Twitter

no communications? no holiday for me

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

This weekend, my husband and I took or daughter away in our new (to us) campervan for the first time and it was fab. Sea, camping, cooking outside, lying on a rug with the papers, drinking champers to toast the new van…all good!

I, however, forgot to take my blackberry charger and consequentially was without any Internet access all weekend. Big deal? well actually, yes it was.

I know some people’s idea of a holiday/weekend away is turning the PC off, not reading a paper or watching the news and generally switching off from everything and if that is the case, you will probably think I am a total saddo. However, for me, not being able to look stuff up during a discussion, prove my husband wrong in an argument, check the spelling to a crossword clue, pop onto Twitter, check the weather or the surf report/tide times or read the headlines online is my idea of hell!

As we packed up our lovely van and left the secluded farm up on the Cornish cliffs, I spotted a sign saying wifi available here…£1. So I booked us in next weekend but will remember the laptop next time.

Twitter and Summize…a match made in heaven?

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

So Twitter has bought Summize, not exactly unexpectedly and turned out to be a bit of a non-story…as with so many things, the story was in the speculation I guess with the main discussion happening last week.

So what will it mean for Twitter then and its loyal users?

A sketch of search inside Twitter

According to the Twitter blog….

Like Twitter, Summize offers an API so other products and services can filter the constant queue of updates in a variety of ways. The Summize service and API will be merged with our own and integrated under the Twitter brand.

There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. We will be adding search and its related features to the core offering of Twitter in the very near future. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to access search.twitter.com—there’s no need for a Twitter account.

Good news if you ask me.

Summize is a great tool and in my opinion it is the best way of using Twitter for PR research.  It provides an instant snapshot of the live conversation about any given topic, product, company or person at any time.

Combine that with 5 new engineers now on the Twitter payroll and it might just help keep the fail whale away too…

why the whale is a win not a fail

Posted on by Becky Green (was McMichael)

I am loving the fail whale at the moment, despite it usually only coming into my life when Twitter has temporarily popped its clogs.

Thanks to a post by the apparently zen James Governor (very relaxed about the amount of Twitter downtime these days), I now know who created the whale and it seems like the artist has tapped into the current conversation too as the whale is now microblogging here and has its own fanclub with a range of pretty cool merchandise! The whale-a-razzi tag is taking it a bit far though, even for a geek like me.

Anyway, here‘s a link to some more work by the artist, Yiying Lu – it is ace, check it out.