This is an excellent addition and will help me make decisions on whether the account is legit or not and whether I should reciprocate with a follow.  

You can see my first 16 tweets using the very cool My Tweet 16 service.

The other big Tweets in my past are from the day Jude was born. 

Going thru the Twitter archives to dig these up wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.  So moving forward, I’ll be using Twitter favorites to mark the big Tweets from my timeline.

Happy birthday Twitter.  You’re maturing quite nicely. 

Awesome time lapsed map of tweets from the New York Times. It shows the location and frequency of commonly used words during the Superbowl. This map produces amazing visuals and is impressive to see how far Twitter has come.

Charlene Li wrote up a quick post about this find and pretty much summed up everything I was thinking:

In many ways, I think this simple mashup shows the power of Twitter — it’s when you see the aggregate whole of Twitter that you begin to understand the potential for it to serve as a channel for what people are paying attention to. Take a look at the “talking about ads” stream to understand which ads resonated where — media buyers, get your orders ready!

So observed Thomas Edwards in the aftermath of the Hudson River plane crash, when timeliness of information about the crash on Twitter blew away what cable news outlets could provide. 

Twitter is a microblogging service that…oh, forget it.

Point is that though Twitter approached mainstream status as a communication medium in 2008, but still doesn’t replace the “online homebase” that one’s blog site can be, especially when served up using a self-hosted version of WordPress.  The Mashable post presents legitmate trends that we may being to see in blog designs, from simple features such as Twitter rolls (similar to Blogrolls) to complex features such as Tweetbacks (integrated Twitter responses to a blog post within the posts comment listings). 

But most of all, the Mashable post speaks to the continuing trend that our blogs exist as the best aggregators of all of a blog owner’s online activity, from Twitter to Flickr and beyond.  2009 also saw the rise of aggregating services such as Friendfeed and storytlr, but these services lack the customization and branding that one can include in a self hosted property such as a blog.  A blog where the posts exists as the primary, featured content with our short 140 character bursts, Flickr photos, Seesmic videos, and more revolving around like planets orbiting the sun.

Tim O’Reilly on Why I Love Twitter – Great post from a great thinker on the web and emerging media

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Blog by Jason Falls – if you’re new to blogging (perhaps we built one for you), Jason has a post that’s worth your time.

Social Web’s Big Question: Federate or Aggregate – Om Malik reflects on online identity managment as Facebook takes the wraps off of FB Connect

Life is Binary, neither is the Social Web – A really fantastic post from the always insightful Deb Schultz.  Best line: “..looking at the current version of the web with an old media lens ain’t gonna fly.”

Gorillaz Avatar Maker – Check this out if you feel a need to refresh your Twitter avatar.

Twitter got a little face lift yesterday and its not that bad. I love the look of the larger type for your “following”, “followers”, “updates” count and that your latest tweet is place under the update field. They do use a lot of my design pet peeves… but that’s pretty much the extent of my complaints.

Pet peeve #1: Rounded corners… really?!? I’ve abused corners in some of my designs too, but I just don’t really understand the obsession. I know it’s very web 2.0, but the design stands up without them. I took a look in IE and it does… I almost prefer it. Maybe it’s because I’m missing the squareness of a tweet. It was sort of iconic. (Side note: It’s damn cool they are the CSS3 border-radius property for those silly corners)

Pet peeve #2: Finger tabs… or at least that’s what I’ve been calling them since my boy Shalin added them to the redesigned My eBay. In the new Twitter design, the finger tabs (right) replaced the horizontal ones that used to be above the timeline. I didn’t like the horizontal tabs either and really don’t know what the best solution would be, but those finger tabs just irk me. Maybe it’s because they look like fingers or maybe it’s because they want look like side navigation but act like tabs… something is just confusing about the whole look of them.

Pet peeve #3 Georgia Italics… that’s just gross and should never be done.

So other than that… it’s good step forward. Congrats, I know how hard it must be to please our large, vocal community. Want to see what everyone else is saying? Check out some of the reviews.

I have never heard of Rick Sanchez before and only stumbled upon his social media integrated newscast on Saturday night when I was channel flipping to find New Orleans evacuation news one of my brief strays away from US Open tennis (which I pretty much watched all weekend).  In addition to excellent reporting, I found Mr. Sanchez on CNN showing familiar Twitter “@” replies on the monitor sitting on his desk.  The next morning, I decided to follow Mr. Sanchez at http://twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn and noticed his recent Twitter activity.  He clearly gets the value of integrating the mediums and interacting…as noticed by his tweet:

what a remarkable tool, cable tv with twitter

I wasn’t the only one to discover Mr. Sanchez’s evolution of TV news this weekend.  And It appears he’ll be debuting a new show on CNN next Monday – “Rick Sanchez Direct” – that intends to integrate Twitter, Facebook, etc.  I’ll be tuning for sure

Perhaps Mr. Sanchez doesn’t deserve extra credit in evolving interactive news.  In the web world, we’ve seen this sort of live interaction building over the years.  Chris Pirillo has been on the cutting edge of interactive live broadcasting for a while now.  And Robert Scoble has certainly (as always) pushing the boundaries by taking advantage of what Qik has to offer with mobile broadcasting.  But somebody had to take the big step at CNN and actually DO IT.  Not only did Rick Sanchez take the first step, but he’s also making it successful.  Actually I’m very curious how fusing Twitter into CNN news happened.  Did Mr. Sanchez and/or his producer bring this to CNN program management?  This would be yet another example of social media infusing the enterprise from the outer layers.  Could Qik and CNN integration be far behind?

Of all the social networks I am a part of, Twitter is the one that is most compatible with my workflow.  I’m a short attention span kind of guy and feel like participating with my friends on Facebook involves me dedicating an hour here and there.  That’s not happening.  With Twitter, I can drop in for 5 minutes at at time, write a tweet or two and catch up on recent activity of the folks I’m following.  It’s the new “smoke break”.

It helps me get to know people faster

It’s amazing what you can learn about people in short bursts.  There are many people that I’ve yet to meet in person that I know so much in person.  Like they listen to Pavement or Sam Cooke.  Or are as obsessed with the Boston Red Sox as I am.

It allows me to spend less time in Google Reader

Instead of opening up Google Reader to read feeds of my favorite blogs, I’m using the folk I follow in Twitter to alert me to things I should view and read.  My Twitter friends have become my trusted sources.

Everyone else loves it, too

Admit it.  You love Twitter.  Sure, it may make you crazy and piss you off whenever it presents you with a picture of a whale.  But every significant relationship you’ve ever had has parts to it that you can’t stand.  We all put up with it and we’ll all continue to put up with it for the foreseeable future. Divorce is not imminent, no matter what some people may think. In fact, we all seem to be rooting for Twitter to exceed beyond our wildest imagination.  In that fashion, using Twitter is like going to a casino and joining a craps table.  While the other casino games are very individual affairs, playing craps is a communal activity where everyone roots for the person with the dice to throw the perfect roll.  On Twitter, we’re all just standing around the table rooting for Twitter.