Online Observations

Twitter launches local trends

I like this. I really like this. To me, the Twitter trending function didn’t make a lot of sense a whole lot of times. The reason was because a lot of times the trends didn’t really appeal to a worldwide audience and were localized towards wherever the majority of the users come from (the USA?). Anyway, Twitter has now launched Local Trends.

As you can see in the image, you can set a location for where you are, and see what the people there are talking about. I am guessing that Twitter will use the geolocation information for finding out which tweets are coming from where.

You have to set your location for this to work. However, you are going to be disappointed if you do not live in either Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, UK, or the USA. Because these are the only countries for which local trends are supported right now. You can also further fine tune the local trends if you live in any of the 15 cities that are supported right now. A long way to go, but I am guessing now that the basic functionality is up, its just a matter of adding support for newer locations. Anyway, even now, you can see what people in Chicago are talking about, and whether its the same as what people in Atlanta are tweeting.

Nice going, Twitter.

Twitter makes it clear that spam and bots are not welcome

Last week Twitter released new Terms of Service for its ever popular service. Here’s a blog post by Biz Stone Twitter’s new TOS describing the new terms of service in a rather interesting manner. One of the main things to notice about the new Terms of Service is that there are specific sections dedicated towards usage of API, storage limits, mail bombing, viruses, etc. This sends out a clear message to people who have been using the API to their own selfish ends. I am pretty happy with this because Twitter was getting to be a real pain with all these marketers, bots, and spam.

Painting Twitter’s history

 

Twitter is the hottest thing on the Internet right now, and rightly so. I blog less and tweet more. Its just so much easier to do it. TechCrunch found a picture describing Twitter’s history. Here’s what it looks like:

 

 

Not too many words are needed for this post (a picture is worth… ). Also click on the image to go to the TechCrunch article.

Someone is phishing in Twitter

Spread the news. Be careful when logging into your Twitter account. Someone has put up a very clever clone of the site for the only aim of capturing your twitter credentials. DO NOT login to any pages or links that you receive through messages, IMs, emails, etc. Always go directly to www.twitter.com to login.

Read More …

Maybe Twitter wasn’t enough

Plurk is a new service which at its basic level does the same thing that Twitter does: it allows you to chronicle your life 140 characters at a time. This is where the similarities end, however.

Read More …

The Japanese Haiku has a challenger

CopyBlogger issued a challenge to the world. Write a piece of literature which is exactly 140 character, not more not less. Why 140? Because this was a Twitter Writing contest. And a lot of people took the challenge. Winners got iPods and a whole lot more. The winning entries are below:

First Place:

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

Second Place:

Read More …

A challenger to Twitter?

Emad Ibrahim, an accomplished developer, has put together a Twitter clone. Now he has done this because he wanted to learn the latest version of Asp.net MVC framework.

Asp.net MVC framework rocks.  I wanted to play with it more and decided why not build an open source twitter.

So he did, and came up with Yonkly: built entirely on Asp.Net and is going to be entirely open source. It has all the features that Yonkly has and then some more. It has built-in a lot of features that Twitter didn’t have to begin with and depended on third party software to create.

Here’s a quick peek at some of the features:

Read More …