I love twitter. With twitter I can follow tech-oriented people easily. Many people in the PHP community are using twitter. I can track them to learn what they are doing, who they are replying to, and any links they enjoy. Following people smarter than me provides an infinite learning curve towards my quest for more knowledge.
Still a few people won’t use Twitter because “why should they tell everyone what they are doing?”. For me, Twitter is less about updating my own status and more about following interesting people. If I enjoy someone’s Tweets (A post to twitter), I can explore the people they’re following.
Twitter is not problem-free. There are few roaming bugs associated with Twitter. In one annoying bug, I stop receiving updates from people. The only way I can fix this is to stop following them and then visit their page and follow them again. I have complained about this problem publicly at Get Satisfaction but also the problem continues. A more reliable solution to this problem has been to get myself an RSS reader. Each Twitter page is equipped with an RSS feed. Intead of monitoring my Twitter page, which could be missing valuable updates, my RSS reader can notify me when someone Tweets.
An RSS reader is an invaluble tool for reading the Interweb. Most websites syndicate their content in the form of Really Simple Syndication feed. So you can either visit your list of favorite websites, or you can subscribe to their RSS feed. When you subcribe to an RSS feed, you are telling your RSS reader to receive updates from that particular website. Working like an E-Mail client, your RSS reader will notify you of new updates. You can read your subscribed sites’ updates in a similar way of reading E-Mail. Some websites provide the entire post, while others provide a headline and summary, forcing you to visit their website to read the entire story. I can either bookmark and visit each site individually on a semi-regular basis, or I can tell my RSS reader about the site and receive updates as they happen. Bypassing each site in this Web 2.0 whiz-bang world, allows me the freedom to miss the site’s latest Ad campaign, to avoid their sometimes impossible navigation, and mostly to unburden my CPU with their usual battery of heavy graphics, videos, and extra-long (Pagination? We don’t need no stinking Pagination) blog posts & comments. I can simply get the content, which is the main reason I am visiting the site in the first place.
On my Powerbook G4 I use NewsFire
2 Comments on “I’m in the Twitterverse too.”
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Kirkly says:
hey there, I didn’t know where to contact you but your layout design was off on opera and internet explorer. Anyways, i just suscribd to your rss.
Posted on 06/11/2009 at 19:37.
ideas says:
It works in IE8 and Firefox. I haven’t used Opera since the days before Firefox about 12 years ago. Also I’ve only had less than 5 Opera visitors in past 6 months. Thanks for your comments.
Posted on 08/11/2009 at 08:42.