tech

How Twitter Works

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Designer / Illustrator / Blogger Jessica Hische developed an infographic for her mother on how Twitter works that I found enormously useful. I used to tell people that Twitter is “basically the Facebook status update feature as a stand alone site” and/or it’s “a real time search engine” which I’ve learned is true but not really true. There are parts of the site I come to understand, like how tagging works: you put a hash tag in front of a word, like #nyc, and then whatever is in your tweet is tagged as something as NYC related. Then, if you search by #nyc you will get every single tweet that has that tag in it, which is why I call it a real time search engine. When the plane landed in the Hudson a few years back, the easiest and quickest way to find out what happened was by using #hudsonplanecrash or something similar.
Well, after reading the infographic, I’ve learned a whole lot more which makes a stat I recently read make a whole of a lot more sense. The stat said that email use across most age groups has dramatically fallen and one reason was that people were tweeting much more. Well, now, again after the graphic, I understand how Twitter is robust and unique messaging platform. Want to learn more? Click on the image below:
how_twitter_works
Via Elizabeth

tech

Ding Goes The Oven – Tweet Goes The Feed

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Twitter is just in the news more and more these days. First Lance Armstrong used it to get his stolen bike back. Then we have the rumor that Google is going to buy it. Now, we have the news that some excellent geeks at Poke have hacked together / masterfully crafted something they are calling BakerTweet.
What is it you ask? It’s a wonderful hardware / software solution for alerting people to the latest oven output from the Albion Cafe, Bakery and Food Store. It’s a wireless Arduino thing that can be customized via a web interface to allow for various custom messages to be Twittered at the twist of a dial and the push of a water/flour-proof button.
What’s brilliant is The Albion actually using it. And it actually works. Check out the video below:

BakerTweet from BakerTweet on Vimeo.