Twitter - more than microblogging

Hello Folks. Looong time since I have blogged and read one. Feeling lazy more often :). Anyway, I am blogging again and wanted to write about the new (from fame perspective) socializing service, Twitter.

Couple of months back when I started using Twitter, I was so impressed that I recommended the service to one of my friends. I would regret for doing this in 2 minutes, because this is what he said when we were chatting:

"read on the net

Twitter is an incomprehensible, pathetic tool used by self-centered, insecure individuals that believe the world actually cared about their every move :P".

The first thing that came to my mind was how much I liked smileys (very sarcastic or :P).

The next thing I thought was that could have been the only website on earth to have said that about Twitter. But then I saw this video. Most of you would have seen this video by now:

This video was just one perspective of the social service. The first time I used this service I was instantly impressed. My perspective was it was more of "Leave the crap out" social service. Twitter does one thing best and that is to allow users to post 140 bytes of information each time.

More than microblogging, it was becoming a potential tool for something else: Real Time Search. Twitter understood this at a very early stage. A quick FYI: Evan Williams is the CEO of Twitter. He was the one behind Blogger, the tool I am using to write this blog. They concentrated on improving search and now its greatly improved and readily available for all users on their home page. Anything new happening around the world can be first seen or heard on Twitter. After using it for around 3 months I have found lot of things faster than others. Some examples:

1. Google wave

2. Bumptop

3. Linkin park's "New Divide"

4. Nadal out of French Open

5. How many people are excited about Palm Pre

All these are trending topics on Twitter. No other website had the power like this ever before. It also acts as a broadcasting tool. Many celebrities, large firms, reporters, news channels post latest updates via Twitter.

Some time back Gtalk introduced "Share what you listen" by allowing users to share the name of the song they were listening. It was obvious what Google came up with using that information: Top Songs list called Music Trends. Now just expand it from "Music" to "Everything". One word: "Awesome".

Take a look at the Usage section in Wikipedia and decide for yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Usage

Enjoy!

Virtual Haircut

Hello there.
This is going to be a small one. I just couldn't resist this.
Check this out:
Virtual Haircut
One of the most amazing things I have heard so far. It might get scary too :) .

Enjoy the audio!

Catch ya later.

Discovering interesting websites

I love exploring new websites. As technology keeps improving the quality of the websites improves drastically. I am going to the share some of the websites and tools that I usually use to discover new websites.

StumbleUpon - No doubt. This tool surely goes on top of my list. Previously stumble upon can be used only with toolbars installed in browsers. But now you can explore new websites using their website.  You get tons of options. You can stumble videos, pictures, websites, news articles, wikipedia pages, search on specific topics. This tool is also a social network. You can have friends and share links, articles with them.

MakeUseOf.com - Amazing website. Its a shared weblog. It lists some of the rarest websites which will be hard to find in other places. Look out for Cool Websites and Tools section.

DownloadSquad - Another shared weblog. This website focuses more on tech (software) news. Every once is a while it posts articles about interesting website. If you are seeing a website mentioned here, its definitely worth checking out.

Digg - A very interesting website and  the first of its kind. Its allows users to post articles on various categories and allows other users to rank (digg) the article. So based on the rank, you might either see that article on the first page or you might not. Even though this website is famous for articles, there are lots of posts on new websites in the Technology section.

Delicious -  The most famous and most used online bookmarking tool. Since most of the them make their bookmarks public, you should be able to get atleast a dozen matches for whatever you are searching for in this website.  This is a great way to find new websites. I rarely use it as you need to search for getting what you need. I don't know if I have that patience.

I use these websites on daily basis to find something interesting on web.   I knew about these below websites with the help of the ones listed above:

- Mint, Billmonk, Billy - light weight music player, Roxer, Clerkdogs - The most efficient movie recommendation website

Hope this will be useful. Please let me know if I have missed any good website here. See ya around.