Google‘s CEO Eric Schmidt is on record here and here saying that Twitter is a “sort of poor man’s email”. I respectfully disagree.
Twitter is email lite. Twitter is the icing of email’s cake without the heavy filling. Twitter is the top of the muffin. Twitter is the sex without the wet spot (was that too much?).
Basically, Twitter is email – except without the Body of the email. It’s all Subject line. You don’t even have to specify the recipient. Ever wanted to send a message to somebody (or everybody) without specifying anybody and didn’t really want to say anything other than “I made it home”? Twitter is perfect for this.
Picture this:
From: Crankie Tech <dont@spam.me>
To: Everyone I Know <*@internet*.*>
Subject: I Made It Home
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 17:08:27
Well, I made it home. That is all.
Sincerely,
Me
It’s short, but it’s easily 700 bytes longer than it needs to be, not including firing up the email client or web client, blah blah blah. With Twitter, on a single data-light web page you get:
I am home.
Or occasionally:
Twitter also relieves you of having to fish the odd spam out of your Inbox because, well, honestly, it’s all spam. However, it’s spam from people you know – which makes it only slightly less annoying because you asked for it.
Inquisitor 1.0.2
Inquisitor 1.0.2 is a pretty little add-on that spruces up your Firefox Search Box (similar to Glims for Safari). It’s fairly quick. However, it’s being developed by Yahoo! and even though it gives you the option to use Google as the default search engine it doesn’t respect that choice in the context menu. If you select a word or phrase and right-click, it will show you “Search for ____” but ultimately will bring you to Yahoo! search page. This seems like a bug. At the very least, it’s inconsiderate and possibly offensive to the very sensitive user who actually expects their preferences to be honoured.
The Search Box behaviour seems fine.
Firefox 3.1b2
Google Gears 0.5.4.2
You know what would be really faboo? If the devs for Google Gears figured out it was worthwhile looking at the non-compatibility issue with Firefox 3.1 and Google Gears. I know, I know, it’s free software and there are a million other things to get to. And they’ve said (unofficially) that by the time Firefox 3.1 gets out of beta they’ll be ready. The only reason I’m asking is this:
There are now a preponderance of sites out there now that are JavaScript heavy. All Google products, Facebook, MySpace, and yeah, WordPress – especially the admin backend which is now AJAX supercharged. So when you’re dealing with these sites a lot it really makes a big difference having a browser that can crank through the JS routines and render the damn page already. This is why I’m working with the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (actually, now the OSX optimized version, Shiretoko – there are Windows versions out there too) which has the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine enabled. It’s quite fast; incidentally I’m also testing WebKit, the Safari engine development version which is right up there too.
Anyway, FF 3.1 makes a big difference in shaving off my waiting time, especially here in WordPress-land. And incidentally, the kind folks at WordPress have incorporated Google Gears functionality to offload the download…load. Works great on WebKit/Safari, but since the Gears guys haven’t worked out the FF 3.1 compatibility yet, we’re still waiting.
Not a big rush, really…but it’s Valentine’s Day. Blow me a kiss, boys.
I’m running a development version of Firefox on an Intel Mac. The new Google Earth browser plugin doesn’t recognize it as Firefox 3.0+ so I installed the User Agent Switcher plugin and added an agent that the plugin would recognize:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; nb-NO; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3
You also need the Nightly Tester Tools plugin to get the User Agent plugin to override the compatibility check too.
