in-between thing: twitter

Some time later, and no, I have not yet experienced the ecstacy that is Twitter. It still feels like I'm saying random, meaningless drivel into the void. I have, however, started finding a practical use for Twitter when it comes to following others. Following groups, organizations, businesses, and so on is proving to be informative. The groups that are on Twitter for professional reasons aren't wasting their 140 characters in random, meaningless drivel; they're posting actual news, using links to connect readers to more in-depth information. In 140 characters, I can decide if the story is something I want to know more about, and if it isn't, I haven't spent a lot of time on it. It might be nice if some of the organizations on Facebook moved this sort of thing to Twitter. For example, I connected to Magers & Quinn (a bookstore) on Facebook. I don't mind hearing about their upcoming events or their recommended books, but Facebook is feeding that onto my Wall, the same as if they were one of my friends. I'd be satisfied with getting that sort of news in a tweet, knowing that I could learn more from their blog, their newsletter, and so on.

Thing 28: Customized Home Pages

Well, this was hauntingly familiar. I'd dealt with customized home pages way back in August with Thing 13 (Online Productivity Tools). There seem to be a few more options out there this year, but the principle is the same.

Since Thing 13, I've been using iGoogle as my home page on my home computer. This time, I've been testing Netvibes and Pageflakes out as well. I want to like Netvibes more than I do, but it's been having small problems ever since I signed up. I had to sign up twice because it locked up the first time and my registration never went all the way through. Started simultaneously with Pageflakes, Netvibes takes noticeably longer to load which isn't much of a selling point, and sometimes it just doesn't load at all. And finally, something about the layout just rubs me the wrong way aesthetically. I've changed the template and colors, but it's still not to my taste. The various widgets do what they're supposed to do (mostly), but I find many of them unattractive anyway. I do like that they've got a fairly wide assortment of widgets, but iGoogle has more (so there).

Pageflakes' strong points are the things I didn't like about Netvibes: it loads faster, I like the layout better, and most of the time, with any given flake, I like its look more than Netvibes' corresponding widget. Its mail flakes seem to have more problems accessing my email than Netvibes' do, though. But at least I didn't have to sign up for it twice, and so far it hasn't had hiccups in loading.

I'm not quite ready to dump iGoogle yet. I may not like its layout quite as much as Pageflakes', but I find its basic simplicity appealing in its own right. And the gadgets I've found are mostly doing what I need them to do, although why the birthday reminder gadget occasionally just stops working puzzles me.

Some gadgets, regardless of platform, are just really useful. I like having my various email accounts viewable with a quick glance at one page, rather than traipsing around from login screen to login screen to check them all. I think Facebook and Twitter do just fine as small gadgets: it strips them down to their essentials and cuts out the noise (well, Twitter doesn't seem to have much beyond its essentials, but it still works great as a gadget--if you like it in the first place). And what's a start page without news headlines or brief weather updates?

Like giving Twitter a fair shot, I'll probably continue to try all these home pages for a while and see how they work out in the long run. There are always new gadgets/widgets/flakes to try, after all--may as well see them in three incarnations.

Thing 27: Twitter

The hypothetical dedicated readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven't posted since February 4. Now part of this was because of catching That Cold and being busy at work, but it was also because I could see that the next Thing was Twitter and I just couldn't work up any enthusiasm for it. Unfortunately, I still can't.

I signed up for Twitter about a week ago and have tried to post daily. I've found a few people to follow and one person is following me (doesn't that sound like stalking?). I get that Twitter is microblogging, but my preferences run toward macroblogging: when I blog, I want to get into a topic and explore it at some length. This is not something you do when you have only 140 characters to work with.

I agree that Twitter would be more interesting if I had more connections there. More Things advises inviting people you know to join. I don't think I can in good conscience, because there's nothing to offer them. I readily admit, I wasn't enthusiastic about Facebook when I joined, but after a while, I realized that there were things about it I liked: applications that helped me socialize (vs. setting my teeth on edge), ways to find people I'd lost contact with, a way to blog while maintaining some privacy, etc. All Twitter is is the Facebook status feed. If my friends are already on Facebook, what do any of us need another status feed for? And heck, you can write more than 140 characters on Facebook. To be fair, I like that on Twitter you're not obliged to start your tweet with your name--but it looks like in Facebook's next incarnation, you may not have to deal with that either.

I note that others seem to be having trouble warming up to Twitter. The only person I get frequent tweets from has nothing to do with the More Things program. The people I'm following who are working their way through More Things have put out a few tweets and then quit. Heck, even mnmorethings, the More Things own Twitter identity, seems to have given up after January 29!

It's different for an institution like a library. I see that if you had actual news for your followers, Twitter would be a good way of getting them the bare bones quickly. Maybe I just lead too dull a life for Twitter.

I'm going to try to be quietly active on Twitter for the rest of the More Things program, to give it a fair try. Maybe I'll ask the one active tweeter in my life what she likes about it. But like with lots of the photo apps from 23 Things, this is an aspect of Web 2.0 that just doesn't fill a void in my life.

Thing 26: Join the 23 Things on a Stick Ning

I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Ning way back at Thing 21. Okay, that was only five Things ago, but given the break between the two sets of Things, that was also five months ago. Not that I did much then. Heck, I'd joined Ning itself even earlier, May 2008, in conjunction with the Midwest Library Technology Conference, and hadn't done much with it then.

This time around, I am putting slightly more effort into the Ning. I finally got around to answering a friend request from last fall (in my defense, I thought I had accepted that request back when it was made), and I've just accepted another one. I've also left some comments on a wall. As it turns out, we're discussing knitting, not the 23 Things, but it's communication. (I swear, knitting has gotten me further in networking than my professional responsibilities ever have).

I have glanced over the Ning widgets and I'm not finding them compelling. For all that Ning can be used for just about any interest, because of the two groups I'm part of, it feels professional to me and no, I don't really want to add BuddyPoke! ("Express yourself! Hug, kiss, tickle, or punch your friends with your own personalized 3D avatar") to a professional group.

I considered joining another Ning group, perhaps one more in tune with my extracurricular interests. Oddly, I'm not coming up with anything. A search for "knitting" netted me some photos, but no groups--not that I really need another knitting group in my life, since I have Ravelry. "Writing" is far too general; "journaling," far too specific. Of course, the beauty of Ning is that I could run out and create groups for anything I searched for and didn't find. But that's not me. This is partly because my schedule is just crowded right now and partly because I'm only a half-hearted social networker at best. Give me an actual network of people I'm familiar with and I will participate pretty regularly. But starting one and luring people into it? Nah. I'd never follow through.

I did add the 23 Things Ning badge to my blog way back when. Indeed, that redesign that I mention in the most recent in-between thing was prompted by my realizing that the new template I'd chosen was cutting off the right edge of the badge. So if I hadn't been able to get DISQUS to work, could I have blamed Ning?

in-between thing: disqus and blogger

Not being entirely satisfied with my new template, I changed it. What with DISQUS being tangled in the HTML, it changed as well. Now, regardless of whether a post has comments or not, it says "View Comments" instead of giving me the correct number (usually "0 Comments," but occasionally people do say things). Tried reinstalling DISQUS and apparently the code went in twice because it then said "0 Comments 0 Comments." This is when I learned that DISQUS's help files are practically nonexistent (the one for Blogger is "Coming Soon"). Okay, world, I'm not positively impressed by this!

[a few minutes later] Fixed this! I can't believe I figured out to fix this; I don't speak XML. Pure intuition--and it happened to work this time. But I don't think I should have had to rely on intuition in this situation. Surely many people who use DISQUS wish to redesign their blogs at some point.

in-between thing: disqus

Ha. With an actual post, I see how DISQUS works. Yay: no one will be forced to sign up with DISQUS if they don't want to!

(No, I'm not saying how it works. If you've made it this far and you're curious, come comment on something from Thing 25 onwards. :) Yes, that's only two posts. I'm trying.)

Thing 25: Bloggers' Toolkit

Okay, I got it: gadgets and widgets are blog bling. If I used enough of these, I could so successfully camoflage my writing that no one would ever find it.

The easiest toys gadgets and widgets were the ones that required the least effort on my part (duh). Since all I had to do to take advantage of the Typealyzer and the Blog Readability Test was to plug my blog's address into a box, they were the first I played with. I'm really hoping that my blog's postgrad readability rating doesn't mean that 23 Distractions is about as pleasant to read as the worst academic writing! Also, 23 Distractions scores as an ESTP blog. I'm an INTJ, and I'm spending way too much time trying to puzzle out how an anonymous computer somewhere was so off-base.

Moving on to more serious/functional stuff, I eventually decided to sign up for DISQUS. I went back and forth on this because I couldn't figure out from what I was seeing how it improved anything. I suppose I signed up for it mostly to see how it worked. Although now I'm confused: since I had to shut Blogger's comments down to get DISQUS to work, do readers have to be signed into DISQUS to make any comments at all? Gah.

Site statistics intrigue me. I'm delaying signing up for any, however, since most of them looked like overkill. But I would certainly try to set them up on a library blog: we all know libraries live and die by their statistics! So far, this hasn't seemed like a blog that would benefit from adding audio or video gadgets. If I were writing a more personal blog, though, I'd probably want to add photos and the occasional video. As for a professional blog, I'm certain we could find a use for those widgets. With this particular blog, though, it really would be bling: flashy, eye-catching, but not much in the way of functional.

The time consumption is pretty high for this Thing. Installation and sign-up usually didn't take long, but working through lists of widgets, reading about them, sorting them out in my head, testing them, and so on took quite a while. I eventually made myself stop just so I could get this posted before February. Although if we do set up a library blog at some point in the future, at least my preliminary research is taken care of.