Twitter Desktop Client query

So, Seesmic Desktop stopped working for me. I don’t know why, I expect it’s personal.

What (Windows 7) desktop clients do you all use for Twitter, and WHY? What do you like about them? What features make you pick that client?

I know I am generally rather pants about answering comments, and I may not be any better answering these. But I would really appreciate any info or opinions y’all have. (About Windows desktop Twitter clients, that is. In this case.)

Thanks!

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Tumblr policy revision

It was brought to my attention, after yesterday’s blog post, that for those people who follow my Twitter yet are NOT fans of at least some of the media properties I enjoy, the Tumblr tweets are spam.

Well, I do try to accommodate reasonable requests.

I’ve created a new Twitter account, SigridsTumblr. If you want the media content — the gifs, the vids, the images of comic book characters and actresses — follow that Twitter account. My Tumblr will auto-tweet there.

If you are already ON Tumblr a lot, the Twitter account will be redundant. If you are on Tumblr and you follow so many people that things get lost, you may want to follow @SigridsTumblr to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Ymmv. People use tech in different ways. I love Tumblr for the ease with which I can find and post visual content. But not everyone wants the visual content. Or those who might want the media images might be Tumblr-averse.

So, this is an experiment!

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January 10 2013

I haven’t done one of these in a while! Okay, here’s some random stuff:

1. My Tumblr updates a lot. This is because I have a queue set up to autopost between 5 a.m. and midnight. I also will manually post something from time to time. Right now I have Tumblr set to autotweet each queued post.

This is because … because I use Tumblr to bring things to people’s attention. Or to say hi to a friend. Or to let someone know I saw a thing and thought of them. Or that I think the thing I am re-posting on Tumblr is important and I want a wide audience to see it. More people follow me on Twitter than on Tumblr. Therefore, I tweet each Tumblr post. I want people — specific or in general — to see the thing in question.

However, since these are queued autoposts, I am not always paying attention when the tweet comes through. I may be driving, or at work, or asleep. So if you say something to me about it on Twitter I may not immediately reply because I am not actually there.

2. Circus resumed! K is very happy to be back at her classes. Also, they are all starting to discuss Spring Recital costumes, which always makes me O_o.

3. M is sick, the poor pook. Which means we are all likely going to get it.

In related news, The 2012-2013 flu season is apparently one of the worst in a decade, and there’s a new and more aggressive norovirus strain going around. So, good times.

4. We took the kids to the Minnesota History Center for school yesterday. Not only were the exhibits great, as per usual, but we had the museum almost entirely to ourselves. This meant that the docents and guides spent a certain amount of time enthusiastically talking to my kids about History.

My kids both proved that they really know their stuff. All kinds of stuff relating to Minnesota and U.S. history. I was really very pleased. We don’t quiz the kids, particularly. And at this point they both get a lot of their general knowledge from reading library books without close supervision. So it’s not immediately evident how much they are learning.

But, clearly, they are learning.

Both the kids are at the very edge of that point in the accumulation of facts, whereafter the accumulation of more facts is easier because you already have a mental system designed for the storage and use of facts. This is a good place to be.

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New thoughts on Twitter use

I love Twitter.

I truly love this particular social media property. Twitter is the thing that lets me stay in contact, asynchronously, with my friends and communities. I work weekends and odd schedules, I’m busy, my friends live across the world — Twitter is how I keep in contact.

And yet, I’ve been avoiding Twitter for a few weeks now.

I think it’s clear that something has happened that I was not expecting. Something new to me. There are so many people on Twitter that I want to follow, want to stay in touch with, that I can’t keep up. I have to stop following so many folks.

I’m not particularly pleased with this. I like being up on the conversations that my intelligent friends have with their other intelligent friends, even if I am only slightly acquainted with the other party. I like getting to know people I only see once or twice a year at conventions, I like seeing the shape of their lives. And I like keeping up with local friends I never see. But as interesting as all y’all are, I can’t keep up.

So I’m trimming my follow list on Twitter.

This is kinda weird.

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New things I am trying

1. I made a paper.li for my Twitter feed — this will aggregate all the links my Twitter-stream posts into a newspaper-style post every 24 hours. I’ll see if I read it.

2. TweetDeck. I am using Lists more and more, so I am trying TweetDeck. So far the new-interface-learning is making me grumpy. I am a creature of DEEP HABIT, and learning to look in a different place on my screen is an irritation to my slight compulsive tendencies.

3. Body of Proof is a new tv show about a medical examiner. As such it combines police shows with hospital shows. And it stars Dana Delany, who I fell half in love with ages ago when she played on China Beach. Also, Jeri Ryan plays Delany’s boss. Also, it is damn nice to see a woman who looks like she’s past 40 as the lead on a drama.

4. This isn’t new, but Wiscon preliminary panel assignments are out. I am very excited about this. A bit.

Friday links and miscellany

1. WordPress.com has stopped working in Google Chrome. After contacting WordPress about this, they said it’s a known problem. I am a bit torked off about this, because of the way I Use The Interwebs. Firstly, I am torked off because it had worked fine until they “improved” something. Grr. Second, I am torked off because now I have to open Firefox in order to post. I know, I know, this is a trivial gripe. It’s still a gripe, though, because the only computer I have is an Asus Eee PC 904. It’s a wee little thing, with wee little Ram. If I run Zune in order to update Lockheed, I close all my other windows. I can run Twhirl and Google Chrome with about six tabs open, as long as I don’t try to stream video. To watch Hulu, I close Twirl and I turn off Google chat — they use too many resources. So, to be in Chrome, checking Google Reader and writing and glancing at LiveJournal, and to see something I want to blog about, I have to go boot up Firefox.

I’ve gotten used to Chrome, dammit. Firefox seems horrifically slow and clumsy to me. And let’s not even discuss the paroxysms of rage that I undergo when forced by my job to touch an IE browser. They are all so damnably slow.

So here I am, in Firefox, writing this. Meh. WordPress? Fix this, please?

2. Did anybody else see this article about the new Knx.to service? Here’s the key paragraph:

“To enable the application, you sign into your Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr accounts via oAuth, Facebook Connect and more. When a friend calls you (or you call a friend), the technology will automatically scan all of your social networks, identify if the contact is a friend, and will pull all the most recent photos, Tweets, status updates, and more into its search pane. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.”

So, you are a professional recruiter or headhunter. So you add in to your 17 social networks the names and i.d. information of every resume you get, everyone you are scouting at colleges, all the employees in your specialty at other companies. And you plug in all into Knx.to. And you contact them — which gives you an instant picture of the things they are saying about theirs lives, jobs, and friends at the moment of your call. Wow. That’s a tool.

I can’t say I’m shocked or surprised. And . . . . and I’m not even really opposed. I mean, the difference between what we had available eighteen months ago in terms of social stalking and what we have now strikes me as the difference between the illegal mix tapes everyone made when I was in college and the illegal downloadable mixes people send via SendSpace. It’s a matter of degree, not kind.

3. Ariana Osborne is delivering a lecture series on the Get Excited and Make Stuff Movement. I highly recommend it.

4. Warren Ellis is putting a human face on the internet. Photos of people who read his board, get his email newsletter, and follow his blog. Hundreds of people. Because, as he says, the internet is made out of people. Behind each comment, each photo, each torrent, each blog entry, there is a person. And they all have faces.

5. M is over his cold, but K now has it. We’re hoping she’ll be well enough by tomorrow to do her two flamenco performances.

6. M lost his third tooth! One of the top front ones, so he now looks EXTRA goofy and cute.

Public and private

So, I have had (until today) two Twitter accounts. There’s the public one — sigridellis — and there’s the one I’ve given out to family and people I know in person. The original idea was that I’d use the private one to talk about things that are of interest to people who’ve met me and my family, and the public one to talk about my writing, my blogging, and public culture.

But the thing of it is . . .

The thing is, that’s not how I actually use the internet. Maybe some people — maybe some of you reading this — manage to keep a distinct public – private dichotomy online. I’m not that person. If I really want something to be private, I don’t put it on the internet. Not even in email, if I want real, actual privacy. (There was a local semi-scandal around here a bit back, with relationship failures and accusations in various directions. Email were forwarded, IMs were screen-captured and sent around, deleted journal entries were recovered. In short, I took the lesson to heart — Nothing, nothing at all, that I’ve ever put on a computer is truly private. I rely — as do you — on the kindness of friends and strangers to not forward my dirty laundry to the world.) (Those of you holding my dirty laundry have my thanks.)

And the thing of it is, I paid attention to the blogs and Twitters I tend to follow. I don’t follow the celebrities who do nothing but linkspam, however much I like said celebrity’s work. I do follow the ones that reveal a little of themself — who bitch about baseball, or complain about awkward filming locations, or whine about meeting deadlines, or share Cute Kid Anecdotes. I like the sense — however illusory — that I know these strangers a bit.

I also follow people who answer back. Not to me, necessarily, and not every time, of course. But the people who make some conversation out of Twitter. And, for me, I converse when I get comments quickly. I do not go back and “catch up” on Twitter. Whatever I missed is gone. So timely Tweets to my phone are vital for conversation.

The upshot is, the personal has infected my public Twitter. And as far as I know, nothing bad has happened. So why, then, ought I keep one private? I can’t think of a good reason.

So this marks the end of the dual Twitter life for me. I’m dumping my private one and keeping sigridellis. If you are following the private one and not the public, and want to keep following me on Twitter, I suggest you switch over. And, I’m going to make sure my public account is following all of those from my private account. What this means is you’ll hear a little more whining, a little more chatter about my kids. It means those of you following both Twitters right now will no longer get duplicate information.

It’s always defriending amnesty around these parts — not everyone wants to hear about my kids, or the hours I work, or the incredibly amusing things I think when I’m sleep deprived. Who knows? I may discover that there is some purpose the private Twitter serves, and start one up again. But for the meantime, what you see is what you get.

Okay, I don’t like TweetDeck

I’ve been using TweetDeck for a couple if days, and I don’t like it. Here’s why it doesn’t work for me:

1) When it notifies me I have new tweets, it just says “notification.” Twhirl, on the other hand, displays the tweets at the bottom corner of my screen. I can glance at it, read it, and continue with what I’m doing instead of changing windows. The Twhirl notif then disappears on its own. It’s like being in a convention parry, listening to the conversations of those around me, without me having to ask everybody what they said.

2) When I click on a link in TweetDeck, it opens an IE window. And I haven’t figured out how to reset the default browser. Now, certainly, this may well be user error. But I’m not a dumb person when it comes to new application interfaces, and I haven’t found it yet. I want it to open a new tab in my existing Chrome browser. Chrome is my default browser.

These pretty much are deal-breakers for me. Anybody know how those things can be changed/fixed?

From the important to the trivial.

1. My website, Slightly Obsessed Studio, is under construction as we switch hosts and change the underlying structure. This is all towards the ultimate goal of getting webcomic hosting ability up and in some format I can easily use. Without learning PHP or CSS or anything. I quite like the website design company with which I am working, and have high hopes for the finished site.

2. Zune Marketplace had a playlist available for download, called “Old School to New School.” It is, in fact, punk rock. There is something in me that will forever grin like a speed-addicted lunatic at the opening of “Anarchy in the U.K.”

3. SMS tweets regarding the tornadoes and storms last night are finally trickling through to Twitter. This is less than optimal. I do hope Twitter has recovered from the weekend’s crippling DOS attacks. I use Twitter. I mean, sure, I also talk about how boring work is, etc, like everyone else. But I use it to convey information to specific people, to request updates, to alert people to items of interest. Like, “Storm past our house, no tornadoes here.” My friends, and my mother, would like to receive such notifications in a timely manner.

4. My family has finalized — for now — their plans to go see the space shuttle launch in two weeks. I say “for now” because NASA could move the date of the launch. But they have procured a hotel, and airline tickets, and are going. While they are gone I plan to see movies. In the theater. Mmmm, movies. I might spend *all of that Wednesday* watching movies, with breaks to nip home and let the dogs out periodically. I bet I could see three films.