For the past few weeks I have been using Digsby, a smart Trillian-style multi-protocol IM client. I’ve tried such programs before — Trillian, Pidgin and Meebo — but for one reason or another they all annoyed me. For this reason, before Digsby I stuck to having MSN, Google Talk and Skype all open at once.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

Over the weekend, with all the excitement of F1, I decided to have a go at liveblogging the grand prix weekend. Liveblogging the normal way can be a cumbersome task. It involves constantly refreshing the edit page and is generally pretty clunky and (for something that’s meant to be ‘live’) slow. It dawned on me, though, that Twitter is the perfect tool for liveblogging.

Of course, the debate as to whether or not Twitter is actually useful rages on. I think the complaints miss the point. Does everything have to be useful? People have been accusing blogging of being pointless for yonks as well. I mean, why can’t something just be good fun for once? Is that not enough?

Anyway, back to liveblogging. I soon thought of the potential pitfalls of using Twitter as a liveblogging tool. Firstly, there are no comments. Although Twitter has its own informal system of replying to messages, you still need to be a Twitter user to take part at all.

Also, Twitter friends who are not interested in F1 would be bombarded with tweets that they had no interest in (although, to be fair, this is a lot of what Twitter is anyway).

Thirdly, the tweets wouldn’t actually appear on my blog (although I’m sure decent plugins that can do this are not too far away — that would also solve the commenting problem as well).

Still, despite the little niggles, this is the sort of thing that Twitter is really great at. And that’s one in the eye for all of those who say that Twitter is simply too pointless to succeed. Yet, there are a few refinements I would like to see made to Twitter to make it a better liveblogging tool.

Firstly, tagging would be nice. Although part of Twitter’s appeal is its simplicity (with an interface that basically consists of a text field / IM window / SMS message and nothing else), I think tagging could really enhance Twitter. Of course, tagging tweets via SMS or IM would be particularly clunky and difficult. But I see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do it on the web. And after all, Twitter already allows you to ’star’ favourite tweets.

So why would tagging be useful? Tagging does often run the risk of being a feature that is included just because it sounds cool. Many websites have a tagging feature that is simply useless. But Twitter tags could work really well if you were to use Twitter for certain specific events.

Say some sad act is liveblogging Formula 1 coverage? I can tag these tweets as ‘formula-1′. This is useful because I am worried that most of my Twitter contacts are not in the least bit interested in my semi-informed interpretations of practice times.

One of the most common things people say about my blog is along the lines of, “I really like your blog — but I skip past all the F1 posts.” The same problem would probably apply on my Twitter account. If I tagged all of my tweets as ‘formula-1′, my contacts could opt to block any of these messages and I could Twitter away about Formula 1 without feeling guilty.

I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, part of Twitter’s appeal is its simple… well, simplicity. On the other hand, this is slightly reminiscent of the way daddy project Blogger never had categories for years after every single other blogging tool on the planet had introduced them.

My other idea is probably not quite so familiar. But I would like to see some kind of permalink that would contain all of the tweets within a certain time range. This could come in useful if, for instance, I wanted to link from my blog to my tweets about the qualifying session. This might not be so useful for most people though.

I don’t know how difficult it would be to implement, but I can’t imagine it would be that difficult. Maybe it would be better just to stick to daily / weekly / monthly archives though. That would probably appeal to many more people. Even this would be an improvement on the current vanilla archive.

I think that those who are ditching blogging completely in favour of Twitter are taking things to the extreme a bit. I mean, sometimes the 140 character limit is simply too restrictive, even for something that would never be a fully-formed blog post.

Still, Twitter has some great actual uses. Liveblogging is one. But I think it is also the death-knell for ‘asides’ or mini-posts. Usually asides are a bit too trivial to be given prominence on the blog itself. Twitter is the perfect place to put a pointless little post without feeling guilty about it.

As an aside, how shocking is it that SMS has been so popular in Europe for so long, and yet nobody here came up with a site like Twitter (at least one that worked as well as Twitter does)? Yet, as soon as SMS gains the slightest bit of traction in North America, their creative juices flow like crazy and they come up with all of this brilliant stuff!

By the way, check out Qwghlm’s idea of how liveblogging major events on Twitter would work.

I’ve been fiddling around with Gadgets again, and I have to say I stand corrected about the weather gadget! I hadn’t realised that dragging them away from the sidebar actually makes gadgets more functional. I now know that Sunday will be cloudy and Monday and Tuesday will be rainy.

There are some other cool gadgets that I’ve installed. Multimeter is a gadget that is just like the Microsoft gadget that tells you CPU and RAM usage, but it uses bar charts rather than antiquated dials.

iTunes Accessory is a very nifty gadget that displays what is currently playing in iTunes. It allows you to skip tracks, pause, mute and suchlike. So now I don’t need to keep fidgeting with windows just to pause a track. Nice.

I’ve not kept it on my sidebar because I don’t post packages very often. But if you do, I think Postage Calculator (UK) is very impressive. If you haven’t got your head around the Royal Mail’s new pricing system, just plug in the weight and size of your package and this will tell you how much it will cost to send. Simple but brilliant.

But this is the one that has really bowled me over. BBC Radio Player allows you to listen to any of the national BBC Radio stations (including digital stations, naturally) without the hassle of firing up your browser and trudging through the BBC website. Such a simple interface as well, and it works perfectly.

What I’d quite like to see is a Meebo gadget. I love the idea of Meebo, but I don’t like it taking up a tab in Firefox.

Is handwriting really needed any more? Kids around the world are forgetting how to handwrite — because all of the writing we do is on the computer. It’s a familiar story. Every time we went back to school after the long summer break, my friends and I would all comment that the most difficult thing was getting used to writing again. “I haven’t had to write anything for about two months!” So every year our handwriting would get a little bit worse.

That wasn’t just because we were using computers all the time. It was just that there really isn’t much need to write at all is there? The only thing I can think of is letter writing. But how often do you do that? Once a year, if that? Maybe, back in the day, people wrote letters to each other. Nowadays people keep in touch by IM or text message. Or, if you’re really old-fashioned, by email. No need to lift a pen.

It’s sensible for me just to avoid writing altogether because my handwriting is a complete mess, and it has been probably since I started secondary school. My lowercase letters are all over the place. If I’m not careful, my ‘b’ looks like an ‘S’, my ‘a’ and ‘o’ both look like an ‘e’, my ‘i’ looks like an ‘l’, my ‘g’ looks like a ‘y’, ‘m’ looks like an ‘n’. And ‘v’ and ‘u’ look exactly the same.

The article says, “Teenagers are still experimenting with their handwriting and trying out new things”. The shocking thing is, I’m not a teenager, and I’m still experimenting with my handwriting. I could cope with all of the other things because I could understand myself what I was writing. But when my ‘v’ and ‘u’ began to look the same I had to take action. In the past couple of months I’ve actually added on a tail to my ‘u’. I never used to add tails because I thought they were a waste of time. Now they are how I tell a ‘u’ (or a ‘U’) from a ‘v’ (or ‘V’).

It became necessary because a lot of the equations I have to use at university involve a u or a v — often in the same place, meaning subtly different things. But I can’t be confusing them or I will get myself… well, confused. At the same time I’m coping with how to write Greek letters. Before it was just π in maths and the occasional μ in physics.

Now, in economics, I have to grapple regularly with Σ, θ, δ, γ, α and the dreaded σ. When you’re struggling with the Latin alphabet, the last thing you want to do is work out how to write a σ (my ‘σ’ actually looks like ‘δ’!).

Whenever I have to handwrite a note or something, I always write it in all capitals. Not print, though, because I am such a lazy bastard that I can’t even be bothered to write neatly in block capitals. My capitals used to be neat — when I was in primary school. But when my lowercase letters became illegible and I moved on to using capitals instead — well, of course my capitals became illegible as well. Nevertheless, it is the least-worst option. Although I always have to apologise and explain that I’m not shouting!

I don’t have a signature either. Well I do, but it’s basically just a scrawl. I’ve tried practicing writing my name, but I think I am actually physically incapable of doing it. It looks kind of like “D____ Sl_____”. Distinctive, in a way, but it’s just a scrawl. Some people are genuinely shocked by my signature.

Despite my uneasy relationship with handwriting, I find it absolutely fascinating. It’s interesting to note how different people can take such radically different approaches to writing the same symbols. My friend and I had a discussion about somebody else. I just said, “I like her ‘a’s.” My friend thought I was using some kind of secret man-code euphemism. But no. I genuinely like her lowercase ‘a’.

Maybe that’s why I don’t have a girlfriend.

Via Digg.

I thought I’d write about a couple of cool websites I’ve been visiting recently.

Back in the day I used MyBlogLog to keep track of what links visitors to this blog were clicking. But then I got bored of it and stopped using it. When I heard that Yahoo! was thinking of buying it, I thought I would check it out again. I actually said, “It would be interesting to see how it’s changed since I last saw it.” And boy has it changed!

It’s not like a social network for blogs. As if we needed another social network! But this is actually quite a good idea because it emphasises the community aspect of blogging. It also reveals connections between blogs that you might have thought didn’t exist. Here is my user profile for MyBlogLog, and here is this blog’s community (feel free to join it of course).

The other website that’s quite impressed me recently is Twitter. It’s another sort-of social network, but it’s more like a blogging tool. But not. It’s from the people who brought us Blogger and Odeo.

At first I had a struggle working out what it actually was. It’s such a basic idea, I needed to make sure I had it straight. You just type in the box what you’re doing. And that’s it! That’s it! At first I thought, “What’s the point in this? I could just write this on my blog.”

Theoretically, one of the best things about blogging is that there are no rules. It shouldn’t really matter if I just rattle out a one-line post. But in reality is does matter, because it looks quite stupid. That’s why I introduced asides to the blog. It’s true — the format of your blog determines your writing style.

Twitter is based entirely on messages that last no more than 149 characters. Like a text message then. And that’s where things start to get cool, because you can send an update from your phone. I can imagine doing this a fair bit on the train. But if you don’t fancy paying the “standard network rate” you can also update via IM or via the web. And you can also receive updates from your friends via IM or on your phone.

It might not amount to much in the long run, but at the moment I really like the idea. It gives me the space to put frivolous nonsense up there without dumping in on blog. Here is my page on Twitter.