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Webtropic

Musings on social media, web technologies and start-ups.

These little javascript programs can mean a lot to personal productivity and social media engagement. I came to this conclusion only recently, while I am using bookmarklets for years now.

The oldest I can remember of is the delicious bookmarklet. Honestly, without it my delicious account would be empty. There is also a firefox add-on which, combined with the buttons does a lot more, but, hey, it is simplicity that we are after, aren’t we?

With the advent of Google Reader Notes, ‘Note in Reader’ became kind of a regular but never really got off. I use it to share things in Reader occasionally, but most of the time I share things either in twitter or in friendfeed. Why? They show up much faster and the crowds in these two services are so much bigger than Google Reader. Google Reader is something like a library: you can’t make too much noise, so its perfect for reading systematically. But when you want some action this isn’t the place.

‘Press This‘ has been a

It’s retweeting that counts, stupid. Or not?May 23

Conventional twitter wisdom has it that being retweeted is a measure of value. This sounds very reasonable as

being mentioned (=retweeted) is a form of recognition and entails visibility as it, usually, includes the twitter name of the originator
retweeting distributes a piece of information virally
and, therefore, retweeting is used as a measure of one’s twitter status by many twitter ranking services

But, let’s take a closer look :

There are two elements in every tweet (those retweeted included, of course): the who element and the what element.

The who element is the source or the channel of the information compressed in the 140 characters.

The what element is either the tweet itself, or the content it points to. Usually it is the latter.

Retweeting tends to preserve the what but not the who. And even the what most likely will propagate changing form (=pointer) in the process.

After two or three retweets (X retweets Y, who retweeted Z etc) the very size of a twitter update makes it necessary to drop some of the @ references: If Z is not in the social graph of

What is wrong with Webmonkey?April 17

Don’t know how many people have noticed this: the feed of Webmonkey tutorials is gone mad. Most of the articles lead to empty pages while some of them are really weird stuff. Like the following:

which, if you click upon, leads to a page like this:

Is this a hijacked feed or what?

Posted in Miscellaneous Tagged: feed, google reader

A call for twitter clients interoperabilityApril 16

Image via Wikipedia

A basic one at least.

With the advent of the second gen twitter clients, which support, among other things, groups, users are confronted with higher barriers to entry and exit: In all clients, the painstakingly prepared groups are hardwired in the client. No easy way to get them out. When one desires to switch to a new client, he has to recreate all these groups by handpicking users one by one.

The problem becomes apparent even in the case where one does not necessarily want to change twitter client, but he simply has to work on two different (or more) computers.

In my case, I had to recreate the Tweetdeck groups for my desktop and laptop computers. And I did it only for the two out of four computers I use and for two out of seven operating systems (3 windows, 1 mac, and 3 flavors of linux). I did not even manage to create them as exact copies.

Now, this call might sound like a luxury request, but given the path the twitter clients have taken (check

Google Reader scares me!April 6

Google Reader has always been a difficult beast to tame. I never suspected it is actually THE beast!

Posted in liteblogging Tagged: google reader