The Randomness of Randomness

Twitterers? Who Twitterers?

// July 29th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Acting Drunk, Microblogging, Supposed Humour

A noun does a verb in/on a noun.

Ask me what crap am I talkin about.

Disclaimer:

• This post carries a high probability of the reader considering it to be crap.
• Whenever I utter crap on this rarely updated blog(or so it seems to me), I will tag it with & categorize it as Acting Drunk.

OK. It is this shady time. I suddenly felt the urge to blog this up, with enough other action items pending. Strange person I am. All blogposts of mine carry these: (I am a lazy blogger | I will now blog | I am here out of the blue moon). So, I thought I shouldn’t deprive you of the deeps**t that I write in each post. Hence, this paragraph sits here

Actually, I have been wondering who twitterers are. This page will tell you, why: Twitter Search for twitterer, i.e. because people use the term.

Now, coming back to the first statement I made: A noun¹ does a verb on a noun²

With reference to the term ‘twitterer’ and its usage by the people flocking twitter(us), twitterer is the 1st noun, twittering is the verb & twitter is the second noun, i.e. “twitterer does twittering on twitter“.

So, in this case the verb twittering is derived from the noun twitter, and the word twitterer is derived from the verb twittering.

Now, the point I am trying to make here is that tweet is a much more commonly used verb(also derived from the noun twitter). This can be easily verified by comparing the frequency of updates on twitter search results for the verb twittering and those for the verb tweet.

Drawing this analogy into the statement I started this post with would gimme: “tweeter tweets on twitter“.

This is hence a humble request to all the tweeters listening, not to use the term twitterer and to rather use the term tweeter.

Hold on!! At this point of time when I used the divine Google search engine, I found what tweeter means in as well as out of context on urbandictionary.com. Doesn’t really sound good in(meaning # 3) as well as out(meaning # 3) of the twitter context. So, it looks like I will have to change the humble request above to an appeal.

After reading the meaning of tweeter on urban dictionary, I strongly appeal not to use the term tweeter for people who tweet. Twitterer (as you might have read above), twitterati & tweople are other alternatives to this potentially harmful term on twitter.

Do let your friends & followers on twitter know about the meaning of this high frequency term used to define them, you and us, by tweeting about it.

Should twitter search crawl other microblogs?

// July 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Business, Internet, Microblogging, Social Networking, Technology

Put in summize.com in your browser and it redirects to search.twitter.com. Yeah, finally it has been confirmed by both summize & twitter that the former has been acquired by the latter.

Summize was a search engine formed to facilitate people with the ability to gauge user opinions extracted from blogs and review sites.

Thanks to some extended machine learning techniques and a complex data engine at the back end, summize turned out to be a very effective search engine for what it was meant to do. Now common!! The three co-founders had 7 long years of experience building numerous highly scalable search applications.

They realised early in 2008 that microblogging sites can be the best and most reliable source to figure out how and what people are thinking about some particular thing. And twitter being one of the most popular mb sites around, they started using summize to let people search how people on twitter(a.k.a. tweople) think about something.

They churned out something that really interested twitter, and since the last one month, the folks from twitter were in talks with summize to take it over and they now finally have for reportedly $15 million.

Tom’s heart does not really sound as happy about having sold twitter than being sad about not being able to assure that the promises summize had made to their users would be kept. You can read more about that on Tom’s blog.

What people will look upto is that how twitter goes about developing summize further. It is least likely to crawl other microblogging sites, which could give people much wider results than just crawling twitter would.

After all twitter is for people, people are not for twitter. They bought summize because they felt it to be the best out of all the mb search engine lot. So the best mb search engine should be used to crawl & index the mb’s so as to give people a more reliable opinion of what the internet thinks.

Summize’s vision is clearly given in Tom’s above mentioned blog post, and that is what could have been the reason of sustainability for summize had it not been acquired. So, twitter should rather look forward to giving people better results using their search, than letting people only search twitter.

What do you say?

Should twitter use their search engine to crawl other microblogging sites or should they only do it for their own?

Follow feeds on twitter

// July 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // Internet, Microblogging, Social Networking

In our fast-moving lives, it sometimes becomes tough to keep following feed-readers all the time.

Here is a quick and easy way to stay connected to RSS feeds you are interested in following, while you are twittering.

Here is a step by step guide to help you start following feeds on twitter.

We are going to achieve this by using a RSS Aggregator/RSS Mashup Tool called xFruits and the twitterfeed service.

So, lets get started.

1. Log on to http://www.xfruits.com/
2. Click on the SIGN IN button on the top right and two forms will open up for you. One to register and the other to sign in.
3. Register yourself.
4. Click on the Aggregator RSS button
   
5. Customize the aggregator and add feeds you want to follow and click “Aggregate my feeds”.
   You may add links to OPML files as well.
   
6. Bingo! Your feeds have been aggregated.
   
7. The title of your feed(marked above in red) links to the aggregated feed.
8. The URL I got for my feed was http://xfruits.com/miteshashar/?id=some_number
9. You may want to go to the Edit page(by clicking the link marked above with blue) to add/remove feeds and to change your feed’s link to http://xfruits.com/miteshashar/myfeed/
   
10. So, you’re now done with setting up your aggregated feed.
11. Now, you need to log into http://twitterfeed.com using a OpenID. I used my Yahoo! OpenID
12. Click on the link marked in red below to create a new twitterfeed
    
13. Enter your twitter username & password. (You may want to make a new twitter account for your feeds)
    Enter your aggregated feed’s URL(http://xfruits.com/miteshashar/myfeed/) as the RSS feed URL.
    Feed in the other settings for twitterfeed and click Create to create the twitterfeed.
    
14. So, there you go. You’ve completed setting up twitterfeeds with an aggregation of feeds you’d like to follow.
15. It shall take some time for the feed to be approved. It was done in 90 minutes for my feed.
16. Once that is done, the feeds will be tweeted onto the specified account. You can follow the new twitter user you’ve created to follow your feeds.
    

If you have any ideas built over this concept or any suggestions to make, please post the same as comments.

So, happy tweeting & happy feed-following!!

nJoi