Greg In The Desert

I have for the most part given up on Twitter. Too much noise and not enough signal. I’ve even gone as far as making my account private.

I’m in the minority and since Twitter is very popular and some people won’t even click on a link unless it’s on Twitter, I have set up an account just for Greg In the Desert on Twitter. The account will just show posts from Greg In The Desert rather than random things from me. I thought it was better to set up a new account rather than spam the followers I already have.

If your interested, I’m using the Twitter Tools plugin with the Twitter Friendly Links to generate my own short URLs.

twitter.com/greginthedesert

When Twitter first came out, I didn’t see the value of it. Much like every other new internet thing (like blogging) I became involved with it eventually. A little over a year ago I signed up on Twitter and have been following about 90 people. Despite it’s growing popularity I have not logged into the site in about a month. I don’t miss a thing.

The first problem: if I have more than maybe a dozen people I follow, it’s difficult to see what’s been going on since I last logged in. The best I can do is to scroll through the website, click the “load more” button at the bottom of the page and try to remember where I left off. Twitter really needs a summary page that shows what I’ve missed. I’ve tried using apps like Twitteriffic with Growl to show on screen updates people make updates, but that got annoying after a while.

The next problem: it’s nearly impossible to follow threads of conversations. More often than not when I log in I see @ replies about some subject that interests me but can’t tell much in 140 characters. I can click on the users name and then go to their list of updates and try find what the original subject was about, but that probably wont happen. THe original subject is forever lost. Twitter really needs a threaded view.

Finally there’s what I call following spam. When someone new starts following me I look first to see what kind of updates they have posted, so I know if they are writing things I’m interest in. I also look to see how many people they follow. If someone has less than a few hundred people they follow it’s conceivable that they might actually reading what others are writing. When someone follows me with thousands of followers I know they are only following me with the hopes that I will follow them back. They have been listening to some social media douche bag expert who says they can sell more things by being on Twitter.

Following spam doesn’t actually affect me that much other than to annoy, but it indicates where Twitter is going. Along with issues like the ones I mentioned here and other annoying issues like short URLs, Twitter is just becoming a waste of time instead of a useful service where I can learn new things.

Greg In The Desert experienced a massive spike in traffic this week when ehowa.com linked to the post title “Drive Through Fail“. I also received some traffic when it was posted on Reddit, Twitter and a few other sites but nothing like this.

There were a few snarky comments left but I decided to keep them.

How dare Twitter go down for unplanned maintenance.

Twitter is currently down for Unplanned maintenance.
We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.

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Now that the iPhone App store has been fully operational for several months, I have wasted money on many applications that I used once and regret spending money on. However a few applications have made it to my first screen (you an fit 20 including the dock) to stay for a while. Half of them are default Apple applications: Calendar, Notes, Contacts, Calculator, Camera, Safari and Mail with the phone and SMS apps in the dock. Here are the 10 applications which make up the rest. These should all work on the iPod Touch.

• Things ($9.99). A ToDo list is a necessity and it has to sync with my Mac for easy data entry. I checked out OmniFoucs even before there was a iPhone Version ($19.99). I found OmniFocus too complicated where Things is more self explanatory on the iPhone and Mac. Price was also an issue, since I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for an application that I would end up not using. Possible future replacement: Life Balance ($19.99). I used Life Balance on my Palm but it wasn’t out in time for me to try it out. I haven’t looked at the iPhone version too closely but the palm version synced with both Mac and Windows.
• iStockManager (Free). Although I don’t trade stock with great frequency, I do monitor stock prices on a regular basis (as sort of a social activity). Having the ablity to trade stock is a plus however and iStockManager allows trading through Ameritrade. I initially had some problems with the application, it turns out I needed to set up options within my Ameritrade account. Thankfully, iStockManger support was excellent. Previously used: Bloomberg (free). Doesn’t attach to a trading account but does the job of tracking stocks.
• Twinkle (Free). I was a Twinkle user when you could only install apps on jailbroken phones and haven’t tried any other twitter apps. I’m not a frequent twitter-er, so I probably wouldn’t need a power user app.
• NetNewsWire (Free). I was already a user of NetNewsWire on the Mac therefore using the iPhone version was logical. I have hundreds of feeds and check them all day long. There’s a number of improvements that NNW needs, I’m looking forward to a update.
• Gas Cubby ($4.99). I’m a automobile tracking fanatic. I used TealAuto on my PalmOS device and it’s annoyed me not to be able to find a good tracking app on the iPhone. I’ve tried several and recently started using Gas Cubby. So far I like what I’ve seen and will stick with it.
• Delivery Status Touch ($0.99). I’ve used the Delivery Status dashboard widget for some time to track my UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc deliveries and having a iPhone version is nice. The latest version sync with the devlopers servers which makes it easy to enter tracking information from the computer to the phone.
• Klick (Free). Klick is an app for viewing and uploading images on Flickr. I especially like the ability to find pictures uploaded near me, however they don’t update often since most people don’t geotag their photos.
• The Weather Channel (Free). As the first review on the iTunes store says, “Finally a good weather app that isn’t 9.99”. My problem with the other weather apps I’ve tried isn’t that they are $9.99, the problem is they weren’t good and were $9.99.
• Stanza (Free). An extremely well designed ebook reader with a built-in “store” of free, out of copyright books. There’s also a desktop companion for syncing your own ebooks and PDFs.
• Remote (Free). Apple’s remote application for us with iTunes and Apple TV. I use it for both.

Although no games are on my first screen, I can’t help recommend a few that I recently played.

• Touch Physics ($0.99). Although there are desktop versions of this game, it’s new to me and I found it very original and challenging.
• Jelly Car (Free). I’m having a particlualry diffuclt time with this game and yet I cannot stop.
• PAC-MAN Lite (Fr
  ee). When I get good at the free version, I might check out the paid version: PAC-MAN ($5.99).

Have a suggestion for an alternative listed here? Let me know in the comments.

I’ve joined the crowd, I found value in Twitter and opened a account. I’m not posting much at the moment but I’m sure my traffic will increase.

You can find me here: http://twitter.com

Gordon Meyer has a post entiteld Twittering Your Home, showing how to use a applescript to add events to your Twitter account. I haven’t found a reason to use Twitter, but this may be enough for me to check it out.

Here’s the script, which borrows some code from Tilman for using curl to send a Twitter status message:

set theMessage to description of me
set TwitterID to “yourID”
set TwitterPassword to “yourPassword”
set TwitterLogin to TwitterID & “:” & TwitterPassword
set TwitterStatus to quoted form of (“status=” & theMessage)
set results to do shell script “curl –user ” & TwitterLogin & ” –data-binary ” & TwitterStatus & ” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json”

You’ll need to enter the login and password for your home’s Twitter account, as noted in the script. Shortly after running this script, the message is delivered via Twitter, as illustrated earlier. It’s a simple as that.

If you use Indigo, another Mac-based home automation application, the above script will work just a few modifications. Instead of passing the message text using the Description field, use an Indigo global variable.