jennybee.net

And so the wonderful twitter updates from MarsPhoenix have come to an end.

The Mars lander sent her last message on 10 November with the binary for ‘triumph’:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3
http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/999383469

I can’t help feeling a little sad.

The tone of the updates generated a genuine relationship between the lander and her followers. Her tweets were - in the truest sense of the word - delightful.

Using Twitter in this way was inspired. The audience was ideal and the tweets were perfectly pitched to be informative, geeky, funny and often very cute.

As I tweeted when I first started following her:

I HEART the @MarsPhoenix tweets.. imagining a little wide eyed robot scurrying over the surface pointing, jumping and squealing with glee
http://twitter.com/jennybee/statuses/827012873

Read more about the mission and the social media strategy here: Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice.

Oh and in case you were wondering; ‘veni, vidi, fodi’ means ‘I came, I saw, I dug’.

I finally got round to reading that Wired article that everyone’s been talking about. The one where they said:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

And I agree. Sort of.

What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.

I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.

Platforms

I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.

This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate - although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.

For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.

I’ve decided to start collecting twitter feeds.

Feeds that have something interesting about them - linguistically or visually.

I’m going to create a page on this website to display them at some point. But for now, here are the first artifacts to be added to the collection:

@towerbridge
“I am opening for the SB Hydrogen, which is passing downstream.”

@shippingcast
“Shnn, Rckl, Mln SW bckg S or SE 5 2 7, phaps gale 8 l8r. Ruf or v.ruff. Shwrs then rain. Gd, bec. mod or pr”

@fireland
“The video poker machines burble. The casino carpet blurs into a 3D dolphin. The waitress’ lipstick, Tokyo Gutter, is smeared across my neck.”

@andy_house
“electricity meter reading: 31550 KWH”

Stowe Boyd recently invited startups to ‘Twitpitch’ him in order to arrange to meet with him at a conference…

1. All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for “@stoweboyd “.
2. Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
3. Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won’t have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.

Nice. If you’ve got a brilliant idea it really should be communicable in 140 characters. And I’m all for using words sparingly and in a considered fashion. Any application that encourages that gets my vote.

There’s a war going on on Twitter and it has a hue.

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball…

zeFrank

I LOVE the idea of playing games on twitter.

So I started a thread using the concept of chain stories which I think would work really well within the 140-character medium.

Here’s how it went (read bottom to top):

Some immediate issues surfaced:

1. There has to be mutual follow-ship between the participants (the penultimate post on the above screenshot was tweeted by someone I wasn’t following and I didn’t see it at the time it was posted)
2. Simultaneous posting from more than one participant (is likely and it…) breaks the thread (if facilitated by @replies)
3. Likewise, delayed posting also breaks the thread
4. It’s just generally difficult to follow the thread of the story

Possible solutions:

1. Limit the game to two participants
2. Set up a group and have people tweet to that somehow (this wouldn’t totally solve the simultaneous posting problem)
3. Let the game descend into anarchy from time to time - use hashtags to follow the story rather than @replies

I’m inclined to take the latter approach. As long as an individual is monitoring the thread they could draw everything back together if tweets got out of control. Alternatively, the story could be allowed to branch off by changing the hashtag (#story, #story1, #story2 etc).

Ultimately for a game like this to work, it has to be spontaneous and simple. I’ll give it another try at some point and document it here.

Some other game ideas:

• Word of the day: challenge people to include a specified (really obscure) word in their tweets
• Web treasure hunt: clues build up a picture and participants have to identify a digital artifact and link to it
• Degrees of separation: get from one person/thing/place etc to another in as few ‘degrees’ as possible
• I’m NOT going to suggest Mornington Crescent as that would be far to geeky