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Monday, September 14, 2009 at 05:53PM You can now tag people, pages, events, or groups that you're connected to on Facebook through status updates. By typing the @ sign, a drop-down list of your connections will appear. Select the tag you want and it will provide a direct and human-friendly link right in your post.
Read the announcement here.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 10:28AM “Because news happens in more than 140 characters.” This clip, which recently aired on a talk radio station is itself a succinct 49 characters long and constructed as a sentence fragment, requires context and special knowledge to unravel its meaning. It assumes the audience will draw the connection to Twitter which limits its postings to 140 characters or less. The aforementioned traits are among those which draw the most fire from critics of the service. Critics such as Mark Bauerline, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) argue technological dependence to Twitter and Facebook encourages brevity and bad grammar thus destroying our language and making the next generation dumber. Perhaps we are only a few years from public service announcements comparing our brains on Twitter to eggs on a frying pan, but until there is long-term scientific data, I’ll leave that particular debate to the scholars. I am, however, interested in learning how to craft engaging, well-written posts that draw readers in and how often it should be done. On this topic, there is more than a decade of research.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has for the past ten years, published a Twitter-style website a priori (the site is actually styled after the large broadsheet newspapers) which does anything but make readers stupid. Edited by Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, the site has remained unchanged in its design and layout since it launched in 1998.
Each of the three columns, Articles of Note, New Books, and Essays and Opinion are updated daily, six days a week, with the newest entry appearing at the top of a chronologically stacked mountain of (in the editors’ opinion) the best, smartest, timeliest writing to be found online each day.
Learn to write from the "old pros"
The prompt is a well written, engaging headline and a link to the online source article. The headlines are generally, one to two hundred characters in length - proof that good writing does exist in a micro format. Though Twitter’s limit of 140 characters is designed to fit within the 160 character limitation of text messaging, Mr. Dung explains, “From the beginning (i.e. the last ten years or so) we have ‘eyeballed’ our teasers to about 3-4 lines, given the size of the columns on our page. This looks about ‘right’...” Anyone struggling with writing tweets that draw readers in would do well to spend a few hours perusing the massive archives of this site and studying these teasers.
A firm, not frantic pace
I’ve been a regular reader since 1998 and if browser bookmarks had passports, my aldaily.com bookmark would be weathered and worn and full of stamps from Microsoft, Apple, Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox - not to mention IP addresses from all around the country. I don’t know if I’ll be active on Twitter that long, I already feel a certain fatigue from the frantic postings that seem to come every five minutes (or more) from some of the “top tweeters” I follow. Will they ever slow down? An ideal pace may over time evolve, but I go back to aldaily.com and look at what Tweeters can learn from it. Daily, thoughtful, timely, and brick by brick, the site serves their audience well by providing a steady and reliable stream of information, which arguably makes each post more valuable and the site a more trusted source.
Not bad for a couple of luddites
“Veritas odit moras” or “truth hates delay” is the motto of aldaily.com. How amazingly prescient! A decade before mainstream media was all-a-twitter Mr. Dutton and Mr. Dung were, (to paraphrase the Black Eyed Peas) so 2009 while we were so 2000-behind. For a couple of academics that are at times labeled luddites because of their unwavering loyalty to their overly-simple website (*neither of them actually uses Twitter, though they assured me they’ve heard of it) they sure seem to have a lot to teach the digerati.
*Author's note: Arts & Letters Daily is now regularly updating their Twitter feed in November. You can follow them @aldaily
Kevin Tobosa is an integrated media professional and runs Tobosa Creative Group. You can follow my non-daily postings on Twitter: @ktobosa
Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 10:25AM Imagine receiving an invitation to a friend’s wedding and after finding your seat, one of the ushers asks you to leave because you aren’t a member of the family.
A similar scenario happened to me last week when I received an invitation via Facebook to attend a meeting hosted by a local artists group. I was not a member, but after reading the event invite, I saw that I could join the group at the event. I make photographic prints so I was excited to hook up with other artists.
Wandering into the studio where the event was hosted, and not knowing anyone, I helped myself to some hors d’oeuvres and a bottle of water and politely tried to engage in some friendly networking. In doing so, I introduced myself to a woman who turned out to be the keeper of the membership list on which, my name was nowhere to be found. Uncomfortably, yet politely, the list-keeper informed me that this was a members-only event and that I would have to leave.
Surprised, I told her I had received an invitation which stated that if I wished to join I could do so at the event. Fortunately, another guest suggested to her that they “see” if the host would be willing to let me use the computer to join. Having now consumed approximately $1.50 in refreshments, (which thankfully, were not being saved for after the meeting) I logged in, paid my twenty bucks, and left.
Obviously the person in charge of the social media marketing and the person in charge of membership had not “connected” (which is officespeak for: “You tell me what you’re doing and I’ll tell you what I’m doing.”) As awkward, offensive, and silly as the whole situation was, it was simply a case of miscommunication from which I took away one important lesson: By saving the refreshments until the end of the meeting, you can make a guest feel even more awkward.
Monday, June 1, 2009 at 05:42AM Verizon finally made RIM's latest software update 4.7.0.148 to the BlackBerry Storm officially available on Sunday which fixes several bugs that arguably should have worked from the onset. Of course, after years of living with Microsoft and Apple, who isn't used to paying to beta test software and hardware?
Still, when my new message alert sounded yesterday afternoon, I immediately checked my Storm. Like one of Skinner's rodents flipping a switch for a food pellet, I was rewarded with the message I'd been waiting for: "BlackBerry Software Update Notification Update Today!"
Unfortunately, the process was not as easy as the previous update. After first trying the Over-The-Air (OTA) update, I began to worry when the progress bar hung at 0% for 10 minutes before notifying me to have at least 19MB of free space on my device. A quick check showed there was 873MB of free space - more than enough to perform the update. After two more attempts I gave up on the OTA.
"Ok, no worries." I thought, "I'll just plug it in to my PC and run the update through the BackBerry Desktop Manager." This was much more promising as progress bar after progress bar was bringing me ever closer to a functional device. Author Joseph Campbell once described the PC as "an old testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy" and somehow I angered mine, because this god hurled a lightning bolt at me that read, "A FATAL ERROR HAS OCCURRED." GAAA!
Doing what any good tech support technician would recommend, I rebooted, pulled the battery, tried a different PC, rebooted again, pulled the battery again, cursed, threw things, and rebooted until it worked. Apparently, my tech tantrum worked - my PC just wanted a sacrifice in the form of my dignity.
My Storm, having taken the hero's journey of death and rebirth as something better is in fact, working much better now. Only time will tell how improved the stability is, but so far here are some of my observations. I'll keep adding to this list as I find them.
Feel free to post the improvements you've seen (or haven't seen).
BlackBerry, Storm, update in Mobile Monday, March 30, 2009 at 02:56AM 
Jim Mone / APThis is pretty cool - we had an AP story run about how the Facebook group we started to communicate volunteer efforts to fight the Red River valley's worst flood in recorded history.
Our group was just the tip of the iceberg though. Though we are using Facebook to comminicate volunteer needs through the official Volunteer Coordination Center operated by FirstLink, many people including myself are using the social networking site to communicate with and respond to our own personal network of friends - both for support as well as to find out who needs help where.