“New! Lists. A great way to organize the people you follow and discover new and interesting accounts. (BETA)

Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You’re part of a small group receiving this feature, so don’t tweet about it yet!”

This looks like it will be quite an interesting feature to work with. It can also allow Twitter users to follow conversations between various groups of people as well as to create an interesting list (for example, South African bands on Twitter) and to share that list with others who may find it of interest (by the way, check out my first Twitter list).

Twitter lists can, in a way, be thought of as similar to groups on other social platforms. They allow users to follow tweets by a group of users with a single click.

I look forward to seeing this feature rolled out fully and to see how it gets used by the Twitter community.

Internet users of today are part-taking in a social web, connecting and interacting with other internet users on a global scale. This has caused users to want to write more frequently, letting others know what they are up to via status updates on various social networks. In addition to writing more frequently, users seem to be writing less in many respects. Shorter snippets of content, designed to communicate in as simple a way as possible (140 characters, as a popular example) the message that they are wishing to share. Due to this shortened nature of content, users are also sharing more photographs and content of different types, enabling the same level of communication through an alternate medium.

In addition to the above, various features are become more common-place on social networks, such as a stream of updates by users to which you are connected, as well as status updates and connecting with other users in the first place.

Enter Tumblr.

Tumblr, as mentioned above, enables users to share information of various content types with other users. Reblogging (similar to retweeting on Twitter), a content stream of posts by friends and a custom page theme are all built-in features. Users are able to setup a free Tumblr blog (hosted by Tumblr as well), which can be up and running in under 10 minutes. Tumblr posts can also easily be shared via Twitter at the click of a button.

With new features and updates to the system released on a regular basis, Tumblr is also showing signs of progression.

From a developer’s perspective, the Tumblr API is clean and easy to understand. This enables the reading, writing, updating and general management of one’s Tumblr blog from an outside resource, such as your WordPress blog.

Therefore, in conclusion, if you want to write and don’t need a huge blog (or don’t know how/want to go through the process of setting one up), get yourself a Tumblr blog. After all, it’s the next big thing.

For those unfamiliar with the feature, it allows Twitter users to mark a tweet as a “favourite” for viewing at a later stage… kind of like an archive.

Twitter’s “Favourites” menu has sparked the above questions in me for a while now. I imagine that everyone’s use of the feature is slightly different. I use the favourites menu almost as a bookmarking facility, allowing me to make notes of tweets via my mobile (for example, a tweet with an interesting URL) which I can then go and read when I’m at a bigger screen.

There’s an interesting post and some cool comments on the Twitter “Favourites” menu over here on the Twitter help portal.

How do you use the Twitter “Favourites” menu, if you do?

NetProphet 2009, for those who don’t know (or those South Africans who’ve been living under a digital rock for the past few weeks) is a conference that was held today for the first time, hosting online media professionals, discussing the possible future of the internet, how users will embrace and interact with technology and various niche topics within these realms. Speakers on the bill included Arthur Goldstuck (Intelligence Magazine), Herman Heunis (CEO at MXit), Hannes van Rensburg (CEO Fundamo), Mike Stopforth (Cerebra, Afrigator, 27Dinner), Dave Duarte, (Huddlemind, Muti, 27Dinner), Peter Flynn (SaaS), Henk Kleynhans (Founder of Skyrove), Andrew Smith (Live Alchemy, Yuppiechef) and Charl Norman (Blueworld Communities)… a full line-up, if ever there was one.

Not only was the conference organised and co-ordinated with the utmost professionalism, not only was the speaker list incredible, and not only was the venue amazing… the entire conference was free to the delegates. All costs were covered by various sponsors (Innovation Fund, White Wall Web and RSAWEB being the silver sponsors).

I had a thoroughly enjoyable day at NetProphet 2009. I enjoyed all the speakers, in particular Dave Duarte, Mike Stopforth, Henk Kleynhans and Andrew Smith. Thanks to everyone involved, all the speakers and to anyone and everyone who in any way played a role in NetProphet. Here’s to many more NetProphet conferences in the future.

According to the blog post, the competition works as follows:

“Entering is simple. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition — either on your website, or via Twitter
2. Leave a comment, letting me know where you posted the link!

The competition will run for one week, and we’ll randomly select three winners on Wednesday 6th May. Good luck!”

Tweetie looks like a really awesome Twitter client for OS X. I’ve tried several (I’m currently using the latest beta version of Lounge) and Tweetie looks like an application I could see myself using. Good luck everyone.

Earlier today, the team at Zoopy.com, a South African social media community, launched a new campaign called “Framed”. This campaign enables users to prank their friends, neighbours, family or random strangers (be nice) and upload their videos onto Zoopy.com (tagging them “Framed”, ofcourse), while the Zoopy community users rate and comment on their pranks. According to the website, “The top 5 pranksters will win R15k, R10k, R5k, R3k and R2k! 5 random voters will each win R1,000 Look & Listen vouchers!”.

Visit “Framed” over here. Now play nice, people.

Gatorpeeps has some really nifty features, including hashtag (#) communities, allowing easy categorising of “peeps” (“tweets” on Gatorpeeps) as well as streamlined searching on various topics through these hashtags. The service is automatically available to existing Afrigator users (a convenient aspect to encourage existing users to adopt the service), and has a clean and clear interface for working your way around Gatorpeeps.

I’m excited to see the progression of this service. Many kudos to the Afrigator team on an awesome job of Gatorpeeps. One feature I would like to see on the service would be more Ajax-like functionality (for example, loading the @username into the “peep” box without reloading the page). This is not so much a feature as much as an enhancement. All in good time hey.

For more information on Gatorpeeps and what others have to say about the service, Bandwidth Blog and Mike Stopforth’s blog have posts discussing the service.

See you in Gatorville!

Using a Twitter account isn’t the same as having your biography written for you. Twitter users want to interact with other Twitter users, as is the core functionality of the service. I’d rather interact with a user who has a personal account, who I happen to know is the CEO of or is working at a certain company. That way, if you have a query for that company, you know who you’re talking with and are also aware that the person works for the company. Brands, bands, companies, etc sign up on Twitter looking for that “personal connection” to their market. For that “direct access”. How does signing up a Twitter account for your brand do this? Or, for that matter, does it do this at all?

In some cases, a band (for example), a Twitter account can be used to directly connect with a fanbase. The “personal connection” can be achieved by treating Twitter like any personal user would. Go to tweet-ups, participate in conversations, contribute. Twitter isn’t your soap box, it’s a clean and tidy lounge that serves cocktails and soft drinks (don’t drink and tweet ).

Yes, a non-personal Twitter stream can work. For example, a blog can post their blog posts on Twitter, acting more like an RSS feed. This saves the user having to open a feed reader, subscribe to emails or to even have to visit the website without knowing what they’re going to see. In this case, the interaction is somewhat different. Being that the account is representing a brand, the users may find it difficult to interact on a personal level with the account, which would limit the account to basic query and response conversations, or conversations pertaining to the topics discussed in the blog.

So that’s my view on non-personal Twitter accounts. I’ve explored both sides of the coin. What are your views?

The majority of social networks and popular community websites today require user registration of some kind. As sub-concepts to this, there is the choosing of a username and password, filling out a form (with form validation and captcha codes), having to activate the account via a confirmation email and the concept of a user profile. All of the above are concepts that a user planning on using the internet regularly should become familiar with.

2. Posting information

Not only is the posting of information important, the choosing of said information is also of high priority. Users don’t generally want to read nonsense (I hereby indemnify myself for any future posts classified as “nonsense”). This also opens users up to the various types of information available for posting and how they work (for example, embedding video, which isn’t as self explanatory as, for example, typing).

3. Connecting with friends

The concept of “following” and “being followed by” friends is a concept that is old hat to the majority of internet savvy (or Twitter savvy) computer users. It can, however, be confusing to non-experienced users. The concept educates users on how content sharing works, as well as how they are able to connect with their friends. Private messaging, for example, is a sub-concept of this.

4. Sharing information to the web

“Post this to Twitter” is something that is becoming more and more popular across various social networking websites, Tumblr included. This opens users up to another channel for communication and information sharing, as well as showcasing the interconnected aspects of various social websites and the way that the web is moving.

5. Mobile integration

With the majority of our country being mobile, and the mobile web increasing at a rapid rate, Tumblr’s mobile options are a great way for non-desktop or laptop users to work with the service.

Well, there you have it– four reasons why South Africans should use Tumblr. At the crux of it, Tumblr is easy to sign up to, easy to customise the look of (you don’t have to, but if you want to, it’s easy) and is hosted for you, eliminating all of the potential hassles and knowledge barriers of having to set up web hosting for oneself. There are, ofcourse, many more aspects of the web that can be introduced through Tumblr. I thought I’d leave some of the fun for your Tumblr experience.

Are you on tumblr? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

A while later, I expanded the above topic of synchronicity to the overall concept of beauty. How beautiful the synchronicity is. I then thought; “this is definitely a nerd’s definition of ‘beautiful’”. Hence, my latest nerdicle on Nerd Mag discusses this further, stating, “beauty is:”.
Read my latest Nerd Mag article.