After getting rid of my Facebook account a long time ago, finally, I have decided to pull the plug on Twitter as well. I have become increasingly wary of the changes of the platform as it seeks for a way to monetise it’s user-base. The timeline has increasingly become infested with annoying ads and no way of getting rid of them. Since Twitter effectively killed the whole app ecosystem with their changes to API rules and banning anything that became useful to a substantial number of people.

Now that Twitter has totally killed their V1 API there is no official way to get Twitter feeds via RSS. Which is a real shame as RSS is a well accepted Open Standard for this type of information :-( SHAME ON YOU TWITTER ! Currently there seem to be very few third party sites providing RSS services and it appears unlikely many will as Twitter will just kill them with changes to their API and/or terms & conditions as soon as they gain traction.

One of the more common uses of Twitter for me is to monitor “back-channels” at events (often events I can attend, but more often these days events I am unable to attend). Unfortunately Twitter’s search capabilities cease to be useful after a little while and so it is very handy to be able to create an archive for the events ‘hashtag’. There used to be a number of tools in the early days, but mainly because of Twitter’s changes to policies and very unfortunate morphing into a closed ‘media-publishing’ platform, the developers of such tools were forced to discontinue their services.

Having seen more and more articles on the use of micro-blogging tools in educational and corporates settings, I am constantly surprised that one of the most useful options from my point-of-view seems to be constantly overlooked. Micro-blogging is like Twitter, but private to your organisation. It is a great way to capture those more informal internal discussions. It can help distribute useful information (such as links) throughout your organisation or help kick-start conversations.

I sometimes need to link to a specific Twitter status update and since the recent upgrade (or as I personally see it downgrade) of the Twitter UI it is quite annoying to find the Status ID, as it can not be copied from the interface (without some Javascript debugging tools at least). http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=[screen_name] This will show the users timeline in XML format revealing the Status ID in the XML result. The following URL can be used to then construct the permalink to the specific status update:

Being out and about a lot, I am a fairly heavy user of my mobile internet plan (currently with Hutchinson 3). One of the more common tasks when there is some down-time while in transit or waiting for coffee is checking out what’s happening in the twittershere. Personally (being a web-app developer for years) I generally prefer browser-based apps over ‘native apps’. Dont even get me started about J2ME apps. One of the main reasons for this preference is that I tend to switch handsets fairly frequently.