Because you are absolutely nobody or nothing if you don’t have a presence on Twitter right now, NASA has gotten into the game. This week, they announced that one of their astronauts — Mike Massimino — is going to be using the Twitter from the Space Shuttle.
Top that, Oprah and Ashton!
In any event, Massimino — tweeting under the admittedly awesome nom de twit of “Astro_Mike” — is a relative newbie to the Twitter, so you can only imagine what he will be tweeting.
Well, luckily, you don’t have to. As it turns out, Medialoper is currently beta testing super secret software that allows us to go and retrieve tweets from the not-too-distant future, and I’ve compiled a list of some of the things that Astro_Mike will be sharing with a waiting world.
(more…)
Once upon a time — February, 2009 — Facebook was the single most powerful community-building tool I’d ever seen. Over the course of 2008, I watched it reconnect a group of friends — day by day, person by person — that had last been fully connected two decades ago. It culminated in an amazing post-Christmas reunion party organized entirely via Facebook.
Now, with the new Home Page, Facebook has broken its own back. It currently lays on the ground like a wounded bird, reduced to retardedly chirping over and over again: “What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind? What’s on your mind?”
But it can be fixed. Easily. And I know how.
(more…)
It’s right there in my “Friend Updates:” Apparently, my friend Tom — you know, the MySpace founder guy who is everybody’s default Friend — has added a new song from some singer-songwriter or other to his profile.
However there’s one small problem with this. Tom’s not my Friend.
When I first signed up for MySpace over a year ago (yup, I was late), I thought that it was a stupid idea to have Tom as one of my Friends, so I de-Friended him almost instantly.
So, if Tom’s not my Friend, why am I being told about the music he’s adding to his profile?
(more…)
As digital media professionals from across the country and around the globe pack their bags for the annual trek to Austin, one question is emerging that will likely dominate the conversation at this year’s SXSW festival — can Twitter survive it’s own success?
Last year Twitter emerged as the runaway hit at an annual event that’s been described as spring break for geeks. At the time I speculated that something better would almost certainly come along within the next year. Surprisingly, a year later Twitter is still going strong. I say surprising, because Twitter is such a simple concept that it should have been easily usurped by something better.
In the past year Twitter has successfully resisted insurgencies from rival applications, including Jaiku, and to a lesser degree Pownce (which still lacks basic SMS support). That Twitter has succeeded where its competitors have failed is all the more amazing considering the downtime and performance issues the application has suffered.
Twitter’s performance problems have been blamed all manner of causes, including the service’s hosting environment, phenomenal user growth, the Rails platform, and the underlying application architecture. Regardless of the cause, the Twitter faithful continue to use the application, although they grumble mightily when the service fails.
(more…)
quarterlife, the much-hyped new series from the creators of such shows as thirtysomething, Once and Again and the eternal My So-Called Life, debuted a couple of nights ago to what some are calling “the worst ratings in 20 years.”
I don’t think that this was what NBC had in mind when they announced that they had picked it up from, er, MySpace amidst a busload of hype. Given the fact that it had a pretty high profile and was debuted during a time where there is very little serious drama being broadcast, their expectations must have been that it would at least hold its own.
And yet it failed, miserably. Why? The flip answer is that it sucked, but that’s only part of it. The full answer is a bit more complicated.
(more…)
