Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

There was a time when I was much more active on Twitter but I am fickle when it comes to outages. I understand technically that there are some things that happen which aren’t foreseen, but Twitter is down a lot!

So here we go again. This is frustrating because I was starting to get back into doing some updated and now this. I hope it’s short lived!

Geek on (if it doesn’t go down!).

Not sure what it is – but I am not interested in Twitter since coming back from the beach. I will continue to post up my new blog posts to Twitter so my followers can come over for a read, but trying to strike up conversation is out.

I feel like it takes too much effort to try and get someone out of your followers group to answer you and actually have a meaningful conversation about something. Most people are following over 1000 people and probably have more than 1000 followers and so it’s like trying to be heard in an arena rock concert while everyone is standing around chatting and waiting for the band to show up.

I think that with some time off and time away from the blog/internet/twitter I am going to concentrate my efforts on 3 things. 1 – expanding my service company, 2 – concentrating on good blog content and 3 – moving forward with my podcast plans with my buddy Bryan.

Geek on!

On my way home from work and all of a sudden I start getting text messages from a familiar provider, 21212. It took me a couple of minutes but I realized it was Twitter sending me SMS updates all of a sudden. I haven’t gotten SMS updates from Twitter since they took down that service last year. From what it sounded like at the time it was due to the cost, which leads me to believe that they have worked out a deal with the major Canadian cell companies.

I took a trip to the twitter.com website as soon as I got home – low and behold; the service has been re-instated. I was able to find this blurb on the page where you register your cell phone number in their system:

Note: In Canada we currently support SMS notifications for Bell Mobility, Rogers, Fido, Telus, Koodo and Virgin Mobile Canada subscribers

So congrads to Twitter. The only issue I have now is SMS subscription management. It seems like many of the people whom I added as freinds are listed to update through SMS. Time to search for a tool to mass switch it off so I can add the people I want. Which won’t be many for SMS udpates due to the number of posts I will get…. I just can see it going all night.

My wife would kill me!

I am spending a couple of hours tweeting and surfing while my buddy borrows a computer to check his email. While doing so I saw a website fly by on Twitter. Like I normally do, I hit the link and then immediately went back to Tweetdeck to read some other posts. I leave my stuff rot in Firefox sometimes for ever just because I am busy with other things. But another tab won’t hurt right?

Well this tab was there for over an hour and I had forgotten about it. Pointing to http://visibletweets.com/ I inadvertently clicked on it. It was a clean site, so I put in my twitter ID and just watched. This is an amazing thing to watch. Sit back, relax and enjoy the great programming.

After you have come back to reality, you realize that this site actually is more than just pretty. One of the animation options in the top right of the screen is “cloud”. So if you entered your ID as the search critera then you can see what other words in posts about you are being referenced more. VERY COOL.

Have fun with it! And above all, appreciate the good craftsmanship here ;)

A tweet just came in from @markshaw – “When Did you Join Twitter? http://whendidyoujointwitter.com/ Please RT”

Of course I go and check it out. Enter my name and poof! My twitterversary is tomorrow. How cool is that? It’s amazing how many small websites are popping up with cool tools to get information about your twitter account.

So go check it out. You might be surprised to find out when you joined. Either that or you have a photographic memory and then screw you :)

I was chatting with @Gordonamy today and she was talking about a friend who lost of their followers. Seems like another Twitter glitch and so after some back and forth about the horrors  of it all, she asked “@thesleepygeek hopefully, its a simple fix hey, how DO we back up our lists anyway?”

Of course that prompts a searching session and it brought me here: http://tweetbackup.com/.

This service seems to provide a backup that we all probably want. The problem is that after some digging it isn’t a backup if your profile. ***UPDATE (2-May-09): Read the commend below from Jonas*** This service will simply backup all of your tweets and all you have to do it follow them. Their server will automatically follow your account and record anything that you tweet.

Cool service, but don’t be fooled. At this point the only people who are backing up twitter accounts are twitter themselves. Someone please prove me wrong and let me know!

So you’re trying to build up a following on Twitter, but things like sleep, work, and bathroom breaks are getting in the way of your goal to out-update Scoble?

via Schedule Twitter updates with Twuffer and FutureTweets.

I wasn’t looking for a plugin to tweet my blog posts but while I was browsing around today I found a new icon. It is from a service called Tweetmeme.com that lists popular tweet links on their web page. The listing of links on the website is secondary to me then is the ability for someone to easily tweet my article.

Some of the Tweet this type icons are very simple and do not offer a number of tweets. I like the Digg style icons that tell you how many times this article has been Dugg. This is what Tweetmeme has incorporated into their link and now you too can retweet on TheSleepyGeek.com.

I was able to install it quite easily by installing the WordPress plugin. It automatically placed it at the top left of every post like I wanted it to do (go ahead… take a look and hit the button up there!), but it does offer other locations in your post. If you are not running a WordPress blog then you can also take raw code from their site and place it into one of your templates.

I like the way this one works and it’s a handy item to have on your site.

Happy posting and happy tweeting!

How many hits will those two words get in a Google search? Probably only an amount that the Google computers can compute and that is the reason that the people over at TweetDeck have incorporated Facebook support into an already popular Twitter client.

I have installed the version that now has Facebook integration. It is not available as a standard upgrade through the automatic notification feature but can be downloaded here.

So far so good in my books. They have not over complicated their integration with Facebook, limiting it to just updates of your friend’s statuses. This is a good move in my books. In a review that I did over the weekend (submitted today, I know) about PeopleBrowsr.com I mentioned that it is great because it is the same on every computer but the extra features above TweetDeck were not really a benefit to me. This was largely because their integration of other features seem overly complicated for a program that needs to react and be used very quickly. TweetDeck has kept the Facebook integration simple and thus it is very fast and easy to navigate.

Now I have a conflict… PeopleBrowsr.com for reasons mentioned here, and TweetDeck for it’s continued simplicity.

Have fun with the new version Tweeps!

There are a ton of ways to access Twitter these days and many of the solutions offer advanced ways of organizing the tweets in a logical way. I have been a fan of TweetDeck for quite a while but I always found it a pain to set it up on each computer I use. I have an office PC, a laptop, a home desktop and sometimes I work on my wife’s laptop if it is the handier of the computers in the house. Having to install Adobe Air, then TweetDeck  and then configure TweetDeck like I am used to using it can be a real pain. Then there are other times when I have to re-do it because like a lot of techies, I format and reinstall quite often.

Most recently, while Tweeting about I heard of an alpha release of PeopleBrowsr.com. This is a website that is quite similar to TweetDeck in layout and features, but like most websites I don’t have to worry about configuration when I move to another computer. I think it comes down to the same reason that I use Google’s hosted e-mail; no matter where I am, I always have access to it and the configuration remains the same.

Knowing how to get somewhere and do something in a software that is meant to increase efficiency is the key to its success. The only reason that TweetDeck worked for me is because I invested the time in setting it up exactly the same on every computer I use. If not for that, TweetDeck wouldn’t have been as effective.

On the other side of the coin, if I were a person who was always on the same computer then I wouldn’t have made the switch. Other than the accessibility of the product, I don’t use many of the extra features. I am able to connect to other services such as FriendFeed but I actually prefer to login to the FriendFeed website and use their interface. The same reasons why PeopleBrowsr.com is a great access point for Twitter don’t apply to FriendFeed.

So a heads up for those of you who find yourself at more than one computer in a day. To be able to instantly jump into the Twitterverse as soon as you sit down, even for the first time at any computer is an awesome thing.

Note that this is still an alpha version and is prone to bugs. I haven’t found anything that is stopping me from using it in the last week. It is also only compatible with Firefox and Safari at this point.