Jun 17: Tor hidden services
This is my first hidden service, for testing purposes. smbzeu3ydgy63zlk.onion. Give it a click and tell me if you see anything!
Jun 6: Twitter: just add brain-power
Like Alisha on Soft Tech Reviews, I feel like a late adopter of Twitter. Truthfully, I ignored the hype when the service came out, and the idea of using it to tell the world about the minutiae of my daily activities seemed rather stomach-turningly boring for writer and reader alike. Seems like I was just being uncreative.
Twitter is a tool like many others: it needs some thought in order to get the most out of it. Firstly, though, we've got to know what we're working with:
That last point links directly into how I am using Twitter with Sandy. Sandy is a reminder service. It has some vaguely human characteristics, for example the ability to parse commands for times and dates, and to send a reminder by e-mail, mobile text or IM, even on a recurring basis. The Twitter interfaces are very useful. When Twitter's Jabber IM service is working (it isn't at the moment...), I can send a remind command through by that means, and also request information from the diary that Sandy keeps on my behalf. I can do the same through Twitter by text message, and this makes it very useful: I can set a reminder on the go, as though I were texting a savvy assistant.
People have written Twitter extensions for Firefox, and I can type a message in my Firefox address bar and twitter it directly to Sandy (so not a public message). Setting reminders as I think about them like this is very effective.
So, I've found a use for Twitter with a bit of ingenuity. I'll be expanding my use to include communicating with clients and colleagues over the next few months, but for the moment, I'm very content to have it in my arsenal of contemporary, web 2.0 communications tools.
Twitter is a tool like many others: it needs some thought in order to get the most out of it. Firstly, though, we've got to know what we're working with:
- A means of posting 140-character messages to an audience, who can opt to be instantly notified by mobile text message, IM or e-mail wherever they are, and can respond if they wish.
- An API which can be exploited to allow one's systems to integrate with Twitter, either by indexing and parsing twits, or sending and receiving them. This includes allowing computer systems to have their own accounts for the purposes of sending and receiving instructions and content to a human user.
That last point links directly into how I am using Twitter with Sandy. Sandy is a reminder service. It has some vaguely human characteristics, for example the ability to parse commands for times and dates, and to send a reminder by e-mail, mobile text or IM, even on a recurring basis. The Twitter interfaces are very useful. When Twitter's Jabber IM service is working (it isn't at the moment...), I can send a remind command through by that means, and also request information from the diary that Sandy keeps on my behalf. I can do the same through Twitter by text message, and this makes it very useful: I can set a reminder on the go, as though I were texting a savvy assistant.
People have written Twitter extensions for Firefox, and I can type a message in my Firefox address bar and twitter it directly to Sandy (so not a public message). Setting reminders as I think about them like this is very effective.
So, I've found a use for Twitter with a bit of ingenuity. I'll be expanding my use to include communicating with clients and colleagues over the next few months, but for the moment, I'm very content to have it in my arsenal of contemporary, web 2.0 communications tools.