Communicating in a networked world
Whoof! I thought I knew everything about Twitter, but I was really surprised to learn something new [see below] last week.
If I drop this message into my Tweetstream… “@quinnovator That was a great idea you had the other day!” …who sees it? Specifically, do all of my followers see it? This would be like sitting at a dinner party, wanting to ask a question of the person next to you, and shouting it out so everyone could hear it.
Another experiment here in San Francisco, finding more ways to pay the parking meter.(Though we’re way behind Europe.)
I was a bit disappointed because some years ago all parking meters in San Francisco were converted to use (in addition to quarters) a smart card that you can buy for $50 (or $20) that fits a slot in every parking meter and lets you pay using the card rather than having to carry quarters. And I buy and carry one of those cards in my car all the time. I feel virtuous because I never have to dig quarters out of my pocket (or the back seat, or under the front seat, etc.) and just pull out the card.
But these new experimental meters accept debit or credit cards as well as quarters. Probably a better idea because far more people carry credit cards. And they’re solar powered. (And yes, in parts of town we’re testing pay-by-phone.) (And yes, we’re testing pay-and-put-the-receipt-on-the-dashboard, like New York and other places.) I wonder how well these credit-card meters will perform in the rain?
Thanks to Marcia Connor for pointing out this Periodic Table of Visualization Methods (via a long chain of retweets). I was explaining to someone the other day about Mind Maps, and how they’re a particular type of visualization technique. There are even special-purpose programs that you can use to make some of these diagrams.
For basic diagramming needs, I use OmniGraffle on my Mac Powerbook, and I love it. For WIndows users unaccustomed to such things, it’s a lot like Visio.
Responding to Infoworld Did PHP kill the Java radio star?
Zend’s CEO, Andi Gutmans, claims that PHP is disrupting Java. Meaning that PHP has gotten a significant toehold and is dislodging Java from its position as the granddaddy of server-side web applications frameworks[1]. I take the word disrupting in its modern sense of disruptive technology – a technology that significantly differs from the standard paradigm and whose effect would have been hard to predict, based on the “rules” of the standard paradigm.
I am a long-time Java-user (9 years) and I agree that PHP is a real contender in the web applications sphere… and would like to make some additional observations. [Read more…]
Suddenly this afternoon at 5pm I started receiving a bunch of tweets (Twitter messages) from friends. That’s not unusual, but these tweets didn’t make much sense. Obviously a couple of my friends were chatting back and forth using Twitter, but of course all of their followers, even those who weren’t in on the conversation, were receiving the messages – which made no sense because they/I had no context for these tweets. They seemed to be random answers to some unseen question. And they weren’t exchanging direct messages, which would have been private, not public. What had I missed?
Then I noticed the hashtag #lrnchat on the tweets and I investigated. [Read more…]