If following conversations in the blogo/social media/o-sphere is important to you / is your thang, then its time to rejoice, because AlertThingy is here.  Running as an Adobe AIR application, this desktop application (unlike the other Friendfeed app which needed you to install the NET Framework) is quick and snappy, and just like your favorite Twittering desk top application, runs quietly in the background picking up Friendfeed updates automatically.

One of the great things about things like Twhirl or Snitter (my Twitter client of choice) is that you never have to press the refresh button (in your browser); they just automatically update with the conversation stream that are your “friends”. EDIT apparently it updates automatically in browser.  Guess I’ve never been patient enough to discover that! thanks @engtech}

Other things that AlertThingy does well:

• Mimics almost all Friendfeed functions
• Has another wise smallish footprint
• Has a box to search for things (people, content, etc) — (although it doesn’t always highlight the search term in the results)
• Did I mention that its snappy?

Now that I have both Snitter and AlertThingy running, you might wonder why you would go with your favourite Twitter application at all.  Well, not quite (although I’m sure this is something they’ll fix).  Friendfeed, the web application (in your browser) has the ability to send back *to* Twitter folks using the “@”pre-fix.

As far as I can tell, AlertThingy has yet to replicate this specific function; therefore, you’ll be able to listen and “hear” tweets.  But you won’t be able to reply back to them *through* Twitter, although this is an admittedly a very new function.

That, and there isn’t an easy way to reconcile my Twitter and Friendfeed accounts.  I have different people on each, and I can only forsee the gargantuan undertaking it would be to manually copy them over (which is so primitive I can scarcely believe I typed it) — so believe me, I won’t.

At any rate, my feeling is that most people are still enamoured with Twitter, and they may find themselves in my shoes (Twitter crowd > Friendfeed crowd; Listen and not communicate back to Twitterati).  And if that’s the case, I’ll be the first in line eagerly waiting for AlertThingy 1.1, although in its own right AlertThingy rocks as well.

So Hugh Mcleod has deleted his Twitter account.

{First question new bloggers might have is “who is Hugh McLeod?”, in which case here are a things I’ve picked up: the dudehas been blogging for a long time; he draws pictures on the back of business cards; he is known for, amongst other things, being funny, and also bringing business to blogging — or, perhaps, the other way around — via a few notable clients, showing everyone that it was indeed possible to help your bottom line by blogging}

And, quite faithfully, Techmeme has picked up on this, thereby, if as if it already didn’t require Techmeme’s blessing — turning it into a Meme — and as usual, the usual suspects are chiming in.  Is it the end of Twitter?  Is it Twitter’s inflection point … to flatness?  Is this where Friendfeed picks up steam and steamrolls right over Twitter’s freshly turned carcass (hey, that was fast / premature)? Is it merely another signal that Civilization will simply end as we know it?

I’m pretty sure the answer is ‘nay’, although *being* one of the usual suspects (for aren’t we all regurgitating what’s on Techmeme, n’est-ce pas?), I’m going to throw in my 0.03c and get slightly metaphysical and trite at the same time (watch out, its a saccharine combination) which is merely that Twitter is like anything else in life:

You get out of it what you put into it.

The funny thing is that Twitter can be both a giant waste of time and a giant boon. Its all dependent on how you use it.  Hugh, for whatever his reasons, has decided Twitter’s output / required input wasn’t worth his time (time value for money, I suppose).

How is Twitter a giant waste of time?

I suppose there are lots of reasons, and I was going to make a giant list.  But they all derived out of a single kernel of truth:  Twitter can be a giant sinkhole for which you can spend a lot of non-productive time, and this can be in doing a *lot* of different things.

Whether its shooting the breeze about stuff that doesn’t add to your *personal* bottom line, or are passively reading / “listening” to conversations that are happening from people you’re following, or pruning your following list, or letting it constantly interrupt you while you’re trying to accomplish something meaningful, or actually spending a lot of time Twittering about things that neither help or interest you *or* the people that are following you (what I call “my cat’s breath smells like catfood” information), you can literally waste hours and hours doing absolutely nothing productive.

If you fall into any one of those things, Twitter can be a giant sinkhole from which it can be difficult to crawl out of, and you might find it easy to not find, or appreciate, how important and productive it *can* be.

How about the benefits of Twitter?

Well, Hugh talks about how important blogging has been to him with respect to *meeting* people and having ‘conversations’.  I agree.

Funny thing, though, is that Twitter complements *both* of those activities *as* bloggers, and injects rocket fuel into the mix. I mean, Twitter can be an awesome tool for both meeting like-minded people and having conversations, seemingly out of the blue with them.

But that’s not all.

Again, you can make a giant list of why Twitter is useful, but to me, if you want to reduce and boil it down, it all comes down to the reason why Hugh Mcleod blogs: its because of the connections you make, the relationships you build, and the benefits everyone derives therein.

A few days ago Hugh wrote that he was offered a contract to write a book.  Awesome.  I’m happy for the guy.

But is it possible that in a different circumstance, another individual may have gotten a similar contract through the contacts — or the personal availability — of being on Twitter?

I think so.

Let’s take a more concrete example — the post I wrote a few days ago on Wordpress blogs being hacked and busted into so that they’re part of a sophisticated blog-bot network? The inspiration for that came right out of Twitter, thanks to Allen Stern and Duncan Riley’s twits I just happened to be reading.

See, to me, Twittering is just one more channel that, if used wisely, can be the source of all kinds of tremendous personal and professional productivity, and is unique because of just how many people are plugged into it at any time, how most people are engaged and willing to actually answer you, *and* how real time it is.

Its just up to all of us to sort out how useful it *can* be, work those things, and minimize everything else.

{which, again, to be saccharine, is like everything else in life}

I don’t know exactly what or how much Hugh Mcleod was getting out of Twitter versus how much it took away from him / what he was putting into it, but the value curve for each of us is going to be different depending on each of our competing, personal demands at any given time.

For example, perhaps after getting that contract via Twitter, he just wants the time to write that book. :)

Steve Hodson, whose Winextra probably doesn’t get the attention that it deserves — it is an excellent blog and you should subscribe to it right now (go on, I’ll wait) — ranted a little on the Friend Economy yesterday and it got me thinking about “friends” in general that you might or might not make, as Web2.0 sites proliferate.

With the increased (personal) adoption of Twitter and Friendfeed, I’m getting the chance of “friending” a whole *lot* of people that I’ve never even seen or heard. In some respects this is a good thing, as I am getting the chance to meet more and more bloggers that don’t get the publicity that some of the larger blogs (or the linklove therein).

On the other hand — blindly “adding” them to your friend list also means increasing the noise to ratio level in your friend “stream” no matter what kind of service you’re using., since you don’t *actually* “know” many of these folks yet.

And for some of you out there who actually have “real” friends (as much as you can have a friend in cyberspace), all the noise starts drowning out the signal after a while. I mean, that’s been my experience.

So what’s the best way to get around this?

Well, I think its one thing to do is re-friend people who are friending you carefully, and actually starting a dialogue with folks you actually find interesting (have things in common, and so on); the downside, unfortunately, is that its painfully slow and quite frankly, in VC parlance, it doesn’t scale well.

But you know what?

I think that’s ok.

Because meaningful relationships only happen when you take the time to actually meet, understand, and connect with people. And there’s a lot of good in that.

And I don’t mean, the feel good “Good” that requires everyone to join hands and sing Kumbaya. I think we’re all a little too pragmatic for that. Let’s also include the following phrase after “there’s a lot of good in that”:

… “it helps you network.”

Networking leads to all manner of *other* Good Things, but that’s the topic of another post. Suffice it to say, I think that used properly, the Friending Economy doesn’t *always* need to be bankrupt, or necessarily inflationary (but it can be, see Steve’s post), and it can lead to meeting a whole lot of interesting, and potentially important people — if used correctly.

Who knows if you’ll meet your next business parter, or business client, or next boss, or new best friend through Twitter, Friendfeed, (or Facebook) or any one of these services? You could — but I think its important to slow down to find them, because they might be passing you right by.

Just read Mr. Rheingold’s thoughts on Twitter (he’s the chap behind Smart Mobs), and I think I can sum it up even more succinctly than he can (granted, his answer was off the cuff when asked by a student), i.e. the answer to “why are you hooked on Twitter?”

My answer? <drum roll please>

Its because I can listen and participate, in real time, with a giant chat room full off interesting people, who at any given time, are thinking out loud, reporting on things they find important, but doing so in a fairly terse and concise way; and, who are almost always reachable and generally approachable about answering any particular question you might have.

Ok, fine. Its a long sentence. :)

The importance of that above explanation is partially dependent on the quality of people in the chat room, i.e. the people who you are following on Twitter, and how important what they’re doing at any one time is to you, but also dependent on the fact that Twitter necessarily restricts you to 140 characters, meaning there’s little room for bluster or irrelevant blatherings (although there are exceptions) by well meaning “friends”.

This is a good thing, because, as a whole, reducing the irrelevancy of stuff will necessarily increase the overall utility and relevancy of the remaining “content”.

Furthermore, because you can Twitter while not tethered to a desk/lap top, its possible to provide insights and report on observations while you’re out doing / seeing stuff, as in conferences, meet ups and much more. There’s a reason why Twitter took off at SXSW last year, and that’s because people were using it to report on stuff they were seeing, attending, editorialize it with their own thoughts, and other, more practical things, like where to meet up for drinks.

Not philosophical enough for you?

Well, if you wanted to get philosophical, you could phrase it thusly (I know its not really a word, “thusly”, but anyway) — getting hooked into Twitter is almost like a bit of a psychedelic experience, in that its like getting hooked into a shared consciousness, where, if you’ve got the appropriate Twitter appliance, you’ll discover an automatic flowing stream of thoughts, feelings, observations, and terse insights of a very interesting crowd of peers.

Without any pharmaceutical aids, that is. :)

Now whether or not you find that something that is utterly fascinating, utterly useful, or an utter waste of time (and its not mutually exclusive, really), is probably a function of a number of things.

But if you don’t “get” it, the best thing to do is just experience it, preferably by “friending” people you know, which is getting easier all the time with Twitter’s ability to find people that you might know, and get you hooked up into ‘finding’ them on Twitter.

Twitter is good for a lot of reasons, and I find that I’m hanging out more and more on the service.  I’m not going to rehash what’s been said about it, except that its an incredible way of meeting new like-minded (or not) people — like bloggers.

I’ve discovered there is an entire universe of other tech/socially oriented bloggers other than the circle, which is kind of wild.

For example:

• Tony Stubblebine, (twitter) CEO of Crowdvine Social Networks, which is a service that allows anyone to create their own social network (a la Ning)
  
• Adam Rubel, (twitter) founder of 71Miles, which is a site / blog focused on regional weekend trips (Northern California and Washington DC, right now)
• Dom Sogolla, (twitter), who blogs at Dom.net and has been doing so (as far as I can tell) since’96, and deserves props for having a 3 word domain name as well.
• Todd Mafin, (twitter), one of “Canada’s most influential futurists“, and “podcasting pioneers” — he also hosts a national radio column on CBC radio.
• Chris Wilson, (twitter), who podcasts at Answers For Freelancers

… in fact, I’ll be making this a semi-regular feature, highlighting the interesting bloggers that I’ve recently run into on Twitter.

If you want to add me, you can do so at @tonyhung — looking forward to chatting with you!

{although these days I’m twittering about things that I’m studying around for my royal college exams…. hemosuccus pancreaticus is the word of the day, folks}

Coming from the metaphorical lips of Kevin Rose himself, Pownce announced its super-alpha mobile version of Pownce today, available for mobile browsing at mobile.pownce.com.  I think this is an interesting development, given that one of the biggest pluses for Twitter has been the ability to message your crowd “off-line”, enabling all kinds of interesting uses, including the ability to broadcast live updates of events as they happen.  Although a lot of Twitter content *is* of the “my cat’s breath smells like cat food” variety, the ability to engage in your community offline — both as a contributer and a reader — allows for the potential for some very smart and very important real-time information to go back and forth, whether it be a local emergency, weather changes, and so on.

By bringing Pownce “offline”, that is, not being tethered to a machine to do your … em … “powncing”, pownce will also be able to enter the same space as Twitter.

Sort of.

After all, in its current incarnation, Pownce will only be able to be viewed via mobile browser.  While such a site is still available for Twitter, we shouldn’t forget that many people use the SMS function of their phones to Twit away.  I suspect a great deal more people have phones that enabled for SMS than, say web browsing — although early adopters being early adopters, this proportion of folks who are *also* interested in Pownce and Twitter are likely to be much more equal than “normal” folks.

(just like more of them will also own iPhones and use Gmail, I’m sure).

[And following the line as from the above, in an emergency (like a catastrophic emergency), sending messages via SMS may be (this is total conjecture) more efficient and use less data than, say web browsing].

Looks like US mobile phone company T-mobile is refusing to allow Twitterers to use its SMS service to Twitter. Its unclear on what grounds other than its an “unauthorized third party”. There are some great comments over at GetSatisfaction (which is something like the ill-begotten socially-networked version of the Consumerist) on the issue, but one of the most salient revolves around the following issue.

While much of the thoughts around Twitter has been somewhere between “Twitter is a colossal waste of time” to “Twitter is an awesome online chatroom“, what’s been forgotten is that for some people in some circumstances, people are using Twitter to broadcast and receive some critical in-time messages.

One great example has been how some individuals were posting real-time messages about the Los Angeles fires via Twitter. Or, how the Los Angeles Fire Department actually uses Twitter to post real-time messages about emergencies in and around the city. Or the potential to use messaging systems like Twitter in real (and hopefully never) catastrophes, as it gets around the logistical issue of telephone lines being down, through to SMS systems which use very little data to broadcast messages.

Twitter needs champions — real champions of these kinds of services — to have a sit-down with T-mobile, to get a better answer as to why messages have really been stopped, and that, issues of profits and losses aside, to educate them that not all twitters are of the “my cats breath smells like catfood” variety.