Archive for November, 2008
SXSW 2009
Much as I would love to be going to SXSW 2009, it really isn’t on the cards (unless some kind organisation would like to sponsor me to go), but there are several people I talked to at last nights Open Coffee who really were interested in attending but wanted to be able to organise a more group-like contingent, partly for the company but also to make their presence more effective. Given that www.nicreatives.com has the intention of enabling exactly this sort of thing, a page has been set up there for people to register their interest and get some preliminary discussion going about who plans to attend.
Twitlonger
It’s no secret that I love Twitter. I get withdrawal symptoms when it goes down and it is one of my primary methods of communication. I also love how it forces you to be concise, to reduce thoughts to the minimum required to convey information.
Sometimes though, just sometimes, 140 characters really isn’t enough. Anyone who has found themselves in a theological or technical discussion knows that it is difficult to convey information in 140 characters. Sure you can email, but you then lose the social network advantages of having the discussion on Twitter in the first place. You can also spread your thoughts across several Tweets, but this is both disjointed and slightly spammy to anyone not involved in the conversation.
So, I’ve made Twitlonger. Think of it as Twitpic for text. You can jot down those longer thoughts and it will generate a truncated Tweet, with a link to the full message. You get the advantages of staying (relatively) within the Twitterverse, but also get to explain things properly, where necessary.
Isn’t this open to abuse? Yeah, that is a worry. People could just use it to be very lazy and not be succinct, but hopefully it will be used sparingly and when appropriate. More information on the how and why is at www.twitlonger.com/about.php.
Currently, I’m running Twitlonger in closed beta, hopefully to catch any glaring problems, but if you want an invite code, tweet me: @stuartgibson.
