Skrocki's Blog: Sun, Social Networking, Random Thoughts...

This only works if you have a proxy in the room, but it's a cool use of Twitter by Scoble to pull a physically distributed audience into a press release and give them a voice to ask questions:

" The hidden OpenSocial press conference (future of information sharing) by ZDNet's Michael Krigsman -- Google’s OpenSocial announcement today suggests changes that may improve the future of social networking (click here for Dan Farber’s coverage). Hidden from view during the press conference, an improvised parallel event arose spontaneously, raising deeper implications than the Google announcement itself. This parallel event offers a provocative glimpse into the future of collective intelligence, information ..."

Scoble got the scoop straight from the Google and MySpace CEOs.

Do you think this will change the theory that suggest middle/upper class young adults build their communities on Facebook while young adults in the working class use MySpace (since there will be some who migrate from FaceBook to MySpace because of benefits of an OpenSocial network)?

Scoble just posted a fantastic video of his visit with the nice folks who bring us Twitter.



In the video, Twitter engineers talk about the importance and challenges of caching data for what seems to be a super simple application & touched a bit on scaling & how they were surprised by the usage spike. They also touch on how Twitter is built largely on RoR with many customizations and the use of Jabber.

Interesting video tidbit: Twitter gets 10x more traffic via the API than the website. One of the most common uses of the API is Twittervision. Info about the API is posted here. I'm wondering what the use cases are for companies like Sun leveraging the API? I see a lot of companies Twitter-izing feeds -- I setup a Twitter feed of Sun Blogs, but I'm sure there are interesting use cases for corporate uses of the API.

And if you're wondering why Twitter doesn't update your Facebook status, it's because the Facebook status API is not opened. So, if this is something of value to you, let Facebook know.

It's all about sharing and as Alex Payne, Twitter Engineer, says Twitter "Brightens your daily routine." I agree that sounds a bit corny, but as much as I resisted Twitter in the beginning, it's now one of the first sites I open in the morning and the last site I close at night. It has had an adverse affect on the time I spend blogging and feed reading, but I dig the brevity, efficiency and cross-functionality of it all.

Via Danny on Twitter: