Factory Joe

Twitter and the future of transmogrification

I proposed to Ma.gnolia a short while ago that they start using Twitter to broadcast their system status updates and they implemented it shortly thereafter.

The beauty of using Twitter is its flexibility — you can ping it using Jabber, the web, SMS or through its API. You can also receive updates through the same protocols, as well as via feed subscriptions. I call this “transmogrification” — essentially the ability to morph data between forms and through various inputs.

It seems that others are picking up on the trend towards Twitterification — and I find it very interesting, especially as the differentiation between bot, aggregate and human is essentially nonexistent. Was it a service, a friend or one of many friends pinging you just then? One never knows!

So far I’ve found these non-individual, non-human Twitterers…

Organizations & Companies

Weather

SF Weather

I’m sure there are more, but do you know of any more that I missed?

“How was your meal?”

Being present with your customers… The shared soul of the experience.

Karmic VC

I spread out my attention investments and eventually something comes back to me… big time.

Maybe instead of “Karmic VC”, it should simply be called “Venture Karma”.

I’m sorry Dave

I think it’s pretty clever that our machines are talking to us through human surrogates using machine intermediaries, like the ones running Twitter.

Consider Twitter_Status and Ma.gnolia on Twitter. It’s like our services have become sentient and know how they’re feeling and want to talk to us like we do with each other.

Or is it just cats in the shell?

Preggers, Mac-style

Perhaps it’s serendipity, I dunno, but there were two fertility and pregnancy tracking apps released in the past couple days. Is it just me, or should we consider them twins?

VolumeLogic Beta available

Apparently I was mistaken when I reported earlier that iTunes 7.0.2 fixed VolumeLogic after breaking on the whole number upgrade.

I was able to get VolumeLogic to work successfully after I installed the iTunes point release, but once I rebooted — whaddya know — it stopped working again. I tried various other solutions, with mixed results, until yesterday when a registration-required beta was posted.

Finally! Now I can listen to my music the way it’s supposed to sound again!

Safari on Windows? Not like I called that

Mary Jo Foley points out that in the Firefox 3 feature plans, there’s a statement under “Observations & Assumptions” section that ~~reads~~ read “Apple may have Safari on Windows with likely ties to iTunes & .Mac”. No, really?

The rewards of the unsought

I’ve just discovered that “serendipity” originates from a story of “The Three Princes of Serendip”.

I read “The Pursuit of Emptiness” by John Perry Barlow the other day. In it, he suggests that the challenge is not to seek happiness but to open yourself to its arrival.

In other words, the challenge is not to seek, but to open yourself to arrival.

Is it serendipitous that I should learn the meaning of the word by having recently stumbled upon an example which illustrates it perfectly only slightly prior to having the origins revealed to me?

Perhaps.

Overhearing

A curious point was made at today’s Mash Pit… in Twitter you can “overhear” partial conversations — and follow them up in the context of the original speakers to get the whole conversation…

It’s simply an interesting notion in the context of “listening” in an online, distributed context.

Genius lost

It’s worth pondering the sheer amount of genius and eloquence lost to browser bugs, software crashes and lost connections since people began blogging and writing their thoughts down digitally.

I’ve personally lost a number of posts and other ephemera… But what might be the net karmic loss owing to such minor disasters?