1. “Why would I want to know every little detail about what my friends are doing from Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed?”
2. “How do you not get overwhelmed by all the people you follow/friend?”

My short answer is I don’t treat it like a fire hose I have to drink down, I treat it like a stream I dip my feet in every so often. To explain this statement, I need to first talk about friends and travel.

I was born in Vancouver, spent my formative years in Hong Kong and then returned to Vancouver for the last two years of high school and college before moving to Austin for my first job. All this moving was a mixed blessing. I was able to experience many different perspectives and made a wide range of friends from all over the world. On the other hand, there were few friends that shared my experiences throughout.

Whenever I visited Hong Kong, which is roughly annually, I meet up with my childhood friends. Conventional thinking would say that, because we haven’t seen each other for a year, we’d have a lot more to catch up on than say, someone here in San Francisco that I saw just the day before.

Anyone who has experience with this can tell you that it simply isn’t true. When you’re apart that long, conversation topics feel like they need to be a minimum level of significance to be worth discussing: career changes, marital status change, buying of property, perhaps a new family member, etc. A sample conversation might be like this:

Friend: “So how’ve you been?”
Me: “Great. Things are going well. I got engaged!”
Friend: “Congrats! You still doing that computer thing?”
Me: “Yeah. Still at the same place. You still at the same firm?”
Friend: “Yeah, 3 years now.”
Me: “Wow …”
Friend: “MmHmm …”

In contrast, the friends you see every day or every week are the ones you can talk to for hours. Why? Because any topic is fair game. You don’t feel like you have to filter out the more mundane topics because it’s such a significant event to be catching up with the person. How was that movie? Did you go climbing yesterday? Did you see that crazy YouTube video? No topic is too trivial.

So how is any of that relevant to the information overload of Twitter and Facebook?

To me, Twitter and Facebook updates represent the mundane, everyday conversations that I could and would have with everyone if I could. By seeing the stream of updates from my friends, I have much more context into their lives, and a feeling that I can converse with them about smaller things. To use a clichéd term, I feel more connected to them.

When I see these friends, even after many months apart, I still feel like I’ve been talking to them and keeping up with them to some extent. Conversations flow more naturally and are much more rooted in the present than trying to bridge the gap since we last interacted in person.

I disagree with the fire hose terminology because it’s not something that is pointed at me. It really is a stream of information which I can look at anytime I feel like. When I don’t dip my feet in, the stream flows on, I’ve missed some updates, and it doesn’t matter.

We can look at it a different way, too. Whether we know it or not, each of us probably have at least 300 people we know and like enough to want to keep in touch with. If you saw each of these people for dinner one friend a night, you would see each person once a year. One solution is to simply forget most of these and hang out with the same dozen friends week after week. Realistically, there are far more than a dozen interesting and inspiring people worth interacting with regularly.

So going back to the original two questions:

1. “Why would I want to know every little detail about what my friends are doing from Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed? ” Using it helps me stay closer to more of my friends in a way that’s impossible to scale with in person interactions alone.
2. “How do you not get overwhelmed by all the people you follow/friend?” I don’t try to read everything.

Don’t drink from the hose. Dip your feet in the stream instead.

It seems that Twinkle is taking advantage of their popularity in a completely irresponsible manner.

Before I go into details, let me quickly recap how Twitter’s conversations work. When you publicly reply to a person on Twitter, you type @USERNAME. So if my username was kevin, you’d type “@kevin that’s so true!”. Twitter and pretty much all Twitter applications support this syntax by providing a “replies” view which shows you every public Twitter that starts with @YOURUSERNAME. So you can see that it’s fairly important for these usernames to remain unique.

Enter Twinkle, who turn out to not just be a Twitter application, but a social network of their own. A person who uses Twinkle doesn’t have to be a Twitter user as well. They might just be Twinkle users, with Twinkle usernames. Thus, there are now two sets of namespaces with duplicate identities that might belong to two different people (a person named Peter on Twitter and a different person named Peter on Twinkle).

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. I have usernames all over the place. However, Twinkle decided that the way a Twinkle user should reply to other Twinkle users is also with the @ syntax and if the poster happens to use Twitter as well, that reply goes to Twitter.

What does this mean?

Let’s say there is a Twitter and Twinkle user and his username is Peter on both services. He has a friend who is on Twinkle only and her username is Jane. Suppose Jane says something witty on Twinkle and Peter decides to respond:

@jane LOL. That’s pretty brilliant, mate.

As a user of both services, his response goes out on both channels — Twitter and Twinkle.

At the same time, JaneB, a Twitter user who has never heard of Twinkle and  the owner of the Twitter username @jane, logs onto Twitter. She checks her replies tab and notices Peter’s message. Except she has no clue who Peter is, nor what he thinks that her last Twitter message about her aunt being ill is all that brilliant or funny.

Essentially, Twinkle’s poor product design, or if you give them less credit, their irresponsible product design, is hijacking Twitter usernames. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this, either. Their Get Satisfaction page includes a number of threads like this:

The poster is right. It is completely unacceptable. In an environment where we’re trying to find solutions like OpenID to consolidate our identities, Twinkle has managed to find a way to create an application that now muddies the definition of who owns a username. The question is, what can really be done? My suggestion is that Twinkle doesn’t ever cross post responses to Twinkle users to Twitter as well.

But the real question is, what’s to stop anyone from coming onto Twitter and creating a similar kind of clusterf**k, polluting or spamming every @name there is?

Update: It looks like in addition to using the @ syntax, they also allow spaces and special characters (e.g., commas, dashes, etc.) as usernames. So now if your username is @kevin on Twitter, you may be getting responses in your replies tab for people who say “@kevin spacey” or “@kevin.cheng”. If you wish to voice a complaint to Twinkle and Tapulous, you may want to add your thoughts on this thread.

First, you might find on Apple, this support document about how to do this. That process, though only 6 months old, is also outdated but it did help me figure out the real process.

Here’s the process to convert media to the format you want now:

1. Go to your preferences (iTunes>Preferences on OSX and Edit>Preferences on Windows).
2. Under the first tab “General”, there is an area where you decide how to deal with Audio CDs. Clearly, the import settings here apply to ALL import settings. Click on “Import Settings …”.
3. Under the “Import Using” dropdown, select the format you want to convert your media to.
4. Optionally, select the quality you desire.
5. Close all the preferences windows.
6. Select one or more songs from your iTunes library.
7. If you right click over your selection, you will see the option to “Create AAC version” or “Create MP3 version” etc. Or you can access the same option from the “Advanced” menu.

In case anyone is interested, before converting them to AAC, I used Audacity to format my music to a manageable, ringtone chunk.

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[x] Yes, and you *must* use my real name (or any online handle/blog name you find useful)
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?
I use it to broadcast short thoughts throughout my day or week or to share something funny I saw/heard that I think most people would find interesting or entertaining. I may also announce some news, “We came in third place!” or occasionally to just let people know what I’m up to – in the hopes that they’ll be seething with jealousy or very sympathetic to my plight.

As for what I like or don’t like. I like the multiple mediums I can access it from. I like how digestible the data is. I like the immediacy of some of the feedback (I’ve also used Twitter to ask for help or advice on something). I dislike the “@mrsmith” public Twitters that are in fact responses to individual Twitters because it assumes everyone else cares about both ends of their conversation. Whenever I’m doing a response Twitter, I either direct message or I publicly Twitter on the same subject matter without explicitly

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.
My friends and acquaintances in the technology and design space. Also, there’s a large portion of followers I don’t recognize. I have no idea who these people are nor why they find a stranger’s Tweets interesting. I don’t really mind, either. I’m presuming at least some portion of them know of me somehow and I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting them.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?
I know almost all of the people I follow with a few notable exceptions. One is the fictional Darth Vader Twitter because it cracks me up. The other is Scott Kurtz, the author and artist of PvP Online, whom I simply hope to meet. As for how, I mostly read them on the web or on Twapper on my phone in bursts. I rarely set it to update per Tweet unless I’m at an event like SxSW and need to know where the critical mass is.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

Just about anything is appropriate but I tend to find repeated Tweets kind of silly (like 20 people talking about an earthquake and whether they felt it or similar number of Tweets on the weather). As I said before, the “@” Tweets are a pet peeve of mine. I’ve certainly been tempted at times but I stick to direct messages when I can.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?
Yeah they’re public and like blogs and Flickr photos, I am cognizant of that and make sure I don’t explicitly bitch about individuals or work. One is bound to regret that kind of thing later down the road. It’s public just because it’s an extension of a blog to me.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?
It works because it’s accessible in multiple formats so you can consume (and create) in whatever way works best for you. As many have mentioned, it won’t scale. Twitter could be useful for a lot of other applications (like multiple authors Twittering to a team Twitter). The former Yahoo! project MixD actually dealt with a lot of these issues well but unfortunately had some fixable bugs that weren’t fixed and didn’t gain the traction it needed to continue.

Last October, Yahoo! held an Open Hack Day where we brought in developers and designers in the Bay Area to work on whatever they wanted to, and invited them to utilize Yahoo! APIs to make cool hacks … and that’s what people did. From Flickr Postcard mailers to a purse cam that sent periodic, geotagged photos to Flickr, there was a lot of great stuff that came out. And of course, there was Beck, the surprise performer.

This June, Yahoo!, in conjunction with BBC (“the Beeb”), are hosting a similar event but this time in the UK. A few of you UK readers probably already heard about this but if you haven’t, you should definitely sign up.

And yes, there will be a band playing. Not that you’re motivated by such trivialities.

Also, unrelated, I got a jury summons. Among the check boxes to choose from for reason not to go:

- not a US citizen (check)
- not 18
- convicted of a felony

Does this mean they’re incapable of telling the age, citizenship, and … criminal record of the people they send jury summons to?!

The iPhone was announced amidst much hoo-hah last week at MacWorld. Those who know me know that I’m a gadget person but have been surprised to find I’m still using a Nokia 6100 phone – the same phone I’ve had for three years. Make no mistake, I’ve been shopping for a good integrated phone for a long time, checking out the latest and greatest every time I am in Hong Kong to visit my family (which I failed to do this past Christmas due to circumstances).

What I found would inevitably be disappointing. Too big. Too clunky. Too ugly. Too expensive. Too little memory. Too unusable. I wanted a phone that had mp3 playback, at least a 2MP camera so I wouldn’t have to lug a compact camera, some level of web and/or email capability, and a decent product and interface design. Apparently, this was too much to ask. The only ones that were close were priced far higher than the value I perceived, and required the additional cost of memory cards to make them even close to useful for some of the functions I mentioned.

When I last looked, it was actually cheaper, smaller, more flexible, and better usability and design for me to buy an iPod Nano and velcro it to the Nokia I had of similar dimensions than to buy any of these bricks. So I bought a Nano.

The iPhone is exactly the kind of integration with almost the form factor I desired and a price tag that was comparable when you compared apples to apples. However, I probably won’t be getting one. Why?

First, Apple has a track record for releasing rather buggy first generation products. The iPod had battery issues, the Nano had scratching issues, the MacBooks had a number of problems reported, etc. So a brand new product line and new market seems ripe for bugs that need to be sorted out.

Second, Apple has a track record for quickly releasing a second generation product that’s not just an upgrade, but usually a complete annihilation of the previous generation. Look at the iPod Mini, which became a bit of a joke to own when the Nano was announced. Besides, there’s rumors that an iPhone Nano may be in the works.

Finally, there’s the deliberate crippling of the technology that seems to be going on. EDGE instead of 3G connectivity is almost certainly a deliberate oversight that will be fixed in the future. The MacWorld live demos showed just how long it took for any given webpage to load. In addition, there’s a noticeable absence of GPS capability in a device that’s begging for it.

So I won’t be getting an iPhone, at least not yet.

Drawing much less attention was Axiotron’s ModBook, an after market conversion of a MacBook to a tablet laptop. A friend of mine once messaged me after the announcement of BootCamp and Parallels:

Now you have no excuse not to switch to Mac!

He was referring to the fact that I stated the lack of videogames on Macs as a primary reason for not switching. I responded:

One word: Tablet

Well now that reason is gone as well – or so it would seem. However, the ModBook lacks some key features which I think will ultimately prevent me from getting one. It’s not the huge price tag, I was willing to pay similar prices for my Toshiba M200 when it first came out. It’s not the overall technology – a built-in GPS and WACOM Pen-abled technology gives it a ton of potential. However, two major pieces are missing: a decent video card, and a keyboard.

Because the ModBook uses a MacBook as its base, it usese the Intel built in graphics card instead of an ATI card, thus failing to fulfill my videogame requirement (not to mention any other intensive graphical usage like SketchUp). How can it be missing a keyboard, you ask? Well, the ModBook is what’s called a slate tablet (as opposed to a hybrid swivel like the M200). Keyboard usage is limited to connecting a USB or bluetooth keyboard separately to the laptop. The whole point of a laptop is portability and carrying two separate pieces of hardware is just unacceptable to me.

I still don’t understand tablet manufacturers and marketers to be honest. They primarily seem to target the “doctor” use case where a doctor does his rounds in a hospital and is taking notes on a tablet PC. Maybe I’m clueless to the level of demand in that market but it strikes me that professional artists, CAD users, designers and such could really make use of affordable tablets and yet, they never seem to cater to that market.

Hey, Axiotron, if you’re paying attention, I’m interested, but I’m typing this blog entry, not writing it by hand.

I was dead set on working on TransitSF, the hack I worked on with Sean and Jane a year ago at the first hack day. It lets you enter two points in San Francisco and using Yahoo! Maps and 511.org’s Tripplanner, tells you what public transit to take. But it needs a lot of work.

Just as I was getting ready to start, though, we got a Nintendo Wii set up 5 feet from me. Let’s just say productivity was at an all time low. So instead, I decided to work on a hack that used the Nintendo Wii remote (or wiimote). By the time of hack day, only a week after release, there were already a number of hacks out there as well as some protocols and drivers. For the PC, there was GlovePIE.

So I did a few basic things. First, I hooked up the d-pad conttrollers to the cursor keys, then some other keyboard mappings. Essentially, this made for the perfect presentation remote (it was bluetooth connected so the range was good as well). But what about the motion? That’s the cool part of the remote afterall.

Well it turned out that measuring exact posiitoning of the wiimote was difficult but measuring that there is movement, especially along the Y-axis, was not so difficult. So I made the ultimate presentation tool. Whenever your demo or presentaiton starts going badly or somebody asks you a hard question, just start waving your hands as you “ummm” and “ahhhh” and point out how that’s a “very interesting point”.

Then, using this hand tool from Microsoft, we get … a fake bluescreen of death. Sorry, but we’re experiencing some technical errors

[GlovePIE file] [Fake Bluescreen] (you’ll have to change the filename to point it to wherever you put the .scr file)

Mom: Just look for it on eBay when you get home, ok?

Kid: Ok.

(Kid starts looking at DVD movies on their way out)

Mom: Don’t get any movies here. If you see any movies you want to watch, tell Dad and he’ll add it to the NetFlix queue.

Wow. We are in the future.