Twitter & Seesmic
For the group assignment (possibly getting ahead of myself here, I really should start assignment 1.2…) I’m interested in looking at social networking, especially twitter with regard to how it can be used to supplement lectures in a university setting. Anne put me on to seesmic, a twitter client. I hadn’t tried any twitter clients up until now (though I’d seen twhirl floating before). I like it particularly for the ability to group members into columns and that it has colour coding to help you distinguish your own posts from others and from replies. The little pop up notification similar to MSN that it gives you when someone tweets is also great (I have been known to sit there and refresh twitter for awhile)…but there’s just something about it that, for personal use, is lacking. I’m going to give it a bit longer because I’m often like this with interfaces, I get very set in my useage ways (that said I didn’t mind facebook upgrading, even if every single other person on my friends list had an issue with it).
That said, I’m seeing some interesting potential for it for the framework assignment. Shelley delicious-ed an interesting article on microblogging for education and also pointed me in the direction of this one on 1 minute lectures and that combined with twitpic which is already growing in popularity got me interested. On the seesmic website there’s already the potential for video microblogs and seesmic desktop (the client software) says on ITS website that it will soon support picture and video integration with the client. I’ll be interested to see how they do this. But with more relvance to this whole thing is how this might apply in an educational setting. The ability of seesmic to allow you to group the people you follow combined with video/pic integration would be really useful for students to group lecturers/subjects, students, study groups and so on. One thing that would be really cool (though I think the entire infrastructure of twitter would probably need to change to make it possible) would be to be able to post to particular userlists/groups, so the content is relevant only to those users. Hmm, something to think about, anyway.
April 19th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Glad to see you’re trying out a client. Sometimes I don’t use my client (Tweetdeck for the moment) when I want things to be static. Usually when I’m doing an assignment and the like. It’s weird how we warm to certain ways of doing and seeing things. You’re not alone there.
Just yesterday I wanted to send something to two people. I wonder if there’s any way it can occur through a client? Hmmm… I’ll ask the twitterverse, but not holding my breath.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
The sending to two people thing is definitely something that would be useful for twitter. Or whole groups of people. Even if you can’t do it through a standard tweet, surely it wouldn’t be difficult to allow multiple recipient DMs – I mean the technology is obviously there, it’s basically an email within the system with a character limit enforced. I wonder why they haven’t done it actually. That said, with the number of “over capacity” messages I’m seeing lately I think they’re too busy just keeping up with the number of people joining let alone adding new features