Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

After reading Dave’s post about Twitter being the new Facebook yesterday, I decided to give Digsby a go. (I’d heard of it previously, but I was semi-scared off by all the twittermania - it’s a bit like marmite).

Since I was only following a few tweeters there wasn’t of a flow - so I added a couple more higher profile tweeters, like Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror.

This morning Jeff tweeted:

I hate #region so much. DIE #REGION DIE!

I quite like #region in VS.NET, (it makes my code look/feel tidy). I was curious to why Jeff had a problem with it, so I tempted to reply to his tweet. But I stopped - thinking it was a bit of a fan-boy thing to do. Also I’m sure someone else would have asked the same question… which got me thinking how do you follow a conversation on Twitter?

I came across Summize (a search engine for Twitter) the other day, so tried that to see if anyone mentions #region or @codinghorror - which they do, but it’s a tad disjointed. I couldn’t follow a conversation.

So I turned to my old friend Google (how to follow conversations on twitter), and found Quotably!

Now I can follow the conversation: http://quotably.com/codinghorror/statuses/811735028

Quotably is powered by Summize, with some extra jiggery-pokery (and human intervention).

Since moving down to Bristol, I have been subscribing to the Underscore mailing list - of which I’m guilty of non-participation. One of the threads today made me realise the potential of user empowerment using “Web 2.0″ services and technologies.

The thread was called “RSS -> SMS“, Andy wrote:

After my wife took three hours to get to work this morning due to the M5 being shut, I’ve built a Yahoo pipe that takes the Highways Agency feed and filters it to be just the M5 traffic alerts.

I can set up the RSS reader on her phone to cosume the feed from the pipe but was wondering if anyone knew a simple and free way of converting the feed to text messages sent to he phone? (It’ll only be for a low volume of messages (less than one a day))

The suggestion of Twitter’s SMS notifications was made, utilising the (very good) twitterfeed service, (which I used for both RSB and BLB tweets).

The UK Traffic information is provided by the Highways Agency in RSS format - which was routed through Yahoo Pipes to filter items containing information about the M5.

It was later found out that there is already a dedicated RSS feed for the M5, thus making the Yahoo Pipes method redundant. However the issue here isn’t about the range of RSS feeds and knowing what do with them… it’s about everyday people using openly available data to provide useful personalised information.

Sure, it’s mostly web-savvy developers doing this at the moment - yet as the web technologies evolve, we’ll start to see more personalised services that anyone can use.

If you want to follow the M5 Traffic Information on Twitter, visit: http://twitter.com/UK_M5_Traffic

I received an email from Pownce this morning, letting me know that they’ve opened the doors to all! Yah! (oh, the irony)

I signed up for Pownce a couple of months ago… configured my profile, looked for a few friends … didn’t find any … now what?

At this point I’m reminded of Rob Manuel’s comment about social networks:

Social networks are pubs. There’s little reason to like Facebook if your friends aren’t there. Anyway, the music is too loud.

Obviously at the time of Rob’s “tweet”, Facebook was only just picking up speed in the UK - now it’s THE place to be on-line (even for the non-geeks). Ringing true, because all your friends are there!

Pownce is an impressive web-app, with a nice slick interface … I’d be tempted to use it, only if I had more friends (billy-no-mates me!) - (actually I found a few now)

I found another interesting article (by Chris Brogan) about the “social networks are like pubs” analogy.