Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter
Robyn Twomey for TIME
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The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a
terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send
140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world
need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago
scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would
allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my
choice of breakfast cereal."
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I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's
co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching
Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging
posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts
replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams w
"Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles."
Sideline is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.
Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license. The first beta release is out and the code is hosted on github.
twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.
Some of twhirl's features:
* runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
* connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmic accounts
* notifications on new messages
* shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
* cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku
* post images to TwitPic
* search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
* timeline filtering
* color schemes
* automatically check for new versions
There are a lot more things twhirl can do to improve your twitter experience, and it offers various configuration options to adapt to your personal needs.