My Favorite Twitter Tools

The Archivist
Twitter
Twitter

The Twitter ecosystem gets bigger with each passing day and developers are building more and more great tools to use with it. Listed below are some of my favorite ways of using these developer tools with Twitter.

  • Natter– The official Twitter app for Facebook has not been updated for a while (not for a lack of trying on Twitter’s part either).  Fortunately, Natter improves on the official app in a couple of ways.  First, it will actually take links you tweet about and put in a Facebook like preview box with a thumbnail as well.  Second, Twitter names get translated to real names listed on their profiles, so you don’t show off the @username notation.  Lastly, comment replies on Facebook are sent back to your Twitter stream as @mentions from Natterapp, which means you can track your conversation on Twitter.  The one improvement I’d like to see from Natter is to have retweets posted on your Facebook profile like LinkedIn currently does.  Still, if you were looking for a better way to integrate your Twitter and Facebook accounts, this is the app for you.
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Site Changes for 2010

My site in 2010
My site

With the long 4th of July Weekend, I thought it was time for my yearly site refresh.  After upgrading to WordPress 3.0 (which has a number of advanced features like Custom Post Types and Multiple Sites installations), I decided to make two major cosmetic changes to the site.

  1. I decided to change the site’s theme to Thirty Ten, a three-column version of the new WordPress default theme, Twenty Ten.  Like all of the times I change themes, the old theme is still pretty good, but I just felt the need to experiment with a new design.  I especially like that asides have been given their own style and that it’s easy to place my own header images (which I hope to do in the coming weeks).
  2. Since I recently joined up with an online advertising company, I wanted to understand more about the business.  So I reactivated my Google Adsense account, and decided to place ads on my site and feed.  I had resisted putting ads on my site since I first started it (which when I think about it seems odd, since I was making less money then I do now), but it felt right to try this out.   We’ll see how this experiment goes.

So check feel free to check out my new web site at allen.alew.org.

Me and Sergey

Me and Sergey Brin
Me and Sergey Brin, Co-founder of Google

One of those nerdy cool things, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, spoke at my search engine class. I got a photo with him.

From Wikipedia:

“Sergey Brin (born August 1973 in Moscow, Russia) is an American entrepreneur. Born in Russia, Brin studied computer science and mathematics before co-founding Google with Larry Page. Brin is the President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at seven billion U.S. dollars.”

Update: Newscenter had a story on it. “Google cofounder Sergey Brin comes to class at Berkeley

Me and Sergey


Me and Sergey
Originally uploaded by enlewof.

One of those nerdy cool things, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, spoke at my search engine class. I got a photo with him.

From Wikipedia:
“Sergey Brin (born August 1973 in Moscow, Russia) is an American entrepreneur. Born in Russia, Brin studied computer science and mathematics before co-founding Google with Larry Page. Brin is the President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at seven billion U.S. dollars.”

Update: Newscenter had a story on it. “Google cofounder Sergey Brin comes to class at Berkeley

Minor follow ups

-I just realized that the Google Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy answer to life, the universe, and everything trick (where you type in I posted about before) has got to be one of the nerdiest things ever. I mean it combines the geeky-ness of Google’s calculator with a favorite geek book.

Yahoo 360, finally, added feeds support (which means I now can display Livejournal on it, among other things) and Flickr integration. I had said earlier that feeds would make it really awesome. If I had more friends on it, it might become my primary social networking tool.

-I’ve never seen a subway so crowded that I couldn’t even step on to because so many people got on it before me. One of the plights of urbanization I guess…

-There’s a piece of comment spam that went around the blogs and left this message

“[last person who commented], I totally agree with what you said.

[SPAM URL]”

Very clever way leaving a spam message, as it totally just blends in with other comments.

Life according to livejournal. Tracking the popularity the moods on Livejournal reveals how people responded to major events. Apparently, sad and angry went way up after the London Bombings. Sure wish there was a Tag Cloud for all the Livejournal tags.

“Don’t Panic” and more from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

After seeing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and completely laughing out of pure enjoyment throughout much of the movie, I must say I’ve become pretty enthralled by the concepts it presents. I had never read the books or heard the radio show before, so maybe that explains why I’m so impressed. Those who had prior experience with author Douglas Adams’s universe said the movie could have been funnier. After plucking through some quotes, there are some great quotes that made it in the movie and others that didn’t.

Favorite Quotes from the movie and such:

Quotes