{"id":126,"date":"2008-04-01T23:59:07","date_gmt":"2008-04-02T06:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=126"},"modified":"2008-04-01T23:59:07","modified_gmt":"2008-04-02T06:59:07","slug":"new-toy-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=126","title":{"rendered":"New toy: “Twitter”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow – Celestron takes 8 business days to get me a terse one-sentence answer. BigC<\/a> responds in one. Impressive. Apparently their technical people are all at trade-shows at the moment so my bigger question will have to wait until they get back, but they were at least able to answer my question about their “tabletop” digital microscopes<\/a> magnification (answer: the “600x” really is optical magnification, not digital.)<\/p>\n

Another digital microscopy WANT\/DO NOT WANT post to follow when I get the followup reply. Meanwhile, after hearing about it on the This Week in Tech<\/a> podcast for a while, I finally talked myself into signing up to play with the coincidentally named Twitter<\/a> system.<\/p>\n

\"Twitter<\/a>It sounds<\/em> like a really stupid idea – “Oh, goodie, now I can broadcast ‘text messages’ no more than 140 characters long about trivial events in my life to the whole world! Whoopee!” “Wow! I can find out when random strangers are drinking coffee AS IT HAPPENS!” Thrills! Excitement! Adventure!…<\/p>\n

On the other hand, having the messaging system watch for particular words might be a handy way of monitoring current events. Plus, there seems to be a lot of potential for fun, off-the-wall uses<\/a>, even if many of them are kind of silly.<\/p>\n

It DOES seem like kind of an ideal context to play with that “geostrings” concept<\/a> I’ve been toying with. A terse, easily-machine-parsed format for geotag data that can fit into a “twitter” post and still leave room for a sentence or two to go with the geographic information seems like it might be useful. If you’re so incredibly bored that you want to see some examples, you can check out my own Twitter<\/a> posts, several of which I’ve embedded geostrings into.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow – Celestron takes 8 business days to get me a terse one-sentence answer. BigC responds in one. Impressive. Apparently their technical people are all at trade-shows at the moment so my bigger question will have to wait until they get back, but they were at least able to answer my question about their “tabletop” … Continue reading New toy: “Twitter”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,4,13,12,6,40,10,33,3],"tags":[81,82,79,80,74,578,78],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-nerdity","category-feedback-solicitation","category-me-me-me","category-meta-blogging","category-microbiology","category-neogeography","category-nerd-culture","category-the-big-room","category-trivial-blather","tag-digital-imaging","tag-geotagging","tag-internet","tag-mapping","tag-microscopy","tag-neogeography","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}