Kevin Makice's dashboard

With SocialBrowse, I have a nice little button near my URL to click and share, and a toggle to turn on/off the notifications of what others are sharing. Clicking on the button isn't currently sharing material in the Qwisk universe, so I'm wondering if there is a replacement for the SB buttons, or if that will eventually be handled on the back end.

I do most of my computer work on a small laptop, so I avoid sidebars due to space constraints. With Qwisk, I'm not seeing a way to turn off that environment and return to sharing as I had been.

It's gone now, but yes the page was completely blank (and "done" loading) and the URL had "qwisk" (definitely) and "twitter" (I think) in the url

I couldn't log in via Twitter, using the Qwisk update. It just went to a blank page that stopped loading. Had to use Facebook instead (which worked) to log in.

A couple days ago, my tweet count appeared to double to 18K, and then start adding incrementally. I was approaching 10K. The higher, incorrect number is also appearing in the status_count field of the API objects.

1) I wouldn't separate "relationship building" from "staying in touch" To me, that is all part of the cycle of disconnection and reconnection. The other two usage cases you mention are specific tasks that benefit from strong relationships. Collaboration on Twitter is not a deep activity. Things are initiated there and reality checks done to poll progress throughout, but the work itself is done elsewhere.

2 & 3) I know there are people who crave the ability to separate subgroups of followers, even going to far as to create and manage multiple Twitter identities (one for local, one for professional). This really needs to be separated into to different aspects: publishing and organizing.

Identity management is not a part of Twitter for me, however. The ability to unfollow (or, with Twalala, even mute people for a while) is always there for people to use. I try to be true to myself, which means sometimes I am noisy and sometimes what I type interests mainly one group. I'm not interested in tweeting different things to different groups. In doing so, I'd think I might impose what I think certain people should know rather than just letting everyone else make up their own minds about any value a tweet might hold.

The second aspect is organization, and for that I am still waiting for some kind of directory management that allows me to tag, flag and search for people in my network in a meaningful way. The best way to search right now is actually to guess someone's Twitter handle (which I rarely see anymore, with use of Full Names in Twitterrific and the ability to click reply buttons). There is nothing that would allow me to track former people I follow, maybe with a note reminding me when/why I stopped. These kinds of things have nothing to do with the outward relationship or publication of content, but it is a way larger and larger networks can make sense. Maybe even something that connects them to other social network pages, like LinkedIn. – Kevin Makice, on November 22, 2008 04:47

The rules have evolved over time.

When I first started using Twitter, the main purpose was just to communicate with my wife and kids, specifically for a spring break when they headed to Florida and I stayed north to work on academic stuff. That expanded quickly to a small set of 20 or so people, which included both friends and fellow grad students and a couple of celebrities (Steven Wright and Jim Gaffigan, neither of whom make any use of the medium).

As more people in our grad program started using Twitter, I became interested in using it for some research. My focus then became identifying Informatics students, faculty and alums, and following anyone who lived in my region. This got me up to about 100. My geographic rules included nearby towns, because few people were using Twitter at the time.

As it became more successful, I created a second account for my academic tracking and started pruning some of the locals and regional people I followed to increase relevance. I went to a few events where more people wound up following me than I returned, mainly because I wanted to focus just on people in town. I started following just a few people outside of the academic-geographic range if they were of interest, but many of those were not reciprocated (Lee LeFever et al). There was also an increase in Twitter application accounts and a few blogs (Comix Mix, The Onion) that I followed. My network was approaching 300 by this time, far more than I ever anticipated following.

I continue to follow all new Informatics students indiscriminately and have added some locals who have joined Twitter. For a brief time, I followed sets of fictional characters on Twitter (Battlestar Gallactica, Buffy, Laura Ingalls Wilder, etc) but wound up pruning them back because the fiction wasn't as intriguing as real people.

There is another Startup Weekend event coming up next month, this time in Indy. I am certain that the people I meet there will be followed, expanding my network again. I've also got a book due out in the Spring, so I anticipate another spurt of growth around that.

In a nutshell, every time I say there is no way I am going to follow more people, my network grows to a new size. Also true: I only do so when I am ready to grow. So some of the people on my list never would have been followed last year. It also may have been intimidating to follow everyone in Informatics, say, if I wasn't there when that Twitter community was small and manageable. – Kevin Makice, on November 20, 2008 19:11

This whole concept is long overdue. I like very much that the past six months, in particular, have given rise to more metrics beyond just the same cumulative profile data that has been there since day 1, but most people don't live in the range of the ones at the very top of those heaps. Rankings of that nature are very contrary to where the value lies - in the high relevance and entropy one gets by following people who fit how they are using the service at that moment.

My concern with even your approach is that it will continue to repeat a common mistake: to focus too much on accumulation, rather than recency. I Twitter differently now than I did a year ago, largely because my network has grown slowly to fit my needs. It would be great if some/all of these metrics could have separate ratings for long-term and short-term behavior. I wouldn't want this system assuming things about me because of how I Twittered on Election Day, for example.

It will be very interesting to me to see how this might change my own use of Twitter. I mainly follow only local members or members within my academic/professional community. A small percentage extend beyond this group and include people of interest, usually with some notoriety. When Twitter Grader added their recommended members feature (which is secondary to their grading system), I noticed a number of follows from regular people (not spammers, not locals) and attribute that to the Grader recs. Your approach seems like it could be even more effective and thus enticing to expand my network beyond my current rules.

Looking forward to this launching.

Simply including all candidates qualifying for ballot access in at least one state could send a nice message of political inclusion and flex some of Twitter's influence muscles.

There is no reason not to include more candidates. I have to believe that the people who make use of the election tool would be receptive, regardless of how everyone actually votes.

Do you have any other examples of cities making use of this site? It may help to see how those places are configured and how active they have become.

Nuts. Posted too soon. The video clips came in fine, but the transitions (replaceable) and the sound (not) failed to load.

I imported the .wav files into iTunes and can see them in the music options, but the program isn't letting me move them into the editing frame to recompile them. The good news is they seem intact. The bad news is that iMovie is ignoring them. – Kevin Makice, on May 13, 2008 20:11

It didn't directly, but it did help me ask the right questions here.

My iMovie projects were just straightforward directories. I could see the .mov and all of the clips within a Media file already. That's the way it looked on the iMac where it was originally created, as well. Maybe the package thing started with the next version of iMovie.

This was successfully solved, though, by changing the folder name to *.imovieproject, creating a new iMovie project in the current version, and then importing the renamed project. It seemed to preserve everything.

Thanks for the quick response on this. Stress levels subsiding.