webrampage

I always wondered if Twitter would make it to the mainstream. I wasn’t sure if it would. Most people were too busy “poking” each other on Facebook or stalking lil’ kids on MySpace. But, it made it…and I’m a bit surprised to be honest.

Twitter just hit the one-billion tweets milestone today. Its not official or anything. The number of tweets were being counted by a 3rd party site called GigaTweet. Twitter might have hit this milestone long time ago since we don’t know when GigaTweet started counting. But, at least we know that we have more than a billion tweets.

You know Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Well anyone with a TV knows them. So, they were talking about Twitter on Indecision 2008. That probably got the whole “Twittosphere” twittering. Colbert and Stewart? They like took Twitter to the next level that day. Now the average Joe knows about Twitter and probably even started using it (or at least gave it a shot).

What really convinced me that Twitter got into the mainstream was when I was seeing this presentation by a few folks from a local tech company at my school. They were talking about Facebook, MySpace, Xbox Live, etc. And then they mentioned something that really surprised. Guess what it was? Yeah, it was Twitter.

I was like “Woah! WTF! They know about Twitter? They don’t look like the type of people who would use Twitter. WOAH! Holy shit! That means little birdie made it to the mainstream.” I was really happy for Twitter actually. Its a great, unique idea and its pretty useful too. It deserves to be more popular than Facebook (not kidding).

Well Twitter just took its first step into the mainstream. I’m not sure if it will be as popular as Facebook. It might. It might not. Who knows. But, it sure is on the right path and its getting more popular everyday. Until then follow my tweets!

Yep that’s right folks, Twitter got a shiny new design and its lookin’ good.

Its funny how moving a few things here and there can it more user-friendly. Twitter now has that little at home, warm and welcome feeling. Makes you wanna use it more and go on a tweet-rampage. Just go check it out and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Here’s the changes I’ve noticed:

1. Moved the tabs from the top to the sidebar.
2. Displays the number of followers, followings and updates under your name.
3. Got that whole round corner thing going on.
4. Displays your latest tweet at the top.
5. Got a colour wheel on the custom profile design’s page.
6. Put a tab for favourites on your public profile.

Apparently they added some AJAX magic on the Home and @Replies tabs, but I don’t see them. I checked both in IE and Firefox. Weird. Maybe they’re still working on it.

Well anyways, here’s the official post from Twitter about the redesign. Check it out since its got everything detailed. So, how do you like the new design? I love it.

BTW, this is like the get-a-new-design-day since FriendFeed also rolled out theirs today. I didn’t post about it because I don’t really use it since I don’t see what’s the point of it. Like… oh whatever. And yo, follow my sweet lil’ tweets (please).

Update (Sept 19): There’s a little bug when you go to someone’s profile and click on “Follow” it doesn’t change to “Following” right away, you need to refresh the page.

I cannot believe it! Barack Obama is spamming Twitter! Oh man. I now see why Fox News was comparing Obama to Osama. Oh I feel bad for Fox now. No one believed them. I didn’t believe them!

Okay lets cut the drama queen (should be drama king, right?) crap now. But, I did notice something weird about Obama’s twitter. He is following way too many people. We’re not talking about a few hundred or even a few thousand here. We’re looking at a 5-digit number. 76K!

Man is that normal? Is the guy working on his campaign or just following people on Twitter? I guess he got hooked or something. Oh man I’m going to jerk-mode now. But, seriously 76K is a lot. And he’s got only 73K followers.

You wanna know how he followed back so many people? He’s using a script which automatically follows you back once you start following him. Just add him and then look at the list of your followers). But, he doesn’t actually respond to your tweets (and he’s not even interested in them). Twitter’s servers are constantly having “technical difficulties” (aka downtimes). I wonder if Obama’s account caused all of this. Probably not.

So, is he actually “follow spamming“? Well I personally wouldn’t say that. Maybe it technically falls under follow spam, but he doesn’t mean to. He’s just trying to keep people updated about his campaign. I don’t like the fact that he’s using a program to automatically follow people back, but it was probably the nuthead running his account’s idea. Well that’s a different thing.

We all get spam and find a ton of them on the web. So, we kind of go into our anti-spam/ninja-killer mode whenever we see something that looks a bit like it. We don’t really think about it and see if it really is spam. We don’t look at people’s true intentions. Well look at the definitions!

So, next time think about it and check if it really is spam. And if it is, then rape that fucker spammer. Until then subscribe to my blog via RSS or email if you liked this post (at least a tiny bit).