Miscellaneous

One of the hottest sites on the web for more than a year is twitter, but what is Twitter?

• I’ve tried a few times to explain it, and while it may be a fun task, it has often become quite a mess. This is an attempt to capture the most successful explanation of twitter.

The core of Twitter is a combination of three different characteristics:

• Twitter is like a blog - An author publish content. It may be personal, it may be themed, it may be interessting - there are no set rules for the contents except those set by the author.
• Twitter is like an SMS - There are a 140 character limit on each piece of content. If you need more, you need to split contents in several “twits”.
• Twitter is a network - It’s no just a website. Through build in services and APIs you can connect with twitter through SMS, desktop clients, Instant messaging and many other ways. Besides a technical network, it’s also a social network where you can follow other interesting users, communicate with other users (private or in public).

That’s pretty much the core.

At work we produce a few websites and have a few “web dashboards”. Wouldn’t it be nice, if public screens around the office could play a little loop mixing the websites and the dashboards together in a slideshow loop?

After an hour of javascript debugging, a nice little generic webpage slideshow was put together, and if you have a similar need a copy is now available in the lab. It’s simple, it should work in most browsers, and it probably has the least features of any slideshow out there.

It seems I don’t find time to do too many stories to the site currently. I do however twitter occasionally. As a convenience I’ve added the latests twitters on the site too…

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I have a VoIP phone on my desk. It’s part of the Corporate VoIP solution, and in most cases it works pretty well. One of my favorite features is the ability to act as a meeting phone with the speaker on. It usually works great, but there is one thing with the speaker feature, which just feels wrong – to turn off the speaker, you press the hangup buttom. Please fix this issue in a future firmware update, and allow the speaker buttom to act as a toggle that can turn the speak both on and off.

Appleinsider has an interesting little story. It reports how the iPhone usage shocks Google

• being far above the expectations. I don’t have any expectations, have so far not used nor touched an iPhone, but frankly you shouldn’t be too surprised.

Sure I’ll probably get blamed as an Apple fanboy, but I hardly know any other company who is able to - so successfully - match the possibilities of technology with consumer desires.