I'm Twittering This! or Dude, Where's My Blog?

As you may have noticed, TalkingTree.com blog is rather barren these days. I find that while I work, while I relax at home (that is when I'm not working at home), or even when I'm mobile I'm nearly always using Twitter, and less so Facebook.

Unless you've been living under a rock you've heard of Twitter by now. If you're still not sure, Twitter is a bit like group chat where you post a short summary of what you're doing or what's on your mind, and other people that are interested can reply. While I'm not going to explain Twitter fully here -- you can find that on Twitter.com -- it can be very useful for sharing up to date information about a particular interest with lots of other people that share that interest. Most of my Tweeps fall into one of several interest groups... There's those interested in Photography, those interested in Web Technology, and those that happen to otherwise be friends or family. There are several applications you can use to watch Twitter updates. My favorite for use on a computer is TweetDeck, and on my iPhone I use Twitterific. One reason to love using an iPhone with Twitterrific is that I can be anywhere, shopping, getting a haircut, or at a conference and have the ability to take a cell phone picture for upload to Twitter with a brief description about what's going on.

Twitter and Facebook are such interesting places to socialize online while sharing information that I've neglected my blog for quite some time. To address that problem, I'll be posting summaries of recent Tweets to my blog here where you can catch up on some of the things I've been talking about. Although, this is a bit like sitting next to someone that's on the phone since my Tweets here are only half the conversation some time. To get the full benefit of Twitter you really have to follow both sides of the conversation.

To accomplish updating this blog with my Tweets, I whipped up a quick ColdFusion script to pull in my Twitter RSS feed and convert to HTML with all usernames and URLs converted to actual links. I'll next try to automate this so that my blog gets regularly updated with my Twitter summaries.

Of course, if you're already on Twitter, Follow Me, and on Facebook Add Me as a Friend.

How to read tweets

• If a tweet begins with an at sign, its a username, like @JoeSchmoe. Its at the beginning because I'm replying to something that Joe Schmoe tweeted earlier.
• If a @username appears later in the tweet but not at the beginning, then i'm refering to that user, like Hey, did you see that cool widget that @JoeSchmoe built?
• If a tweet begins with RT, that means Re-Tweet, and its kinda like holding up a megaphone. On Twitter you Follow or subscribe to certain people, and in turn other people follow you. The people that subscribe to your tweets may not be following the people that you subscribe to. So by retweeting someone that you subscribe to, you are amplifying that persons tweet by broadcasting to all the people that subscribe to you. Confused yet? If your subscribers are interested in the retweet, they may then follow that original person (a.k.a tweep or twit).
• If a tweet has a word beginning with a pound sign like #photog, that's called a hashtag. Hashtags are used as labels to identify a topic for your tweet. Later people can search by hashtags to see tweets from everyone that talked about that topic. In this case, #photog means the tweet is about photography or a photographer. This in contrast to #photo without the last 'g' and it is used for tweets about a particular photo.

Recent Tweets for Mon June 29, 2009

Mon Jun 29 10:09 PM

2 nights in a row my son doesn't want to sleep coz he's not feeling well. Long nights of frequent rocking, not much sleep for me.

Mon Jun 29 4:45 PM

@JoshuaCurtiss Pretty sure it was CF5 -> CF6 w/ the J2EE conversion. I was on the team at Macromedia that reviewd poss bkwds compat issues

Mon Jun 29 4:39 PM

@jlamoree Holy cow, a fradulent Lactating Lesbians infringement claim from Cream Ridge, NJ. That just, em, *sucks*!

Mon Jun 29 12:52 PM

@jonbcampos Apache XSL-FO http://bit.ly/Xrhar

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