By the way, you can follow me on Twitter here. :P

Tweetmeup is a great way to keep track of where and when the next Tweetup will be. It even goes as far as pointing the location on a Google Map for those who are navigationally challenged. It tells you who will be attending the Tweetup and at what time it starts. No more confusion.

While there and after the Tweetup, it aggregates and display all the photos taken at the Tweetup and uploaded to Flickr. Every idiot who didn’t know about it can see what they missed out on! :)

You don’t even have to register. You can use your Twitter account to announce a Tweetup or RSVP to one. Just click the sign up button and tell Twitter to allow Tweetmeup and Bob’s your uncle.

I think this is a fantastic idea. Well done to @Compl33t for this initiative! I just wish we had this at Teched09 already…

I wonder, but maybe this would be a great platform for ALL geek events and not only Tweetups? I’m yet to attend a GeekDinner / 27dinner / WhateverDinner that has one single person not on Twitter.

(this is a great, great album by Pantera, BTW)

The problem is, if you continuously hit people in their face, 2 things are bound to happen:

1. People will see it coming and duck the next blow.

2. Keep it up long enough and people will ignore you or start to avoid you.

Either way, you are not going to achieve your desired goal. So the next time before you hit someone in the face to get their attention, rather try and talk to them instead of about them. Talking about them, when they are in the same proverbial room as you, is nothing but a vulgar display of power. Just a thought…

First we have the “dooming” Morgan Stanley report(The report is in PDF format). The one written by a 15 year old intern. Now, don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying the young chap is incapable. Au contraire, read the report! It is not bad at all. What is shocking though is that the only thing said in the report about Twitter is:

On the other hand, teenagers do not
use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just
leave it as they release that they are not going to update it
(mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would
rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that
no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.

Three sentences in a single paragraph of an entire report and the headlines spells doom for Twitter. What a lot of the Doomsayers do not realise is that MOST of Twitter’s userbase starts out this way. They register an account, then think “This is useless” and leave. They do not return for months. Eventually, though, they will revisit Twitter. That is how it was for me and a lot of other regular Twitter users I know of. The point these suits miss is this very significant paragraph:

Most have signed up to the service

A lot of these teenagers WILL return at some point. They should pay attention to the other interesting facts in that report…

The second article was a Reuters article. The headline reads: “Want to buy Twitter? As far as anyone knows the site has yet to earn a dime.” Now, there is no arguing that fact. No-one is disputing it. Yes, I can understand that there are very few people who would invest in something that has no plan to be profitable. Someone is funding it, so why is this such a big deal for everyone?! Why the hell does it concern people so much? It is not as if it is their own money or tax money that is being used to fund Twitter, is it? NEWSFLASH: Twitter turned down various very lucrative offers. Not that long ago either! So, Moneyweb et al, stop bothering yourself so much with how Twitter does or does not make money! If their money dries up, then we’ll start to worry… Okay?

Twice I saw this yesterday. The first was by a Social Media “Rockstar” (really, this “Rockstar” meme makes me want to lick a red hot grill at a steakhouse) who was ranting about web celebrities who are clueless. Basically what he was referring to was popular people on Twitter who follows only a small group of people in their inner circle and has a huge following and how wrong and clueless it is to do that in his humble opinion:

You might think that non-reciprocation makes you look like an “influential thought leader,” but to me it looks like:

1. You’re kind of a noob. Your name might be “big,” but your social media interaction and filtering skills are small.
2. You’re kind of a snob. You’re more concerned with appearing “popular” than listening and learning from people.

I am referring to the “You’re kind of a noob” part.
See?
Pot calling kettle black?
Ever heard of Twitter search to filter? If they use it, they sure as hell don’t have to follow everyone back. God knows how the hell you are going to follow what 11316 people are blabbering on Twitter. Listening? Really? How? Sit the entire bloody day and night in front of Twitter reading?
Who is paying for that?
Pot calling kettle black?

The second time it happened was to myself at yesterday’s Nomadic Marketing session when I accused Dave, Chris and Kerry-Anne of being quiet and scarce. I was very quickly being told “Who are you calling black?!” :P Sorry chaps!

This Bash script gets the info of the current playing track from iTunes using the osascript command (osascript executes AppleScript, so naturally, this is for OSX ;-) ) and tweets it using curl. I had to use Perl to encode the update string since characters like & was not behaving kind! :) Here it is:

#!/bin/sh

state=`osascript -e \
'tell application "iTunes" to player state as string'`;
if [ $state = "playing" ]; then
        artist=`osascript -e \
        'tell application "iTunes" to \
        artist of current track as string'`;
        track=`osascript -e \
        'tell application "iTunes" to \
        name of current track as string'`;
        album=`osascript -e \
       'tell application "iTunes" to \
       album of current track as string'`;
        msg="Listening to $track by $artist from $album";
        curl --basic --user "username:password" \
        --data-ascii "status=`perl -MURI::Escape -e \
        "print uri_escape('$msg');"`" \

http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

fi

I saved it in a script called tweettune and

chmod 755 tweettune

to make it executable. If you run the script it will return the update in JSON format.

It works great. If you are cooler and your Bash is hotter than mine, please send/leave me the code to try!

PS: remember to replace username:password with your Twitter login credentials.
PPS: Yes, I know OAuth for Twitter is out. This is not about using OAuth, but updating your Twitter status with the current track playing in iTunes.

(Image credit: http://slackerschronicles.blogspot.com)

A couple of months I signed up for SocialToo. It is a coolish application I thought at the time, but it turned out to be annoying.

• It enables you to follow those who follow you automatically. A really bad idea it turned out to be! It blindly follows anyone who follow you, without even leaving the choice up to you. Yes, even the spammers. :P
• It unfollow anyone not following you. You guessed it, bad idea! There are some very cool Twitter streams which you just have to follow, whether they follow back or not. I have a strong suspicion this is the functionality that left me not following anyone!
• It sends an direct message to anyone who follows you. Can you say SPAM?! Ugh, yes, it is quite handy, but getting back DM’s like “No worries, I already read your blog!” makes you feel like a dumbass! Not cool. Seems, this feature you cannot disable anymore. :P
• It sends you daily stats about people who you followed and people who unfollowed you. This is cool if you’re into that sort of thing and worried about it.

You can select to disable these features. You cannot delete your account, which is what I’d like to do since the above features created me more headaches than I can handle. Some Twitter users might thrive on these services, I don’t.

Here is what I think happened:

• Twitter had one of its many database outages.
• SocialToo checked to see who unfollowed me and who it should drop.
• Twitter returned 0 followers.
• SocialToo thought, “Cool, not a problem, unfollow everyone then!”
• Twitter came back and things were all good with people following me.
• SocialToo already unfollowed everyone for me.

How do I know this? Got the follow/unfollow stats email stating that 810 people unfollowed me. :P Nice.

My advice to you is unless you’re one of those “Get 1000000000000000 twitter followers and you’re a Demi-god” people, stay away from SocialToo.

I’ve learned a little bit about developing for mobile devices. (feedback on m.afrigator.com would be welcomed!) Something I’m completely new at. The great thing about this is there are so much to learn, but it seems very hard to find quick, straight answers to your problems. It is challenging which is a great thing. By the way, Mobiforge is a great resource!

I’ve decided that I’ll set out and try and learn and share something new every day for the rest of the year. It may be something arbitrary, something tech related, some new word, it really doesn’t matter, as long as I learn something new every single day. I might not always share it, but I’ll try!

Lets start with yesterday, since I did learn something fascinating. Wezzo tweeted yesterday about a stunning new supercar that is being built right here on home soil in South Africa. Read more about the Perana Z-One here. It is a stunning piece of machinery. One 999 units are going to be manufactured and they will only retail (allegedly) for about $75 000 or R750 000. A bit much for my budget, still, pretty car that!

@homemark We are the devil, our products are of low quality and we rip people off.

@homemark Congratulations, you’ve won recycled toilet paper, please give us your credit card details so we can make you pay for it!

@homemark Customers are like nappies, good for making money and disposable when they’re full of sh!t

Katharina from Quirk took the brandseye/ORM approach on this matter, but it made me think:

Would Homemark give a damn? In fact, should they?

I’d love nothing more than to say yes to the above questions. In fact, I would say yes they should! If they would is a different matter. The mere fact that they plough millions into TV advertising and the fact that their website simply seem like an evil necessity is evidence to the contrary.

Lets be honest here, it looks not much better than the IEC Electoral site a couple of months ago. See here. I somehow doubt they are worried about losing the kind of customers that are on Twitter. In fact, I don’t really think a lot of Twitter users buy from them on a regular basis. Am I wrong? If not, why should they worry about noise being made in a sphere that don’t affect their target market one single bit?

Well, if you do indeed look at their Google CV, they couldn’t care less. I wouldn’t worry too much about being sued if I were @homemark (the twitter one).

The dude also launched a blog, so if you need to know why he’s pissed, see here: http://homemark.blogspot.com/

A few moments ago I received this apt little image via email from Lester and it just made me chortle: