Excerpt from:  FAS Talk
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September 11, 2008

Follow Me on Twitter

Stream of consciousness news and comments... 140 characters at a time.
The iPhone make a particularly cool Twitter client because it's always there and makes it easy to incorporate photos and even current geo-location data into my tweets (i.e., Twitter posts).

I've been working with Bill French (@bfrench) since 2000, first as colleagues at Starbase, then as co-founders at MyST.  Very quickly, I came to understand that Bill offers a window into my technological future.  We're both techno-geeks, but Bill always gets his mind around new technologies first.  So, when Bill told me, a computer eon ago (a year or so), that he was looking at Twitter and that it was destined to become an important technology, I believed him but did not dive right in.

Well, about a month ago I took the Twitter plunge and now understand that, true to form, Bill was spot on.

I'm still not a super active tweep ("Twitter person") but I have started and I'm finding it very engaging.  I use Twitter both on the web from my various computers and on my iPhone.  The iPhone make a particularly cool Twitter client because it's always there and makes it easy to incorporate photos and even current geo-location data into my tweets (i.e., Twitter posts).

Twitter also has a very complete web services API (application programming interface) which I've spent some time playing around with.  My head is already buzzing with ideas about how to leverage Twitter within the MyST Blogsite®, Topic Cloud®, and MyST Web Services platform.

If you use Twitter (or even if you don't--yet), you can follow me @faseidl. I look forward to seeing you online.

Comments
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Twitter

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter.  On one hand, I don't think I'm important enough to report what I'm doing.  OTOH, I love seeing what my friends are doing!  Thanks for following me :)
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The real value of Twitter is an emergent "epiphenomenon"

There is very little value in any single neuron, but the collective value of all the neurons in a brain is enormous (even if we can't explain exactly how that happens.)

@TeacherPatti, my first impression of Twitter was exactly the same.  And while I'm not sure exactly how or where a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts value will emerge, I am pretty confident that it will emerge.

Twitter is really a general purpose, publish/subscribe, multicast messaging infrastructure.  There is no doubt that such infrastructures can be valuable... almost a decade ago I worked with companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to license such platforms just to solve specific business problems.

Now, several software generations later, here's Twitter, a nearly ubiquitously available, free platform with a relatively complete (and also free) programming API.  As Tim Berners Lee once said of the Internet itself, this technology is emergent;  emergent phenomena are often unexpected, nontrivial results of relatively simple interactions of relatively simple components.

Something is bound to happen.

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