tweetdeck

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Twitter screwed up TweetDeck, so here’s the old version

08 January 2012 in Internet by Stilgherrian | 10 comments

Back in May 2010, Twitter bought TweetDeck for $40 million. Now they’ve taken the power users’ Twitter client of choice and, well, fucked it up.

OK, the fact that the new TweetDeck doesn’t run under Adobe AIR but directly as an OS X program will improve the battery life of my MacBook Pro. Eventually. When the program catches up to what we’d all been used to.

Whenever the heck that’s likely to be.

I’m not holding my breath.

Until then, here’s TweetDeck version 0.38.2 for OS X [2.4MB .zip], the final Adobe AIR version. Enjoy.

[Update 0840: You can download the equivalent TweetDeck version 0.38.2 for Windows from OldApps.com. It'll do you for Windows XP, Vista, or 7.]

[Update 0850: Can we trust that website? I'd better mirror it here. Here's TweetDeck version 0.38.2 for Windows [2.4MB .zip]]

[Update 0900: And now we also have a Linux installer! For your enjoyment, TweetDeck version 0.38.2 for Linux. Thank you, sylmobile.]

Twitter: a guide for busy paranoids

22 August 2011 in Internet, Marketing, Media, Politics by Stilgherrian | 2 comments

[This is a slightly edited version of the article written for "Stories: from The Local Government Web Network", issue 3, August 2011, which was distributed at the LGWN's conference in Sydney on 18 August. Some material in this article also appears in Tweeting your way out of Paranoia, the closing keynote presentation I delivered.]

If you’re not yet at least experimenting with Twitter, the real-time social messaging service, you should be.

Suppress the corporate paranoia. It’s a lot easier than you might think. And while Twitter does get far more attention than its relatively small size might suggest — truly active Twitter users number perhaps 20 million globally compared with Facebook’s 750 million active users and counting — it punches well above its weight in terms of connecting with influential community members.

Twitter may not ever become the core real-time service used by the masses. Or if it does, it may only be for a few years. You only have to look at the last decade to see the then-leading MySpace surpassed by Facebook in 2008, just four years after Facebook was founded. Google’s launch of Google+ in June this year has generated plenty of speculation that the search and advertising giant’s foray into social networking will in turn wipe Facebook off the planet. Who knows?

There will always be some real-time social messaging service, however. Whether that’s Twitter as a stand-alone service, or whether we all end up using a real-time component of Facebook or Google+ or something that has yet to be deployed — none of that matters. The principles and practices of real-time messaging will doubtless end up being much the same.

Anything you might do with Twitter will be easy to migrate to any other real-time messaging system. The lessons you learn will carry across too.

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Choosing who I follow on Twitter

30 January 2009 in Internet, Personal by Stilgherrian | 21 comments

Twitter bird cartoon by Hugh MacLeod

Since being listed as an “interesting Aussie Twitter user” at NEWS.com.au the other night, I’ve gained 300-ish new followers. Here’s how I’ve been deciding who to follow back.

First, though, I don’t think Twitter starts to make sense unless you have a reasonable number of people in your network. For me, the penny dropped when I had about 50 followers and followees, and you actually interact with them. At that point I started to see the live communication rippling through the hyperconnected mob. It helped that I already knew some well-connected geeks to get the ball rolling.

Once you hit hundreds of followers, though, there’s a phase shift. You simply can’t see everything that happens. It scrolls by too fast. At first that’s stressful — until you realise there’s always more in the world than you can ever experience. So another penny drops, and you detach. Zen. The Twitter-river flows on 24/7, but you don’t stop to watch every fish.

I use Tweetdeck most of the time, not Twitter’s standard web interface, because I can create groups of people. The unfiltered Twitterstream rolls by on the left of my screen, with separate groups for close friends, for media contacts I need to keep an eye on, direct messages and so on. Another panel shows everyone who replies to me or mentions me. So while I can’t see everything on the main stream, just mentioning me will grab my attention.

(I daresay it changes again when you’re like Stephen Fry with more than 88,000 followers. [Update 5 February 2009: It's now more than 122,000.] May the gods forbid I reach that level of fame! He wouldn’t even be able to monitor all his @replies and DMs!)

So, how do I choose who to follow? Here’s what I’ve noticed today.

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