What Are Twitter Lists & Why I Think They're a Big Deal

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Twitter has begun rolling out Twitter Lists to a limited number of users, starting yesterday (Oct. 16, 2009). When I noticed several of my followers discussing this, I went to check my own twitter profile and was presented with the image above. I did not notice the "don't tweet about it yet" message until after I'd already done so, and a follower pointed this out to me who also had lists enabled. Soon thereafter, tons of Tech blog's were posting about it as well, so I am going to take the liberty to follow suit.

First of all, I am very excited by this feature and look forward to the near future when all users have this enabled. In short, I've wanted a native Twiter feature such as this for a while now, since I feel in love with Tweet Deck & Nambu's "Groups" feature within their Twitter clients. I've sort of limited myself to following around 400 people because I've found that after much more than that, my Twitter stream becomes very hard to keep up with without checking it constantly throughout the day. When I used to use very-unstable-and-crashy Nambu and then very-bloated-and-inelegant-non-mac-like Tweet Deck, I loved the ability to group people I follow for easier filtering of their content. Brizzly, the web-based Twitter client that I recently got an invite to, has a 3rd party feature built into their app which enables similar functionality. After using all three of these clients, I've found myself using Tweetie for Mac once more (and eagerly awaiting Tweetie 2 for Mac). According to Tweetie's developer, Loren Brichter, Tweetie 2 for iPhone and the upcoming Tweetie 2 for Mac will both support the Twitter Lists feature nativley. So what are Twitter lists?

This is an example of a list I made last night. This list simply contains all people that I follow on Twitter whom I know to live in the Washington D.C. area.

As you can see on the right, the amount of people on this list is the amount of people this list is following. The amount of followers this list has, is basically the amount of people who've subscribed to this twitter list.

At first, I was hesitant to press that Follow button as I was not sure what would happen. Would I suddenly start following this lists of 200 tech bloggers that Scoble created? Alas, no. It simply subscribes you to that follower list. Those followers' tweets do not automatically appear in your twitter feed unless you follow the members individually. Subscribing to a list simply saves it in the right-side-column of your twitter profile page. When you click one of these bookmarked lists, you can then see the tweets of the people who are on the list.

Twitter Lists can be public or private. While I keep a private list of 'essential' Twitterers that, when on a busy day, these are the only people I really care about not missing any of their tweets. This list has around 20 people on it. So as to not hurt anyone's feelings, it's a private list. No one can know that they didn't make the cut. Public lists, however, are why I think this will really take off. Follow Friday? Twitter's Suggested Users List? Both concepts are now obsolete. Now anyone can play the role as social curator and group interesting people together in any way want all while sharing these lists with anyone who may want them. This is going to be big, if for no other reason, providing an easy mechanism to share followers.

 

 

Petulance and the Prize

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by Garrison Keillor writing for the New York Times.

Evidently some people were disappointed that Dick Cheney didn't receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and believe me, I sympathize — I thought Philip Roth should’ve gotten the literature prize instead of that grumpy Romanian lady with the severe hair — but it was Mr. Obama whom the Norwegians wanted to come visit Oslo in December and stand on the balcony of the Grand Hotel and wave to the crowd along Karl Johans Gate, and, face it, Mr. Obama is going to draw a bigger crowd than Mr. Cheney would have. When a man has shot somebody in the face with a shotgun, people are going to be reluctant to line up en masse in his presence lest he get excited again.

Going to Oslo in December and sitting through a black-tie banquet with a bunch of wooden-faced Norwegians and eating herring and delivering a speech larded with bromides about international cooperation and no jokes is not what I’d consider a whee of a good time, frankly. Oslo is rather dark and murky in December. The sun rises during the first coffee break and sets right after lunch and this does not make for a festive mood. Bell-bottoms were not invented in Norway, nor was the mambo, or the convertible. This isn’t Carnival in Rio.

Some conservative pundit suggested that the president should’ve declined the prize, but it is not gracious to reject a compliment, one should accept it with becoming modesty, as Mr. Obama did, that’s what your mother brought you up to do. The prize isn’t about you, it’s about Peace, or Literature, or Homecoming, or Champion Hog, or Male Vocalist of the Year, so walk up there and smile for the cameras, say thank you and sit down.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes. Here is an idealistic, articulate young president who is enormously popular everywhere in the world except in the states of the Confederacy, and here sit the 28 percent of the American people who still thought Mr. Bush was doing a heckuva job at the end, gnashing their teeth, hoping and praying for something horrible to happen such as an infestation of locusts or the disappearance of the sun, something to make the president look bad, which is not a good place for a political party to be, hoping for the country to slide into chaos. When you bet against America, you are choosing long odds.

A person can run down the list of all that’s wrong with this country, including the lobbyists who cross back and forth from public service to influence-peddling like alligators on the golf course, or the bankers who lost their minds in the great mortgage mania, but the country has a history of rising to challenges and turning away from demagogues and doing what needs to be done. Because we are a passionately patriotic people, infused with a love of our history and our land, and so we have limited patience for fools, such as the ones who now dominate the right.

Conservatism is a powerful strain in American life that ordinarily passes as common sense. Save for a rainy day. Don’t foul the nest. Don’t burn your bridges. Don’t sacrifice the future for short-term profit. But when it contradicts itself and becomes weighted down with bigotry and cynicism, then it doesn’t hold water any more.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And conservatives tried to keep functioning through the Bush administration but the contradictions wore them down, and last fall, when the federal government wrote a blank check to stave off collapse of the financial sector, conservative principles came crashing to the ground, and now all they have in common is that they don’t like President Obama.

O.K., but resentment of an American president being honored by the Norwegians is not a good point from which to build a Republican revival. Petulant fury isn’t a winning hand in politics. Get over it.

My fiance, Steffanie, often scoffs when I try to turn on A Prarie Home Companion in when we happen to be in the car on weekends when it's on. She gives me a look of pleading that says, 'Do we really have to listen to this?' Now, I confess I am not a HUGE fan of the show... I mostly like his long running skits (Guy Noir), the news from Lake Wobegon, and his quirky fake commerials. Mostly I like Garrison Keillor whom I think is one of the great living writers of our day.

And I especially like when he writes Op-Ed columns for the New York Times.

Google Wave First Look

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Gina Trapani former editor-in-chief at Lifehacker has posted an excellent article over at lifehacker (where she still posts from time-to-time) called "Google Wave First Look." I highly recommend reading her post to geek a feel of what Wave can do, that is, if you haven't already watched the demo video from the I/O Conference from earlier this year.  Gina also makes this excellent point which everyone who is lucky enough to receive an invite should keep in mind:

Wave is only as useful as the people who are in it, so if you get an invitation and the privilege of giving out invitations, do use them very wisely.

 Remember, you only get 8 "nominations" initially. If you blast these out to 8 of your closest friends, 6 of whom are really geeks and might not really use it, you've just run the risk of detrimentally affecting your initial wave experience because you now have no one use Wave with (unless you want to go out on Twitter and find random strangers to try it out with). Be selective with your newfound Wave granting powers :) 

 

Teabaggers Lie

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Matt Kibbe, president of the astroturfing agency known as FreedomWorks, told the teabaggers assembled in Washington that ABC News had reported crowd size as 1 million to 1.5 million people. Problem is, ABC never said that:
At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as "tens of thousands."
Nevertheless, right wing blogs all over the place keep repeating the 1.5 million number. But they've gone further than making up numbers; they've actually faked photos. On Twitter, a blogger by the name "coffee260" tried posting this photo as "proof" of the crowd size:

 

Problem: there's a museum missing. That's an old photo -- look at the edges and you'll see it's a sloppy screen grab. Look at this photo from Obama's inaugural; the missing museum pops up like a yellow mushroom in the upper-right:


Who would tell such a lie? Great question! The picture was posted by a pseudonymous blogger whose stated mission is disinformation:

The vision of this website is that black Americans will become more aware of the history with regard to the political party they support overwhelmingly by 90%. By doing so, they can seize control over their own destiny and come back home to the Republican party.

Blogging only once in most months, his posts are a mix of charismatic evangelism and boilerplate FreedomWorks propaganda, including a complete schedule of town halls.

But he was in good company; Michelle Malkin got caught faking it too. Here's the picture she's been spreading all over the intertubes:

 

 

Here's the livecam shot of that same location at 3:30 pm yesterday, when 1.5 million teabaggers were supposedly streaming through this intersection:

 


Why does the most Christian-y political-slash-religious movement always break the commandment about lying? And when will the mainstream media just call them what they are -- lying liars who tell lies?

iTunes 9.0: Home Sharing Explained

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Like most other Apple Geeks™ I watched today's Apple Event via twitter, live blogs, and Leo Laporte's TWiT Live broadcast, eagerly awaiting news about Apple's new products. When Steve reached the point in his presentation where he introduced the new iTunes 9.0 release, I was very happy to see both Home Sharing and the iPhone application organizer. The new iPhone application organizer is a no-brainer, as shown in the presentation video. Home Sharing at first seemed equally as easy to understand, but seeing as I was at work and I sync my iPhone at home, I was unable to immediately try it out. I finished my workday and quickly rushed home to try out iTunes 9.0. After a short download, installation and iPhone update to 3.1 I began playing around with the features. New iPhone content syncing options: check. iPhone app organizer: check. Home Sharing: Che....err wait. Where did it go? My fiance and I asked each other this question within minutes of one another. We had encountered a problem.

The Home Sharing side-menu item, which initially displayed, instructed us to enter our Apple ID info, had then promptly disappeared. Sharing was not working for us the way we saw other people reporting that it was working for them on twitter, forums and other Apple blogs across the net. At first, I hypothesized that perhaps I had misunderstood the point of Home Sharing and that it was only intended to use as a way to share content across multiple computers who all use the same iTunes account. I was disappointed that my fiance and I could not both use this feature after all, and I abandoned the idea in favor of making dinner and then watching Congressman Joe Wilson (R) of South Carolina declare this evening, in front of Congress, the American Public and the World, that he was a douchebag. My fiance went off to bed while I began watching the presentation video of the Apple event from earlier today. When Apple turned over the demo to one of the other Apple employees who demoed Home Sharing, he made it very apparent that the library he was sharing with was his wife's. Something didn't seem right to me. They never mentioned using the same Apple ID, and while he wasn't clear, his language implied it was between two different Apple ID accounts.

I started searching. I turned to several blogs, gdgt.com, engadget.com, gizmodo.com, tuaw.com, macrumors.com and finally of all places, cNET where I came across this gem of an article. Deep down in the comments of this article, I ran into two back-to-back comments that cleared the entire problem up. 

This is how to get Home Sharing to work between two different Macs who both primarily are used by two different people with two different Apple ID accounts. Turn on Home Sharing on Mac #1. Input the Apple ID login/pass within the Home Sharing screen for Mac #2 (on Mac#1). Then go to Mac #2 and on the Home Sharing screen input the Apple ID login/pass for Mac #1. It seems so simple, right? If only Apple had been a little more clear on their website how to get this to work (or better yet, on the Home Sharing screen instructions).