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Twitter Gossip

Twitter Gossip rounds up the latest news and opinion about everyone's favorite social media tool, Twitter.com. Daily updates will bring you the buzz of the day regarding Twitter, as well as links to interesting uses of Twitter, new apps and tools, and other fun tidbits.

Twitter outage spurs rebuke from bloggers, contestMay 21 2008

Twitter suffered another serious outage yesterday sparking a strong wave of criticism from bloggers.

One frequent complaint was Twitter’s lack of communications with users during outages. “[H]ow about just having enough respect for your users to let us know what’s going on, asked TechCrunch. Meanwhile VentureBeat noted that during major outages the official blog is rarely updated and it’s unclear to users where else to look for official information. Twitter finally posted a terse note on its blog taking responsibility for the outage.

Meanwhile, CNET’s Molly Wood (@mollywood) launched a contest to build a Twitter competitor. “I have had it with this Twitter situation,” she wrote. After consulting with software engineers, Wood is convinced that a better-scaling Twitter analog can be built in hours. To entice someone to build it, she offered some incentives:

I will go there, for a test period of not more than 30 days, and I will beg all of my followers to join me for this test period (as of this writing, a nice round 6,700). My colleague, Tom Merritt, says he’ll go

Boycott of Twitter scheduled for tomorrowMay 20 2008

Disgruntled Twitter users are planning a boycott of the service tomorrow, May 21st. According to one of the organizers, Andrew Dobrow (@anjrued), he and others have been frustrated with Twitter’s frequent outages. “As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.” Some like Jennifer Leggio (@mediaphyter) believe the boycott will be self-defeating. “We get what we pay for. Unless those boycotting have made significant financial contributions to the server upkeep of Twitter I really don’t want to hear it from them.” Do you think a boycott of Twitter is constructive or not?

Control your lights with TwitterMay 20 2008

The official Twitter blog points us to a hack by Justin Wickett (@jwickett) that allows a user to turn their home’s lights on and off by sending a text message to Twitter. Here’s a video demonstration:

Other Twitter-connected devices include the Botanicalls Twitter, a sensor you can add to your plants that will send a tweet if they need water.

What is Twitter in 140 seconds video contestMay 13 2008

Video sharing site Seesmic and others are sponsoring the “What is Twitter in 140 seconds video contest.” As the title implies, entrants must create a video explaining Twitter running under 140 seconds—a reference to Twitter’s 140 character limit. Top prize is a new iPhone. Judges include Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur (@loiclemeur) and Twitter institution Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton).

Entries can be submitted via any video sharing site but must be tagged “whatistwitter.” Read the story.

Study reveals top five words on Twitter, interesting trendsMay 12 2008

New media blog ReadWriteWeb teamed up with search engine Summize to study who exactly is on Twitter and what they tweet. One interesting finding: Five percent of all tweets are produced by the top 100 active accounts, and many of these are not people, but rather feed bots, like the one we use at Twitter Gossip.

The top five words people send on twitter? “Test,” “lol,” “working,” a smiley emoticon, and “sleeping.” They also found “that there are three main types of conversations going on.” First are status messages like “going to sleep.” Second there are short-term memes like an episode of a TV show or the death of a celebrity. Finally are long-term memes like the presidential race. Read the story.