I’m curious how many folks are using twitter, and why they’re using it.

My experience thus far is that it’s more buzz than substance. Critical mass has been hit. The frenzy is in progress. Where will it go, what will it do, and will it matter in the long run? How will it fit in with how we communicate?

More spammers seem to be hitting it than anything else. The rapid communication is a boon–but filtering is necessary; it can be a full time job solely to determine who’s legit.

Let’s see what the coming days will bring. No doubt the result will be interesting.

In a few hours I’ll be heading over to the 7th Guitar-B-Q, put on by my good friend Doak Turner. This is going to be a hoot of gargantuan proportions. I am looking forward to it! http://www.nashvillemuse.com

I must say it has been a phenomenal day here in Nashville. A perfect Saturday, enjoying Nashville’s Spring perfection.  Lori and I had quality time.  Glad to be here.  Full of gratitude, big time.

Invariably I will search for pointers on songwriting.  Google Reader even knows this.  Figures.  The Reader recommended “Career Songwriting“.  It naturally caught my eye, piqued my interest.  No choice–I clicked.

I was pleasantly surprised by the clean look.  There was no shouting “Hey, I’m a Web 2.x site,” or anything of the sort.  The colors seem relatively neutral, allowing Andrea’s words to do the shining.  And shine they do; there’s terrific content here.  I’ve got something in common with Andrea; I have studied with Pat Pattison.  Some of his books are in my library as well.  Andrea’s recent discussion of rhyme reminded me of how pertinent Pattison’s approach was.  We rhymers so often settle on the perfect, obvious rhyme.  Andrea supplements his approach, shares it, brings it into the context of the everyday.

For many months this extended look at rhyming has been nagging me.  So many other projects and techniques get in the way; however, looking at these on virtual paper is refreshing.  I will put in conscious effort to employ these techniques.  My writing will be better for it.  It will come off more current, more natural.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that WordPress was powering the blog.  Frequently I check out which blogging platform is being used.  I wonder whether it will reinforce my WordPress loyalty overall.  This site did.  Thanks again, WP.  You did it.  I’m stickin’ with it.  It clicks.  And I rhyme, with your friendly backend magic.  Woohoo!

This site is too cool. GoogleDuelsUltra lets you take google search terms and graph their comparative popularity. And it provides some sweet statistics as well. It employs the Google API with aplomb. A rockin’ web page to make your day a little Googlier.

I compared John Belushi and Bill Murray for kicks on intelligence, silly and funny.

The page uses PHP to work with the API.  Thanks to Geoff Peters, indeed a talented individual.

I’ve recently begun using FriendFeed after seeing a post from Robert Scoble.    The application has been easy to use and has enabled me to follow feeds from very influential bloggers like Scoble and Stowe Boyd (and get introduced to some other brilliant minds).   In FriendFeed’s settings area, I kept on the option to have the FriendFeed delivered via email.  It’s not entirely clear why I would do that considering the prodigious amount of inbox, but hey, the more the merrier, right?

Due to my scattered existence FriendFeed’s digests have landed in my junk mail box, and I have yet to add to safe senders–but because a quick human scan of junk mail happens, I caught 1/2/09 feed in which Mr. Boyd responds to a post concerning the survival of FriendFeed.

From: Stow Boyd’s Louis Gray on Why FriendFeed Will Fail

These [twitter & friendfeed] are not direct competitors in that they don’t have exactly the same feature sets, but they are for all intents and purposes. Very few people participate actively in both.

Competition does not come to mind when thinking of these two services–but with the competition in context, it would seem that twitter would win out due to its ease of use and its basic mission, i.e., “what are you doing right now”.  But twitter doesn’t come near ff as far as real substantive utility goes.  I’m not a Silicon Valley geek (more of a Music City USA geek in eternal training), yet the interface was fairly easy to use.  Soon enough people will be more aware of what the social bookmarking tags are all about, and they will grab accounts on every Web 2 site they can find–it’s electronic vanity press to the max.  This transformation will come about.

One bias in terms of  active use is that an FF user by virtue of their own twitter activity will feed that much activity–or at least perceived activity–to their FF account.  By its nature as well, FF is designed to automatically capture activity from elsewhere.  Does that comprise activity on FF itself?  In my mind it does–but I’m not sure what it would mean as it relates to its competitive ranking.  FF’s own native activity is only a part of the picture.  Does that mean it’s a goner?  It all depends on what your criteria for success are.  The native dialogues are fine for me–I can observe who’s coming up with solid responses, and I can conveniently comment.  It’s simple.  It’s a plus.  And it’s brilliant.

If failure means financial failure relative to twitter, then twitter wins.  In terms of depth of utility, however, in my view there’s no comparison.  FF is utilizing twitter and I don’t see that happening just yet vice versa.  FF harnesses the web and makes me an ubercitizen.  I have no problem with that, and I do not see a steep learning curve at all.  FF competes and succeeds here.  No failure in sight.

The picture here may show a slaughter by twitter, but a look at the permalink showed over 4000% growth for FF in the last year. If that yearly pace is kept anywhere nearly as well over a decent amount of time, guess who wins? FF hasn’t hit the tipping point yet. All it needs is more mavens to put the good word in and to keep using it.

The learning curve is this:  get the public in on the paradigm of Web 2 and the programmable web, the meaning of these icons, the nature of rss based social context overall.  Yes the interface could be better, yes a lite version may help–but people will catch on if that marketing takes place.  It may take a while and many factors affect adoption, but I see FF as a winner all the way.  It’s a keeper in my book.

After a bit of incubation, a little turning away, I’m finding myself back in Google Chrome.  The interface is very clean–that’s one big appealing item.  There are built in developer tools (should have known better) such as an inspector element, javascript console and javascript debug.  These are quite handy right out of the, er, box.  The performance is comparable to FF/IE, and as the picture below shows, the Task Manager shows Chrome with the lowest memory use (memory is still not unlimited for me, especially with MacBook Pro using VMWare/BootCamp — sorry, not fully on Mac or Linux here).  Chrome could become the favorite.

Ultimately, in the Windows environment, I’ve seen that IE has the best memory usage, which one would hope should be the case.  Chrome doesn’t clutter the interface up with much in the way of buttons and toolbars.  Keeping this minimalist approach makes sense.

So if I want a no frills moment, Chrome will be the way to go.    As plug-ins become available, it will be interesting to see how detrimental the result becomes.  Off to check for add-ons, plug-ins, widgets, and all manner of goodies for this refreshing browser.  I’m chrome-browsered, google-injected, and steppin’ out over the wifi…

One can look at the world pre- or post- google.  Maybe you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that, but you still could.  I know for sure it has made research a lot easier, and it has saved my tail more than once.  I for one do not have such an encyclopedic mind as to immediately know exactly what to do when some obscure error comes up in html, xml, visual basic, or any other app–or for that matter, any other matter of life!

In short, google has exceled.  Sure other search engines have been existent for a longer period of time, but none has been so simple and elegant as the king of white background and understatement.

This same less is more philosophy seems to have come to Google Chrome, the company’s new internet browser.  This morning I finally decided to take the plunge.  Just about the first thing I did when I installed was to make Chrome the default browser.  What came over me?  I haven’t seen the reviews, but here are my impressions:

• Would love to see toolbars/plugins - being a firefox/ie user for a good number of years, i miss the plugins such as Web Developer, Compete stats, blinklist, and more.  The developer community certainly has had a great deal of time with these other browsers vs. chrome, but they’d still be nice to see out of the box.  I’m sure the volume of plugins will mushroom in the coming months.
• Open source code - solid, great to see this, it should ease plugin development!  And yes, should I care to do some spare bathroom reading, it would be nice to print out a section or two.
• Memory footprint - Chrome does well here.  Less than 50% of my firefox memory usage–but with Chrome at no plugins, this is a big advantage.
• Ease of installation - There was no issue here, it downloaded quickly even on a (gasp) gprs connection to my laptop.  Not necessarily a distinguishing factor, but it’s nice to have.
• GUI Impressions:  Lives up to simple and elegant.  Here’s where an absence of toolbars is of benefit.  Chrome just lets you get to your web pages.  There’s solid storage/thumbnails of visited sites, as well as integration with your google account.  Big convenience here, but I have not necessarily been big on storing my browsing history on my google account.
• Performance - no true technical benchmarking here, just impressions, which are that this is average, and a page or two typically working perfectly in other browsers crash in Chrome.

__________

I see Chrome as a 3 out of 5 for the moment.  It’s no longer the default browser (that lasted about 5 minutes).  I might use it as an outlyer for now, to see if pages rendering well elsewhere will work well here.

Of course, Google overall as always blows me away with innovation, convenience, pertinent results, endless capabilities.

Looking at my igoogle this morning I saw a post concerning ihop’s free pancakes.  Had to follow the link to see what the hoopla was about.  I did not see much about it in Main Stream media–but what’s mainstream media these days?  To me, it’s my own personal page, frankly what I snag on google.

Seeing that this is benefiting Children’s Miracle Network, it became more intriguing.  My buds and I will definitely be heading there on 2/24/09.  It’s in my calendar for sure.

A friend recently told me about an inspiring lecture by Ben Zander. After a look around in the video player, I stumbled upon TED, which was the conference at which the lecture took place. On this site are experts, tall figures in the worlds of Technology, Entertainment, and Design (hence TED). You can join the TED community as well, add your profile and join in the dialogue.