Twitter - Social Networking Without The Network!
Twitter, which has been catching on very fast since it first popped onto the net just two years ago, likes to call itself a micro-blogging site. What does that mean? It means they will host a miniature profile for you, and let you write entries that consist of no more than 140 characters. For all practical purposes, that means just a sentence or two most of the time.
The idea of Twitter is to keep your friends informed on what you’re doing. You accomplish this by either signing onto the site and adding your entry, or more often, signing on through your cell phone. You can also sign up to received text messages from Twitter whenever one of your friends updates their status.
Unfortunately, their network sucks. The concept is great, i would love to get regular updates on some of my friends and keep them up to speed on what i was doing, but the fact that you cant find ANYONE on the site totally kills your ability to network with your friends. Currently, the ONLY way to find someone, besides doing a search for their name or location, is by entering their e-mail address. Boy, that is SO useful. Twitter really needs to get a hint here and take notes from Myspace and Facebook, and let users create a slightly larger profile and browse other profiles by relative location or other commonalities, like high schools, colleges, and employers. As it stands, i have no idea if any of my friends are on Twitter, which completely kills the idea of staying connected with my friends.
Okay, maybe i lied a little bit. There is one other way to find people on Twitter - give them your email address and password, and let them look through your contact list to find members, or send invites to people who are not yet members. Yeah, like i’m really going to do that. I don’t give a shit if you say your not going to store that personal information, look guys - i don’t know you, and i don’t know what your agenda is. I’m not going to take your word for it on anything regarding my personal information, unless i read a nice big legal document like a EULA so i know exactly where you stand. Just because most people are dumb and say yes to everything, doesn’t mean i do.
So as it turns out, twitter may not be completely useless. At the very least, i have found that you can use it to do at least one thing - stalk pseudo-celebrities. I’m not sure how many super famous people are on twitter, but i know a lot of the tech journalists i like to follow have twitter accounts, and its nice to be able to follow what they are doing, so i can read their new columns or catch their latest radio show. So unless you know who Leo Laporte or John D’Vorak are, Twitter probably won’t do you much good. But if you’re a geek like me, at least there is ONE good thing about the service.
After two years, i would have thought Twitter would be mature enough to at least offer a decent way to browse through users, but that’s not the case. Until they catch up to Myspace and Facebook in terms of being able to find and make friends, the service just isn’t going to be as useful as it could be. This isn’t to say i want to see them take on other features like Myspace and Facebook have, i actually think the highly specialized site is great, it just needs to be easier to use, or it won’t attract new users.
(P.S. - If you ARE on Twitter, or want to sign up - you can follow me, I’m signed up as ‘Gumpo10k’)
November 9th, 2007: Demonoid, one of the world’s largest private BitTorrent trackers is shut down by the CRIA, the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Demonoid was one of the largest hubs of high quality torrents that ranged from free & public domain software like linux distributions and amateur movies to distinctly copyrighted material like the latest movie blockbusters and often video games and television shows that had yet to even been released.
There was plenty of speculation that the DVD war would come to an end when Warner announced they would be releasing exclusively Blu Ray discs. To top it off, other sources like Netflix and Walmart completely cut off their HD Selection and stopped offering HD DVDs at all. Places like Best Buy and Circuit City had moved the HD DVDs into the bargain bin, and given Blu Ray all the shelf space. It was clear to many that HD DVD was doomed.
Recently, Apple released the 
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So, for a while now, i’ve been using this application called