they originally uploaded to their social network. To you and I this would sound like a legit reason to become angry, the thing is though, it’s not their image. We all can relate to feeling like the social network we use is ours and ours only as it acts like a stage to our audience whether public or not. We have advanced from simply uploading just the photos that we take and have cleverly decided to start searching for images on the web to share. This is great, we all get to visually see what someone somewhere took a picture of,…

If you are looking at Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or any other social network and are scratching your head as to how the type of content that is displaying in your feeds got there, you may want to begin rethinking how you are using your social networks. If you are looking for quality (boy, I sure hope you are) then you need to start saying “no” or not adding people back. Sure, adding everyone who followed you anywhere on the web seemed like the right thing to do back in 2007, but that is now so two thousand and late. You will always need to take emotions into account when people add you and if you don’t…

It was recently revealed that Twitter has over 500 million users. Now the fat birds of microblogging are planning to virtually pull the plug on many apps and services that have been built around their API with a post about the news yesterday. The closing in of their walled garden is another example of a popular service that is starting to get sick of others making money off of them. Marco Arment gives a great layman’s interpretation of what’s happening here. Phrases such as “choke access”, “pushed developers aside”, and “talk to the hand” have been used to describe this behavior, currently being…

Every now and then, I get tired of hearing the statement “When I was younger, I played in the streets” or “When I was younger, we didn’t have cell phones or laptop – we biked to each other’s houses and played outside.” These statements imply that kids today don’t do that. Let’s cut out the blanket generalizations because ultimately, they eventually turn into blatant exaggerations that usually result in your grandfather boasting that he as a boy, walked fifteen miles in the snow, to and from school. Somehow, both the route there and back were unfortunately uphill. I will concede…

You’ve seen it, the way other people are able to get social interactions left, right and center. Almost like people are sitting there waiting for them to post something, anything, then BAM, before your very eyes they have a bunch of likes or retweets or anything that signifies they approve. You may ask yourself often just how do they do it, you post frequently, trying your hardest and think you are posting pretty clever stuff, yet to get just  one single “like” is like pulling teeth from a walrus. It truly does not have to be this difficult; you can easily get responses to posts by finding what…