Too Beautiful, the blog

Too Beautiful

| wishlist

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

On the other hand, 'Holy shit, they're shooting at us' pretty much covers it

140 characters is a novel when you're being shot at.

-- Oft-retweeted message on the #iranelection Twitter stream, presumably in answer to the objections
that posts on Twitter can't offer much in the way of detailed news

Labels: journalism, twitter

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

The corporate life: excitement division

One of the VPs at work sends around the news that management has taken to referring to "fiscal year 2010" as "FX." How annoying is that? Just a little less annoying than someone referring to 2010 as "oh-ten," which I've already been hearing.

In the same "newsletter" they're holding a contest to pick the new name for the internal document repository website. To generate excitement, "the person who submitted the winning name gets $100. Cash. In this economy, cash can be useful." Yes, but I thought the problem was that there's not enough credit. Whatever. You know what would be really exciting? Give another $100 to a random person who votes for the winner. Now that would inspire everyone to vote.

Finally, they offer the news that our division of the company will now be posting updates on Twitter, the better to "keep you abreast of product and customer news, expert commentary, bylined articles, podcasts, blog posts, speaking engagements, trade shows, and more." The only problem? Twitter is blocked throughout the company by IT.

technorati: twitter, companies

Labels: economy, twitter, working

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Dept. of Too much information

Look at this -- something called SocialWhoIs. The idea is:

Once you've setup an account on Socialwhois, you can create a more detailed biography (Twitter limits you to 160 characters), add links to more social profiles, and add in some interests, which then become clickable so you can find other people on Twitter and Friendfeed (who have also created Socialwhois profiles) with similar tastes.

Stuff like this is like the opposite of what I want the internet to be like. The guy who posted that has this problem:

While the names of some new followers I get on Twitter or Friendfeed immediately ring a bell, with others, I have no idea who the person might be.

Jesus Christ, if you don't know who they are, why should you care?? Are you really on the internet to "find other people with similar tastes" and interests? Then go to a dating site, you tool!

This is why I'm not on Friendster or Facebook or even LinkedIn. I really don't want to get into the whole etiquette of social networking. It's already strange enough that people whom I don't know follow my Twitter feed, but at least that doesn't require any reciprocal action from me.

Then again, I realize I don't have a great instinct for creating networks of friends in the first place.

Labels: blogging, social networking, the internets, twitter