Ever tried to look up that hilariously funny, wicked smart or straight up historic message you tweeted at that birthday party about three weeks ago? Yeah, good luck finding it if you’re not using a tool like Twistory.
As we wrote when we first featured the app nearly three years ago, the app lets you subscribe to (public) messages from any Twitter user, including your own, in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.).
The app has amassed over 40,000 users by now, creator Tijs Vrolix tells me, and he felt it was time for an upgrade.
The update is now complete, bringing better performance and better stability to the tool. Try it: once you authorize Twistory to access your tweets, you’ll see tweets for the past 30 days appear on the appropriate date and time in your favorite calendar application, within seconds.
In the interest of making some money, Twistory now also boasts a premium version. For $1 a month, that Pro version of the tool lets you export your entire Twitter backlog as a CSV file, which Vrolix says was probably the most often user-requested feature.
Note that the backlog is limited to 3,200 tweets due to Twitter-imposed API limitations.
It’s easy to ignore someone when you don’t know or care to know anything about them. But it’s different when that person shows up in your social media stream, telling you about a lonely day on the street or simply wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day.
Underheard in New York is an initiative to help homeless New Yorkers speak for themselves through Twitter. Four homeless people — Danny (@putodanny), Derrick (@awitness2011), Albert (@albert814) and Carlos (@jessie550) — were given their own prepaid cell phone, a month of unlimited text messaging and a Twitter account.
The goal was to raise awareness and give a peek inside the daily struggles and unexpected challenges of being homeless in a major urban city. Between January 2009 and January 2010 the total number of unsheltered individuals within New York City rose an estimated 34%; this figure doesn’t include the tens of thousands staying in shelters.
Underheard in New York’s co-creators provided the men in the project with some basic training on how to access and use Twitter. Underheard in New York (@underheardinNY) was developed by Rosemary Melchior, Robert Weeks and Willy Wang, three interns at the BBH advertising agency. They, like all interns, were issued the challenge: “Do something good… Famously.”
The back half of that mandate is sure to cast aspersions on the project’s motives. The team has been careful and upfront about the challenge. Its website reads: “We decided famous was just another way of saying make people listen. Go big. Be heard. Make real change.” Weeks insists the initiative was started with the utmost sincerity.
While Underheard in New York has no direct fundraising component, Weeks hopes it will help people better understand homelessness and inspire them to volunteer or donate to shelters like the NYC Rescue Mission. The Mission helped select the four men, who all sleep there at night. The Mission has a long-standing relationship with BBH.
Weeks explained that these four men serve as a pilot group that the team hopes to expand with more Twitter accounts and voices from the New York area. Although the co-founders will close the initiative after their internships end, Weeks is looking at a bigger picture. “I think for us the project is over when it’s over, unfortunately. But hopefully the project has a lifecycle beyond what we’re doing. Maybe another organization will adopt our strategies, raise awareness.”
Most of the money and support has been coming from BBH, which has acted as advisors and provided $1,000 in funding, most of which has gone to paying for the phones. Accordingly, the four men are typing away on inexpensive, Samsung clam-shell phones. “Part of the point is that that very basic technology works for what we’re trying to do,” Weeks said.
Right now, the four accounts don’t have a ton of followers but they do contain some moving insights about loneliness, hardship and the basic human kindness shown by — and shown to — these four men.
Is a program like this useful only if it can go viral? What did you make of the tweets and will you be following them? Let us know in the comments below.
Don’t tell Twitter’s Dick Costolo, but it seems everyday users are completely content with the ability to SMS their friends. So says a recent Deloitte study , which found that 90 percent of smartphone users send at least one text message per day. Compare that to only 40 percent of smartphone users who “hit up” their social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, at least once per day. In other words, reports of the text message’s demise have been grossly exaggerated.
All of this is on the same day that Dick Costolo, the Twitter chief operating officer, said at the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, that he envisions a world in which Twitter is available for every platform, for every device, and for every person.
The Deloitte study says that plain ol’ text messages are still so popular because they’re “more immediate and more personal.” (Costolo actually alluded to that in his MWC presentation, saying that Twitter needed to become more ubiquitous — you shouldn’t have to launch a separate application to tweet your friends.) That text messaging is so profitable to wireless providers appears to be a happy accident, seeing as they were initially developed as a service to the hearing impaired.
A lot of people like to bitch and moan about how in the age of realtime information, the stream moves too quickly and as a result, there’s a decent chance of inaccurate news being spread. There’s no question it’s an issue, but with the situation in Egypt, we’re once again seeing the overwhelming upside of this realtime data spread that makes services like Twitter so powerful. And just look at the flip side.
The above image shows the frontpage of a newspaper that was delivered this morning. There are hundreds more like it around the country. Many, many people still get their news this way. They woke up this morning, opened the paper and got information that is so old that it’s now totally inaccurate. It’s ridiculous.
This has actually always been an issue — “In related news, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN!,” quips Twitter’s Mark Trammell — but if radio hit the newspaper format over the head, the live, 24/7 television news channels drove a stake in its heart. And now the realtime web has pounded that stake deeper. With a sledgehammer. And then stuck a grenade in the mouth of the corpse.
I’m sorry, but there’s simply no role for the newspaper anymore. That’s not saying there’s no role for newspaper journalism, just the physical product itself. It’s a waste of paper, ink, and time. R.I.P.
Streamie is a web-based, totally real-time and open source Twitter client which makes use of the latest web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3.
It has different menus for displaying mentions, direct messages, favorites or retweets. And, as expected, you can send tweets easily.
A number of options help customizing the application like message filtering, display settings and enabling geolocation.
The application is fully Ajaxed + uses nodeJS, less.js, require.js and Socket.IO which can be a good way of getting experienced in these "getting popular" resources.
