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Showing posts from December, 2008

So what is this Twitter you keep going on about?

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Twitter is the one social networking / micro-blogging / status update service that I fully embraced this year and used extensively. At Web 2.0 Summit in October 2007, there was a lot of talk about Twitter, so I thought I really should give it a go, and once I got into it I was hooked. I often describe Twitter as being like the status update feature on Facebook and you can choose to follow other people's or companies status updates and to restrict who sees yours (if you want). I, in fact, also have my status update in Facebook automatically whenever I update it in Twitter (except for when I am replying to somebody else). First off, Twitter is FREE to use. They are looking at various Revenue models, but the base service is expected to be free for the foreseeable future. Twitter is based around the simple question of "What are you going?". In response to this you can only use 140 characters . Whilst you can just answer this question, most people use it as a way to

Keeping up with what's happening in the world

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The world of technology (in particular) is moving very fast. I used to surf the web looking for what was new on key sites, but then decided that I would rather have the information come to me rather than me having to stumble across it. I then subscribed to lots of mailing lists, but once RSS feeds arrived this enabled access to even more information in a manner that meant I wasn't drowning my Inbox (or having to set up numerous auto-filter rules), so I stopped subscribing to the vast majority of mailing lists. For the past year I have been using Twitter and RSS feeds as key methods for keeping up with what's going on. I now wonder what next year will bring and how Semantic Web technologies will change relevant information makes its way to me. The key methods I recall adopting for the past few years in terms of keeping up with what's going on: 2006 2007 2008 Daily Surfing the Web, in particular: Computerworld Slashdot Aardvark TheServerSide.com TheServerSide.NET Mailin