Memex 1.1

From Dave Winer.

Jay Rosen asked: "Write a 140 character post that explains what you find Twitter useful for."

DW: "Twitter is my shared notepad. If I want to remember something and I don't mind if everyone else knows it, I just post it here."

Only 126 characters.

Interesting idea — What Should I Read Next?. You type in the title and author of a volume that you’ve finished reading and it comes up with suggestions. It’s based, I’d guess, on a collaborative filtering algorithm. It’ll get better with more signed-up users, but it wasn’t very impressive on first attempts. For example, it’d never heard of J.K. Galbraith’s The Great Crash, and produced weird follow-ups for Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.

“Morning. Hooray ! 79 degrees and blue skies. And I pissed off the mail again. Life is sweet.”

From the Twitterstream of ‘disgraced’ TV presenter Jonathan Ross, currently spending part of his three-month suspension without pay on hols in Florida. Needless to say, the Daily Mail is fuming about him. Come to think of it, does the Mail ever do anything other than fume? Perhaps it should be banned under the no-smoking-in-public legislation.

From Steven Johnson.

A few months ago, I flew into London to give a talk at the Handheld Learning Conference, which had put me up at the Hoxton Hotel. I'd arrived late at night, and when I woke up, I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was waking up in London with no clear idea what neighborhood I was in. That seemed like precisely the kind of observation/query to share with the Twittersphere, and so I jotted down this tweet before heading out to find a coffee:

Waking up at the Hoxton Hotel in London — strangely unclear as to what neighborhood I'm actually in…

When I came back from coffee, I discovered, first, from a batch of Twitter replies that I was apparently in the neighborhood where half my London friends lived and worked. And then I noticed the envelope that had been placed on my desk. I opened it up, and it turned out to be a note from a producer who worked with Sir David Frost. They had noticed on Twitter that I was in London, and said they were very interested in having me talk with Sir David about Everything Bad Is Good For You for his show on English-language Al Jazeera.

At breakfast the other morning with a group of colleagues, two of them expressed the classic put-down of Twitter: “I’m not interested in knowing that someone has just had a cup of tea and put the cat out”. The point of Twitter for me is not really what’s going on my contacts’ lives, but what’s going on in their heads. And that’s what I mostly get from the service, and it’s worth having.

Some data on FriendFeed here. Worth graphing sometime, maybe.

TechCrunch snippet about a kind of retrospective twitter service.

Memiary, a site built by developer Sid Yadav over the course of a weekend, is looking to help you remember what you’ve been doing with your life. The site is a micro-diary, offering a private place to fill in your thoughts and takes only a minute or so to fill out every day. Blogging fills this role well enough for many people, but most of us aren’t comfortable with sharing the most personal details of our day-to-day lives with anyone who stumbles across our webpage. And most of us simply don’t have time to fill out longform diary entries, so the short text snippets work well.

Getting started is simple: enter an email address and password, and you’re presented with five text fields asking what you’ve done today. Fill those in, click the checkbox next to each one, and you’re done. Each of those daily activities is saved in a log, which can be browsed through later. At this point the site is very barebones (understandable because of its short development time), but I’d like to see more ways to input my daily activities, such as through a SMS message…

O yikes! I’m laid low by a horrible streaming cold after two very intense work-weeks and so I logged onto Twitter (first time I’ve been online in nearly 24 hours) to alert my friends to this fact. I tweeted “Sneezing, coughing and spluttering with a horrible cold”. And then found a tweet from Charles Arthur pointing to a Blog post which suggests that he may ‘unfollow’ me. He takes a strict, non-nonsense line on these matters, viz:

First: what I like is people pointing me to interesting stuff. Which generally means people who include links to interesting stuff in their tweets. When people don’t have those sorts of things in their tweets, and when it really is the unexamined life (”Having cup of coffee” “Eating biscuit”) then I’m afraid I’m not interested. I love ya and all that, but I’d like to get something done. And for me that means finding a fresh perspective, not knowing that you still have a pulse and a functioning brainstem.

What does this mean?

If people start using Qwitter and ask me why I’ve unfollowed them, I’ll point them to this post. It’s simple really. In an attention economy, there’s only so much time I can listen to what colour your curtains are. Then, I’ve got to get on and earn some money. Please, no hurt feelings though.

So there you have it: useful stuff only. To be fair, Charles also provides some cute Applescript for quick-posting of links to Twitter.

I can see what he’s getting at. Some Twitterers (e.g. Dave Winer) are terrific at providing a constant stream of interesting links. But actually one of the things I like about Twitter is that it also enables me to know about the trivial detail of friends’ lives.

From the 10 Downing Street Twitter feed:

PM and Premier Wen of China exchanged warm congratulations on the UK and China’s Olympic performances ahead of a bilateral meeting tonight.