Revision and my new blog

I am currently super busy with my revision for my final exams at university EVER (hopefully - assuming nothing goes terribly wrong). This is why this blog has been so poorly updated and I apologise. I am however still using Twitter (as seen on the right) and have also started a personal blog with vox, you can find it here. I am updating this blog to the Vox question of the day and the occasional random post.

I hope to resume normal blogging after I have completed my exams in a few weeks! Hope everything is going well for everyone else, be it revising or essay writing that seems to be plaguing all at the moment.

x

Moodmill.com: Emoticon your mood

Ok so Moodmill is a site where you log in, choose an emoticon according to how you are feeling and then explain why you are feeling that way in a little blurb. Sound like internet therapy to you? Yes me too. And you even get a page to yourself so you can track your emotional progress. Pointless and just another thing to sign up for? Perhaps. I'm not going to be joining. I much prefer to do my emotional splurging in private thank you. Or at least on Twitter where it can only last for 140 characters.

Facebook status to kill off Twitter? I doubt it.

NB Since I wrote this Mashable has written this article about the issue. (Take note, no uk compatability for mobile updating [same as no photo printing, or advert running]. Does something tell you that Facebook aren't taking the UK seriously? Besides the fact that anyone living in the South East can only choose London or Portsmouth as their networks, agh! Good job they've got the networking bit down!)

There has been alot of speculation regarding whether the Facebook status feature will kill off Twitter, or at least dampen it's use. To me there is no real conflict between the two. I mean I use both, ALOT admittedly, and use them completely differently.

The Facebook status is for you to tell your friends (people who know you personally) about what you are doing.
You can tell them you are going home for three months and leaving your uni house empty. You can tell them that you just saw a photo of Dave with Andrea who have previously claimed they hate each other (and then share a photo through facebooks share feature to prove it) because they will care about that information. You can tell people you are happy, or sad, or excited, and this will stand (big and proud under your name, thanks to the new facebook layout) until you change it when your mood changes. (And annoyingly you must write your status to conform with '*Your Name* is...' and if you don't type your status in the third person it appears with the grammar of a three year old). Facebook status is a fantastic Facebook extra, but this is not Twitter. Or at least this is not Twitter for me.

Twitter is about sharing web articles, sharing funny and amusing things that have happened, sharing funny and amusing thoughts, sharing deep thoughts. You don't want to tell the whole world on Twitter that your house is empty (as I have mentioned in my previous post about Twitter) for obvious security reasons. Many of your Twitter friends may not know you personally and so don't care about what Dave and Andrea have been doing. And if you mention you are happy, or sad, or excited it is a snapshot of that moment in time (not a continued feeling until you say otherwise).

And those are not the only ways Twitter is different to Facebook.

• Being able to update amusing thoughts from sms is a major plus point of Twitter for me. Often you will think of something amusing only to forget it a couple of mins later. Facebook does not offer text updating yet.
  
• Often there is something that does not warrant a whole blog post, that can be shown in 140 characters. Using Facebook status for linking articles etc is practically unknown.
  
• Each update you make is given a permalink making it easy to share other peoples thoughts, and your own, with people outside Twitter as well as the whole Twitter community. Facebook status can only be seen by your friends and your network.
  
• The Twitter public timeline and search systems such as Twittersearch and Twitterment allow you to find and follow people who interest you via phone, im or on the web.
• Addons allow flexibility of updating. You don't need to log into the site to share with the world.

One thing I would say however, is that if you are privately updating to your personal network of friends it is possible the similarities between Facebook status and Twitter would be more pronounced.
But these are different services, providing very different things. Facebook status is just one of the many things Facebook offers. Twitter is about broader social networking, beyond your group of friends. Eventually as Facebook develops its features further, and Twitter begins to add more complex features and options, they may become more similar. However suggestions that either of these services is intruding on the other to any real degree at this point just seems silly.

Shinyshiny article: Why I love Facebook
Twitterati Article: Will Facebook kill off Twitter?

Busy

I'm having a busy couple of weeks and so this is just a quick post to say, as potentially seen by my twitter feed, I have not disappeared off the face of the planet. I have simply been catching up with friends and family, writing a carriage of goods by sea essay and preparing for BUSA nationals which is this coming week. Hope everyone has had a wonderful Easter, and I should be back blogging properly in about a week.

Twittervision 12 hour warning

I've taken to hiberating my laptop while revising, and leaving net pages up etc without using them for several days. I think it must be the computer version of having a messy bedroom. For some reason revision seems to bring out my messy side. I think it is having one million things out at once; textbooks, handwritten notes, handouts, typed notes, statute books, paper and pens to make notes on etc.

Anyway imagine my surprise when I switched my laptop on to find this screen (photo). Twittervision actually has a twelve hour warning system, I assume calculated according to when you logged in considering my laptop was off for about fourteen hours (I am really not sad enough to watch it for that long). And i'm wondering why they bother to have it... (except obviously to remind people like me to clean up our internet windows). Logically speaking it must mean people are watching Twittervision for 12 hours, and it might be just me but isn't that slightly concerning?!

Twit This

I know i always seem to be talking about Twitter, and I do apologise, but it is a very fast growing site will lots of new addons appearing every minute. There is Twitterific for Mac, and Twitteroo for Windows, Twittervision which I have posted about previously, and a whole host of other progammes and sites. The newest is Twit This which I have just added to my site on the right. This allows people to link your site easily by turning it into a Tiny Url (which I have also previously posted about), and then adding it to Twitter. It is a simple concept but potentially quite effective if alot of people added it to their pages, allowing sharing of what you are reading to be quick and easy. However I think i'm going to stick with my Tiny Url on my toolbar for now since constantly linking your own site is neither fun, nor particularly ethical or nice, and I have yet to see Twit This anywhere else.

Mashable discusses Twit This here.
TwitterBuzz shows the most popular twitter links here.

kiva.org

Kiva.org gives you the opportunity to loan money to entrepreneurs in developing countries in order to help them establish their businesses. Over the period of the loan (usually 6-12 months) you can also receive email journal updates from the business that you are sponsoring. The way I think this site triumphs over other more established charities is that it allows you to choose who you lend to. Often the inability to keep track of exactly what your money is being used for is what prevents people from giving money to charity. You can view profiles and people's businesses. You know directly who you are helping.

Apparently the people who are featured have been chosen specifically by Field Partners such as CREDIT (who among other things organise loans to vulnerable women), and ACTION NOW KENYA, to ensure that you are likely to have your money repayed. To date kiva.org has a 100% repayment rate to lenders, but there is no security so in theory you could 'lose' your money. You gain no interest from your loan but to my mind this is irrelevant because of the impression you will be making on someone's life. And if you do not get your money repayed then surely it is still worth it for giving someone a chance.

You can choose how much of the money the borrower needs that you loan (you can loan from only $25), and so their total money can be borrowed from a large number of lenders. If you have some spare money, and want to give to a worthy cause I think this might be the way forward. This is helping people to help themselves without crippling interest rates that would usually attach to perceived 'high risk' enterprise.

You can follow KivaThon on Twitter.

twittervision

There is nothing I can say about twittervision except wow... and you could spend hours watching this. It's like having a constant public timeline, showing you all twitter updates in real time, on a googlemap. Twitter on a whole new level. It's worth looking at just for the one-off experience. Only now i'm not sure what to do, it just goes on and on and on... I'm thinking good if you want to find interesting people to add, bad if you want to do something productive, or have a life. I'm already slightly bored and feel a bit like a loser for watching it and like i'm watching time tick away. That might however just be because I have so much to do. I'm not sure. Make up your own mind, but do make sure you check it out at least once.

Big links to small links at tinyurl.com

Just discovered a highly useful thing for anyone who uses Twitter, and has issues with posting links due to the 140 character limit. At tinyurl.com you type in your full length link and it throws a small length one back at you. I'm sure it also has other uses other than Twitter but I can't think of any. Perhaps to avoid links looking majorly scary by containing 6 lines of osgnakdnfkjanfjanfjklslnfdkldjnajkfndskjnfsjnfaskjdal at the end.

For a minimising example
This is the traditional link from the BBC Website of the story about whether our British Accents can create success in the US: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6470095.stm

And this is the tinyurl link for the same article: http://tinyurl.com/33ue5d

Reduced from 45 characters to 25 characters just like magic. That's an extra twenty characters of your twitter freed. Are you amazed? I was.

Vox.com

I have just started a new blog at vox.com in an attempt to find something prettier than blogger which I can use, and I have to say vox wins hands down in the easy prettiness stakes. If I had any vague understanding of html i'm sure that blogger would be the better option, but sadly at 21 i seem to be losing my brain agility for understanding new computer based things.

As far as I can work out however, there is no way to import twitter, which is annoying. And although it has several tools regarding importing things from youtube (which i do actually use), it is also advertising flickr which I have never had patience with. It is also based on a neighbourhood scheme, which involves you being able to blog simply at family and friends, as well as to the big wide world... as much as I actually quite like this idea, I am painfully aware that i'm the only one sad enough amongst my friends to blog so I would not be able to use this option. It also won't let me send blog posts that i make on vox to this blog, although I haven't yet checked whether I can do it from the blogger side of things.

Also having Facebook, plenty of gmail emails, twitter and this blog to occupy what time i do not have, it raises the question do I really need something else to log into and check or update. In fact I deleted my MySpace account a couple of months ago because it just seemed pointless and increased the amount of spam I received about ten fold.

Basically I'm left wondering if I can really justify swapping functionality for prettiness. I don't think I can. As I am however, lothe to part with my pretty new page I am going to have to think of a cunning way to use it. Ideas on a postcard please.

LWord Actress Twittering

Just discovered someone I added on Twitter because they seemed interesting is actually Janina Gavankar from the LWord. I don't actually watch it but its still quite exciting. This actress twittering is here.

Wikipedia information about her is here.

Twitter: What are YOU doing?!

I thought I should perhaps tell you a little something about Twitter because until very recently I had never heard of it. Apparently taking America by storm, this site allows you to make short updates (text length minus your 13 character user name) by accessing the site, GoogleChat or text messages, all to answer the key question 'What are you doing?'. You can opt to only allow your friends see your updates, and if you don't choose this option then anyone can opt to 'follow' you, which essentially means they can choose to be instant messaged or texted your updates. Now in my opinion the texting thing is slightly scary and stalker-like, as if you are publicly updating then some random in Brazil could be being texted the fact that you are 'just leaving the house' BUT then again like many of these networking sites you can only be stalked by how much information you give. It would be sensible for example to not be updating with 'in house all on my own, forgot to lock the doors, have lots of expensive electrical equipment'.

The major advantage of the site is being able to blog quickly, and it does make you consider what you write much more as you have to be informative and amusing in a minimum number of characters, particularly if you are posting publicly. My favourite posts are not the ones about going to buy shopping, they are the ones that tell you something interesting, funny and amusing.

Overall it seems pointless when you first join, just like a site dedicated to the 'status' feature of Facebook, but definately grows on you. My turning point was the morning it snowed last week, and on the public timeline you could see the reactions of people all around the country, VERY interesting.

On a more informative note you can also choose to receive news updates from BBC England, and could effectively just use it as a free text information service.

On a less informative note apparently you can follow Macworld (I don't have one and so won't be), and there are rumours that many tv/film directors are planning on joining, including the director of My Name is Earl... or that Ed show, i can't remember which or where I read it...

NB. It is Mike Pennie, writer/producer of 'My Name is Earl'. Find his twittering here. And I rediscovered this on the Twitter blog here.