The new Beta Twitter Retweet feature

This just popped up on my screen:


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So it's a symbol instead of an RT and a handy way of seeing how popular a link is - kind of like the Facebook "Like" feature...

There's also a new button beside the "Reply" one:

Sometimes a press release says it all: the mysterydates.ie twitter singles night

Subject line: "A complimentary Invitation to Ireland first Singles 'Twitter' party with mysterydates.ie"

Saturday October 31st will see the official launch of mysterydates.ie in a twitterparty. Ireland’s premier events dating company will launch Ireland’s first twitter party in Kobra Bar, Leeson Street at 8 pm.

Daters will be given twitter addresses if they do not have their own so their personal identities will not be revealed to other daters.

Daters can then flirt virtually on large television screens in the bar via their twitter accounts with other daters. If the flirting on screen goes well a pair of dates may want to take the flirting offline. And if both parties agree mysterydates.ie will release their names so that the daters can flirt face to face at the party.

Seriously now, what could I add to that?

Oh wait, this:

“Twitter offers a great new way for single people to have fun at our party and flirt virtually,” said Hugh Redmond from mysterydates.ie. “Daters want to have fun and remain a bit mysterious initially and Twitter is ideal for this.”

So yeah.

Log on to www.mysterydates.ie to pre-register for the unique dating event which costs just 20 euro or ring 087-939-5381.

Halloween seems like the perfect time for it too.

Taking some time out. Suspended from Twitter. Laughing hard

This was too good not to blog, despite my self imposed break from it while I contribute to Culch.ie, the new Boards blog and the drain and source of energy and creativity that is the wonderful twitter.

But about 20 minutes ago...



I've been suspended from Twitter. Yep, my crimes of bad jokes, being anti-spam, anti BS and general mischivousness has finally caught up with me.


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I swear, I haven't laughed so hard for ages, simply because I had been marking spammers as spam, ranting about retweeting and telling the usual very bad jokes.

How do all my followers react? Same way I did. Laughing hard!


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So it's over to the Contesting account suspension page on twitter.com with me to fill in the details.

From the email I received:

If you are suspended, it's most likely for one or more of these reasons::

• User Abuse
• a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
• aggressive following
• imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
• misuse of the reply feature
• updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
• updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
• updates consist of updates poached from others' timelines, passed off as one's own
• Technical Abuse
• updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
• a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
• an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster

When this happens, we suspend the account for investigation and hide the contents from the public view in order to remove the cause of complaint.

Anyways, I *will* be back to blogging here soon. Promise. Got some stories for you. Stuff that's in my head, my notebooks and my soul.


EDIT: I'm back... http://www.twitter.com/darraghdoyle - that was quick!

Twitter as seen through the eyes of B3TA users

I love their image challenges. Always creative, always irreverend and never ever appropriate, the latest round of images from B3TA users really made me laugh.

Apologies for any offence, etc...

Before there was twitter:


from Zac Flimby

http://twitter.com/marcelmarceau


From Virulent

Spitter


From drboon

This is awful...


from Squid Ink

Possibly just as bad:


From Clagnut

Well if that's what you're doing...


From M3essential (with a nod to this sketch...)

Quitter


From Puromycin

Stan

From Half of Stephen Fry's left buttock


And my personal favourite, Splitter...

The Governator is on Twitter!

It's Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role as Governor of California and he really seems to have gotten a handle on how this thing works...



Michele Neylon has made a very good point last night...

Obviously it's something I said...

I was wondering when this would happen...



There's almost 60 Qwitter emails all in one go.

I recently went through all the people I follow on Twitter and wondered - who are they? Do I speak with them regularly? Do I engage with them or they with me?

I was up over 950 people and not really properly engaging with anyone. So I decided to just unfollow everyone. Every single person.

Then I went through my followers list to see who I recognised, who I spoke with, who made me laugh, who had interesting links and who I knew in real life and followed all of them back, seeing as they're the people I wanted to talk to.

All 350 odd of them. :-/

Then I added all the gurus, the moguls, the idea merchants, the event twitters and those services I liked.

I expected mass unfollows. I never mind someone who unfollows - God knows I don't tweet much of use anyways - I use it more to stay in touch with people than as a "promotion" service. I thought if twitter really works on conversation, on connection and on following, I should have dropped down to below the number I follow.

Strangely I didn't. There are therefore people whose twitterstream features my inane ramblings who I never interact with or never interact with me, yet they keep me there. Is it because they don't know how to delete? Are they just shy? I'm fascinated.

This fits in though with Sinéád's recent research on Irish bloggers. Part of her thesis which I'm particularly interested in was her finding that

" ...some blogs are more connected to a blogosphere than others, with some bloggers not being connected to any blogosphere at all. Over 65% of bloggers indicated that they were listed on an Irish planet aggregator, and almost 64% consider themselves a member of the Irish blogosphere. The remaining bloggers indicated that they were not listed and did not consider themselves part of the Irish blogosphere.

This highlights the 35% of bloggers unconnected from the Irish blogosphere, and this could suggest that there are far more Irish people blogging than is known.

It sparks off a lot of questions in my mind about the use of the word "community" in an online sense. Boards.ie for example isn't really one community, it's very very many in the over 700 forums we have. Equally just because one is a "blogger", one isn't expected to engage with other blogs or bloggers - though Sinéad's research shows that those who do benefit from the Social Capital:

"35.5% of bloggers believed blogging had a positive effect on their social lives, with 19.9% saying it had a “very positive” effect... Additional questions revealed that blogging has had an especially positive effect on the development of weak tie relationships with 81.3% of bloggers indicating that they have made friends that they communicate with online because of blogging.

Conclusions then? I don't know. The medium has me as interested and as passionate as it ever has. The opportunity to talk to people you wouldn't meet ordinarily - possibly you wouldn't have access to - is the biggest advantage, the one that keeps me going back for more...

For Twitter, I just repeatedly quote Ivor Tossel from his Twitter article on Globe and Mail:

Summoning the Fail Whale - the twouble with twitters

One of the better takes on Twitter I've seen in a while from the folk over on Current TV.

Twitter rap - one fordy

I was told about this in a meeting this morning:



Via funnyordie.com and Howard Lindzon. Put together by Jon Labes and Phil Pearlman and rapped by Julie Alexandria and Brent Rose, directed by @jonlabes.

Vote for John and Peter in the Shorty Awards

They're the Academy Awards of Twitter, if you take the academy to be all your followers who'll vote for you and the award to be for best producers of short content in 2008. It's great to see John Williams of @mcawilliams fame and Peter Donegan of @doneganland notoriety reach the finals of the first Shorty Awards. Go on the Irish!



If you are on Twitter and haven't voted, just head on over to the Shorty Awards website here, click Vote under doneganland in the Green category and under mcawilliams in the Personal category and complete the form. It's very easy and they'd appreciate your votes.

Good luck to yis both :)

Support via Twitter

Damien blogged about why he likes Twitter.

Here's one of the main reasons I do:



I'm chuffed so many people thought it worth their while to listen and to lend their support.'Twas an interesting experience. Thank you all :o)

There'll be no excuse for not knowing

Bebo and Twitter taking over my life...

I read today in the ever informative Silicon Republic that Bebo is going mobile.

Between them and Twitter, pretty soon only "I couldn't get online" will be my only excuse for not knowing what my (online) friends are up to...

Would you be bothered twittering on?

Twitter: now you can see EXACTLY what I'm thinking (when (and if) I post it).

This whole Interweb 2.0 is great. Thanks to Bebo, I can see how Orla's doing in Australia, thanks to Flickr I can share my photos and see other friends' ones, I can catch up with people on Vox.com, thanks to Yahoo answers I can find out things like this, thanks to netvibes I can have my own homepage almost the way I want it and thanks to Last.fm I can groove while writing this (as Stephen so kindly put it) "waffle".

Twitter.com takes the waffle part to the next level. It's people's thoughts as they post them from around the world. I'd heard about it but Donncha joining up made me go and have a look...

Here's a really good post for newcomers about it. So it's people doing what people used to do way back in the day when blogs were weblogs. Enter text. Hit submit. It's a stripped down version of Bebo and My Space and it lets you see where your friends are and what they're doing - if they post. If they can be bothered. I have. Not sure if I will again though...

Twittervision helps you follow them around on Google Maps. "Interesting" is probably not the exact word I'd use, but from a web 2.0 angle you have to give it to them - they're certainly connecting the world!

So here I am... another page with my name on it. What am I doing now? Posting on Twitter that I've posted this here of course...