Felicia Day

So many people expressed their enthusiasm but newness to Twitter in comments to my last post that I wanted to compile some helpful links: Everything from searching to finding people to follow, and making it easier to integrate Twitter into your web life.   I found that after I got my iPhone, my dependence on Twitter changed from night to day because Twitterific and Twinkle make it so easy to keep in touch.
Here are some fun resources for you:

• Twitter Search is a great tool for searching Twitter.  Some people are unaware that if you don’t START a Twitter reply to someone with an @theirID, then that the person won’t see it in their replies tab.  This search engine, formally Summarize and recently bought by Twitter, makes it easy to search all Twitters for anything you’re looking for, including lost replies directed to you.
• Better, if you’re lazy like me, you can automatically search all Twitters and have them sent to your inbox like a Google Alert with TweetBeep.  Very convenient.
• Added due to smart comment:  Linking your Twitter to your Facebook Update is as easy as installing the Facebook Twitter App.  During installation it will ask you if you want to tie the two together.
• Desktop ways to keep track of Twitter include  Digsby (PC only) and Twhirl which are very popular.  Digsby includes Facebook and email alert options, Twhirl focuses more on microblogging sites.
• It’s not as useful in a huge city like LA, but Twitter Local can show Twitters in an area you designate.  Along with the iPhone apps Loopt and Twinkle, that show you people in your area, location-based Twitter tracking could be cool for finding local Twitterers.
• TwitPic lets you post photos to Twitter and replies to your photo show up automatically as @ replies to the poster.  Very cool and convenient, especially while posting with an iPhone through Twitterific.  It’s automatic, takes your pic from your iphone and you can easily posted (sideways, but oh well, they have a few bugs to fix, haha).
• Picking who to follow is hard when you first start out.   Twitterholic and TwitDir lists the top 100 most followed and other “most” people, but these aren’t necessarily good guides to follow.   Twello is a great place categorizing people by category.  Twitterpacks is another service like this.   If you’re looking for people in specific careers or interest categories, these are good places to look.
• Twitscoop has a cool dynamic search of what is hot on Twitter, like a tag cloud.  Twiturl tracks hot links that people are currently Twittering and ranks them.
• Lastly, FriendFeed is a lot more than just Twitter, it’s a whole Lifestreaming service.  I won’t go into details, but you can have comment threads to your Twitters here, saves “@trash” as I like to call it (When people reply to others with @ Twitters and you don’t know what the hell they’re referring to, lol.)  I try not to use too many of those in my Twitter stream because it’s not interesting to followers other than your replyee most of the time.  I use Friendfeed and connect my Facebook status update to my Twitter to have threaded conversations there.
• If this isn’t enough information overload, the Twitter Fan Wiki has a listing of just about every Twitter app, anything you need or never wanted will be listed there!

If I left anything off, please post in comments and let other people know what you use to get your Twitter on!

Ever since I started using Twitter I haven’t updating my blog as much. I’ve read about this phenomenon many times on other prominent blogger’s sites: That the immediate satisfaction of Twitter drains the will for more long-form blogging. I’ve thought about it, and I’m sure that I could take any number of Twitters I post every day and write a whole blog entry about each of those subjects, but it feels like after I Twitter something there’s no real reason to write a blog about it. 140 characters seems enough. I don’t know if this is encouraging shallow thinking on my part or just enabling me to post more spur-of-the-moment and share more overall. I’m still trying to analyze it. I know that as I travel through the day, my mind is more attuned to communicating in “Twitter-speak”, just as, when I’m writing a scene for a script, my mind is constantly searching for character traits or line inspiration. It’s an awareness that has become second nature for me, especially since I can Twitter on my iPhone now (addicted, lol).

I think Twitter is brilliant because it is a very effective form of one-way, selective communication. We’re all being deluged with information on the internet, and the “megaphone” approach seems like the natural way to move towards when communication reaches overload. However, that’s from my perspective, having over 7,000 Twitter followers and 1,000 Facebook friends. Most people don’t deal with the volume of communication that I do daily. If I were just limited to a few dozen friends, I feel like Facebook and MySpace would be much more attractive to me, because I would have the time to really keep up with what each person is posting and use the tools to coordinate more real-life meetups etc. It would be a deeper level of connecting than is available to me, the way I use these services.

If any of you Twitter, especially if you’re new to it, I’d love to hear your thoughs about it and social networking in general, and how you use it in your lives!

YouTube – Hilarious Muppets Bloopers!

OMG, funniest clip ever!

So, I’m spending a lot of time on the internet today and yesterday.   And I realize, I may be addicted to start-up internet companies.It’s almost an obsession of mine.  I have a bunch of important tech blogs, like Mashable and Techmeme, and Techcrunch and a bunch of others on my iGoogle page “Tech”, and whenever a startup that is slightly interesting is mentioned, I go and sign up.  Why?  Well for one…ok, it’s a quest to be able to use the handle “Felicia” instead of “FeliciaDay.”  It’s like, I’ve arrived first:  The first Felicia to…mark the territory.   Grossly put.  BUT second reason:  I’m desperate for a way to manage my online life.Not only do I have all the requisite social networking accounts, but I have many other places where I like to have a web presence, like Twitter, and Flickr, etc.  But it’s become a chore, as you’ve heard me whine time and time again, to maintain all these and keep up with them.   Good thing:  A lot of entrepreneurs are aware of the niche-filling problem and are filling it.   To varying success.

  The hottest one of these is FriendFeed.  It’s been jumped on by the early adopter band wagon, and YES I’ve been on there for several weeks now, but honestly, I don’t really get how to use it that well.  You can basically hook up your online life feed there, add all the things you do on the internet like Facebook and YouTube and Flikr etc. and have it be a feed on you that people can Subscribe to, like RSS.  Cool concept.  Sad to say, the superficial rules my impression of this site.   The look of it is pretty bare bones and not attractive.  It doesn’t make me want to hang around at all.  And it just seems like there’s an endless feed of junk, and that’s from being subscribed to just one or two people!  I’m only following a few relative strangers now, but even if they were my closest buddies, the aesthetics of this site leave me wanting more.   Evidently new stuff will come rolling in soon, (Hopefully a more attractive way of sorting feed information) and there ARE nice features like commenting on feeds etc.  I will keep trying it, but they need to get some Makeover magic!

  That is what SocialThing! has, and yes, I tend to want to play around with this site more because it’s pretty.  Unfortunately, they are limited at this point in what programs you can add (they’re adding new places like WordPress, Pandora etc. on a continuing basis) and it doesn’t allow comments like Friendfeed does, so I don’t log in much.  I’ve heard that it’s capabilities are much shallower than Friendfeed, but I’m not that sophisticated a user so I haven’t delved into the micro-utilization.  I like it enough to say that when it has a greater selection, I will totally use it more.

   The program that has really changed my online life in a small way is something my brother Ryon (YES I GAVE YOU CREDIT) hooked me into:  Digsby.  If you’ve ever used Trillian, or Adium for the Mac (Other downloadable chat aggregators), you know the joy of having IM and ICQ and Yahoo Messenger together, but Digsby has made me a happy clam like no one’s business!  Not only do I have IM/ICQ/Messenger AND Google Chat in one program, but it has Facebook AND Myspace alerts AND email alerts!  So, depending on what I tell it to alert me about, a little attractive rounded box pops up on my desktop.  AND there are little icons for Facebook and Myspace, so I just click on those items in the toolbar, and can see all the activity for that program in a nice box.  Don’t have to log into MySpace until I have to!  Sadly, they aren’t supporting Mac yet, but they have plans for it in the near future they say.  I would definitely recommend giving it a test drive if you’re a PCer.

 I just stumbled across a web-based program like Digsby called Fuser that I just signed up for and will try out.  DAMNIT!  I WILL COMBINE THINGS!  Anyone else have newer startup stuff they’re addicted to already?  Clue me in!