sinéad's lifestream

I seem to be in a minority group that sees the potential that the new twitter re-tweet function brings. For someone that has worked on a method of highlighting Irish tweets for the benefit of non-twitter users and anyone offline for a long period of time, it’s possible that I’m able to see the potential a little more clearly.

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

Will someone let me know when it stops raining in Ireland? I feel like it’s been going non stop since last year.

The increase in rain fall over the Summer might have something to do with why there aren’t any small birds visiting my garden any more. Cold and rain equals less insects, so I wonder if that has meant they’ve moved on or the chicks didn’t survive to Autumn. Though the crows and magpies certainly are benefiting, they’ve been knocking our full bird feeders over and gorging themselves. Cheeky buggars.

I wish the sparrows, finches and robins would come back to brighten these dreary days.

There’s simply not enough “practice grilling your sausages” apps out there. (#sarcasmfilter) I’m addicted to downloading and playing with free apps, hence
how I come across so many. The Denny iFry sauasages app lasted a whole 5minutes on my iPhone before I deleted it, but yet it managed to elicit quite the girlish giggle. Just look at those sausages! Hehe.

There never seems to be enough time to blog any more. So I’ve installed the WordPress application for the iPhone and I’m going to stop letting my musings get lost in the Twitter stream forever. Should be perfect as a replacement for Twitpic (which I’ve become increasingly tired of) and for posting Spotted posts.

Now if I could just figure out how to make all of this work with Flickr, so I could store uploaded photos there instead of on my server… might be too much of a challenge, but alas, I’m never one to turn away from a challenge.