Twitter (not THAT story, though), semantics, gardening, and netbook supercomputers:
- Retweet Radar -- the phrases showing up in heavily retweeted posts. This is another feature that should be incorporated into desktop clients. Three of the top 10 terms as retweeted by the General Public are "Ashton", "CNN", "followers"; if I wanted to read this drivel, I'd buy US Magazine. The point of software with a social network is to let me swerve the extreme blandness of mass culture that makes me want to poke sporks into my eyes just to have something I cared about. (via zephoria's delicious stream)
- I Am Machine Tag and So Can You -- This post explains how you can use machine tags with your next web app or even your blog. With Machinetag, a jQuery plugin, you’ll be able to search and display machine tagged content as trees faster than Colbert can crack a quip. Well … maybe not that fast. Machine tags are Namespace:Predicate=Value tags that provide semantic information in a machine-readable fashion, they're part of the rapid semantic weight-gain program that geeks have put the Web on. (via foe's delicious stream)
- Robots Feed and Water Tomatoes (NZ Herald) -- self-service Botanicalls on wheels.
- FAWN -- Fast Array of Weak Nodes, a cluster built from low-power netbook CPUs. Using a cluster of the same processors that normally show up in netbooks and similar mobile devices, researchers have created a powerful server architecture that draws less power than a lightbulb. (via Roger Dennis)
Comments: 3
jim winstead [18 April 2009 12:42 PM]
i really don't get your commentary on the first link. you want to see the most re-tweeted stuff on twitter, and then are surprised it has a lot in common with popular culture? it sounds like you're complaining about buying a copy of us weekly and then wishing there were more articles about banjos.
gnat [18 April 2009 04:38 PM]
@Jim Sorry to have been ambiguous. I'm not disappointed at all by Retweet Radar--it's a clever idea, and good if you want the pulse of the nation. But ultimately I want this feature in the app I use to read Twitter. I want to know what my friends are retweeting, because that's going to be more relevant to me than what Everyone is retweeting. Initially Twitter was my friends, to a good first-order approximation--they were all early adopters. But that's long gone and to be useful, apps that mine Twitter must take the social network into account, otherwise we'll just end up with irrelevant generic results.
But yes, I always wish US Weekly had more banjos in it.
jim winstead [19 April 2009 10:10 AM]
ok, so when you say you want it in the app you use to read twitter, you mean you want the app to have a feature like retweetradar that shows you the most re-tweeted items from the people you are following.
i thought you were talking about just having the list from the existing retweetradar in your app. tweetie for the iphone, for example, has a 'Trends' feature that is similar in scope to that, but not what you're talking about.
it sounded like you simultaneously wanted the public retweetradar in your app, and for it to go back to the days when all the users of twitter were your friends, which made absolutely no sense.