Tag: twitter
Twitter to be taught to ten-year-olds
The UK government announced today that it wants to teach Twitter in primary schools as part of a campaign to make online communication and social media part of the national curriculum. Kids will also be taught to use Wikipedia, how to blog, and proper typing skills alongside traditional handwriting skills.
The plans, which also remove the Victorians and Second World War from the primary syllabus, were going to be launched next month, but leaked early in the Guardian. Analysts and teacher groups have cautiously welcomed the moves, though they wonder why current trends are being given so much weight.
Personally, I’m glad that Wikipedia, blogging and proper keyboard usage are being taught – all of those are, for the moment, here to stay. I’m a little confused, though, as to why Twitter has been singled out. It’s not that revolutionary and, even speaking as a heavy user, it’s current prominence in the news is surely no more than a passing media fad caused by high-profile celebrities joining up. Students should certainly understand online communication, but I’m not convinced Twitter is the best way to show them.
What do you think? Tell us on Twitter – and no, the irony of that isn’t lost on me – @techdigest.
Guardian (via Techcrunch UK)
GALLERY: Our 12 favourite fake and fictional Twitterers
Ever since Twitter first emerged, there have been people creating fake accounts. Some of them are are done spitefully, while others are a little too close to their real life counterparts to be truly entertaining.
But the folks that do it right, with just enough humour to make it obvious that there’s some gentle ribbing going on… those are our favourites. In this gallery, we’re going to celebrate their contribution to the internet: celebrities, fictional characters and beloved pets await. Just click the glorious visage of Captain Jon Luc Picard to continue the tour when you’re ready to continue…
Alan Martin (@alan_p_martin)
OPINION: Why I'm not going back to using Twitter with SMS
I’m quite proud to say that I’m old-skool when it comes to Twitter – I’ve been signed up since April 2007. My first tweet? “Watching TV, waiting for my roommate to finish dinner, and then going out drinking.”
Back then I used the SMS system with Twitter. I’d SMS my updates to a central number, and the service would send them back to me by text. When you’re only following a few people, that’s fine. You don’t end up abusing your free text allowance.
But then Twitter, citing financial reasons, withdrew the SMS service in August 2008. Overnight, the gentle buzz from my phone getting Tweets two or three times a day just stopped. I stopped having a reminder to Tweet. As a result, I got a bit lazy and there’d be weeks between my Tweets.
But then something changed. I managed to slip over the tipping point of following enough people saying enough things that it was worth checking it daily, so it found its way onto my bookmarks bar of my browser and that got me back off the edge and tweeting again.
Nowadays I’m following 350-odd people, and I get about three or four updates a minute. That’s fine at my PC – running Twhirl means I can just let those conversations quietly purr away in the background. I’ve also got a client for my S60 phone – Twibble – which sorts me out on the go.
A company called Twe2 launched this week that lets European users get alerts on their phone, in exchange for an ad at the end of the Tweet. Yay! I can get my SMS Tweets back! But I don’t want it.
The idea of having three to four texts coming in to my phone every minute seems ludicrous. The way I use Twitter now – it’s there when I need it, and I can ignore it when I want – is perfect. I get any @replies and DMs emailed to me, and I check my email a billion times a day so I don’t miss them. I just don’t need SMS.
Do you agree? Or are you gagging to get SMS tweets back? Share your opinion in the comments.
Tweet your way to employment with Twitter JobSearch
People always say that a CV or resume should be no longer than two sides of A4 paper long. Well, prepare to cut down your working history to 140 characters, because Twitter job hunting is the next big thing – if you believe a couple of new employment based startups for the service.
Facebook updating homepage yet again
After the disastrous launch and eventual user acceptance of Facebook’s news feed and profile pages last year, you would have thought that the company wouldn’t mess with the site too much more for a while. But no – it doesn’t want users getting too comfortable, so next Wednesday there’ll be a new homepage.
It looks like Twitter. There’s no two ways about it. With the status box massive and front-and-centre, there’s a definite homage going on. The feed below is now real-time too, so you can see stories appear as they happen. That feature’s been around for a while but previously it wasn’t the default option.
But one feature that Facebook’s adding to the mix is filters. If you’ve got friend groups set up then you can choose to view the updates from just one group or another. That could definitely prove useful for power users, or those with very distinct friendship circles. You can also view feeds from your friends in specific Facebook groups that you’re a member of, which is quite nifty.
This is a definite improvement to the site, and should help it compete against the attention draw from Twitter, especially as Facebook’s biggest asset is that almost everyone you know is on it – something not true of its media-darling competitor.
It’s a bit of a blatant copy and should probably have been rolled into the previous update, but I suspect that many mainstream users will hardly notice the change and as a result, there won’t be the mass user revolts that have characterized previous changes to the world’s favourite social network.
(via Business Insider)
Realtime search bar coming to Twitter
The future face of Twitter has been presented to investors at a presentation in San Francisco and that face looks to include a Twitter realtime search bar right at the top of the screen.
I said before – in fact, I think it was just yesterday; yes it was – about the potential of Twitter as a new and more powerful source of search…
Google CEO calls Twitter a "Poor Man's Email System"
When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked what he thought of Twitter, at a technology conference hosted by Morgan Stanley yesterday, he came out with the following gem: “Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man’s email systems”.
Ouch. Now that’s the sound of a man hurting. Hurting because his company didn’t see the microblogging revolution coming? Hurting because they did, and backed the wrong horse – buying up Jaiku rather than Twitter? Maybe he’s just hurting because people are hacking Google to display Twitter results.
He went on:
“In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?”
“I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using. Twitter’s success is wonderful, and I think it shows you that there are many, many new ways to reach and communicate, especially if you are willing to do so publicly.”
He also gave a quick mention of Google’s new Twitter account, but got a little confused by the character limit, claiming @google is somewhere to “go ahead and listen to our ruminations as to where we are and what we’re doing in 160 characters or less”. Actually Eric, it’s 140.
(via Business Insider)
Real-time Twitter searches on Google results
Have a click on the image just here on the right and once it’s bigged itself up, you’ll notice it’s a Google search page with five Twitter results at the top. That’s because some clever soul over on MT-Hacks has created code for the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox which offers a degree of real-time search on Google…
Skittles changes homepage to Twitter search for "Skittles"
Skittles, the little fruity sweets, have done a bit of a makeover on the Skittles.com homepage. The page now shows the real-time results for a Twitter search for “Skittles”, with a floating box to tell you a little more about the page.
There are several aspects to this that are interesting. It’s another massive step towards mainstream for Twitter (I bet Skittles is hoping that the service doesn’t go down). It’s also a massive step towards “the conversation” for Mars, which is a company that’s been plagued with criticism in the past, though admittedly not as much as rival Nestlé.
In fact, although there’s not been much stirring on the PETA message boards at the time of writing, it’s surely only a matter of time before the people behind sites like MarsCandyKills.com start flooding the service with highly-negative Tweets.
Some call this the campaign backfiring. I don’t think so. I think that it shows bravery, and a belief that the general public doesn’t really care. Personally, I think far more positively about the company that it’s happy to publicise its criticism, and I’ll be disappointed if they cave.
Skittles.com (via @robbrown)
MPs call for regulations for Twitter over child safety concerns
Well, perhaps that standfirst is a little over-dramatic but, just as the original incarnations of Napster and YouTube were utterly ruined, the same might be about to happen to Twitter. The internet police are coming…
