---

Internet

Evidently this is where I talk about things on the internet, including this website, Twitter, and SocialVibe.

---

Twitter Timelines and You (Poll)

I follow 150+ people. However, when push comes to shove, I’m willing to admit I don’t read half of what you guys write. I’ll wake up in the morning, and one of the first things I do is check twitter. However, rather than catch up on everything that happened through the night, I’ll skip to maybe the last hour to half hour’s worth of tweets, and check the profiles of people who’s tweets I really want to see. My mentions are looked at last, as they’re the ones I KNOW I’ll take the time to reply to.

This isn’t to say I don’t appreciate what everyone has to say, or that I find you boring. It’s just that I really don’t feel I have the time to invest in reading hundreds upon hundreds of tweets, most of which would consist of witty observations, or links to the latest news. I do enjoy reading them, but going through just an hour or two worth of tweets takes up too long in my opinion. When we think of Twitter we think of a community joined by short concise messages. But all those short concise messages combined result one BIG mass of text. If you follow more than 100 active people, chances are you have an awful lot of reading to do.

This is basically me asking you, do you read all or most of the tweets you get in your timeline? How long do you dedicate to reading them? I’m interested.

Oh hi there!

I’ve been awfully busy doing pointless things that don’t really have a purpose; mainly gaming. I thought I’d bring you up to date with that guy we all adore and worship; me.

With the recent sale on Steam, my gaming is obviously going to have a negative effect on my bank account. I’ve recently been playing a lot more Fallout 3 than usual, as a certain person has effectively been playing so much that she has completely finished the main quest before I’d even made it out of Megaton.
Along with that, I’ve recently bought Red Dead Redemption for my Xbox 360. That game has brought me back into console gaming; there’s nothing like the promise of a GTA type sandbox game to get me holding a controller again. The game handles wonderfully, and there’s so much to it that I can spend an hour without ever doing a proper quest. There are side quests which occur randomly, which you could do, or ignore and ride away. Those sort of encounters would of made the Grand Theft Auto series a more engrossing set of games to play.
The new episode of Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse came out around a week ago, so I played through and finished that. Not to spoil anything for those of you who may own or be playing it, but at the end you screw someone’s brain out. Hot.
Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 1 & 2 have also had some playtime, but not as much as others.

While I haven’t been posting on here, that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging. I recently decided to give my Tumblog an actual use. Presenting Zombie M&Ms; the place for my thoughts when I don’t have access to my computer. I’ll be posting random things there when I have something to say, but only my phone handy, as well as the usual reblogged crap spewed out by Tumblr. To make it official, I bought a premium Tumblr Theme for $9 that I liked
I’ve also started another tumblog about the game We Rule. I love playing it and decided to see if I could tackle writing casually about it whenever I had something to say or there was an update. I already do this on here for Team Fortress 2, and don’t want to make you put up with too many posts of that nature. If you play We Rule and enjoy my writing style, you might want to check it out, otherwise fuck off. Instead of paying for a theme for this, I’ve instead started using the Novephel Theme; partly because I like the look of it, and partly to test it out for a friend.

So that’s the grunt of the things I’ve been doing that I find vaguely interesting. What have you been doing with yourself?

This is EXACTLY how I play Words With Friends

Some of the time anyway.

This is exactly how many people play the Words With Friends game on the iPhone; they’ll attempt as many different combinations of high scoring letters as they can until one just works. It all really comes down to the point that there’s no penalty for making up words. QUIGOBY isn’t a word? Well, try again!
I have won a fair few games through use of this method, but when you think about it, it does ruin the challenge. I remember playing Scrabble and having to REALLY pick a decent REAL word, lest someone challenge me as to whether it exists.

If the game wanted to be a bit more realistic, it would have the miss a turn penalty that comes with failing at making a real word. That would stop people “Brute Forcing” the game, and lead to a more challenging experience.

If you play this, what do you think?

FFFFFFUUUUUU-

Here Comes My Baby – Sons Of Admirals

There’s not much to say about this, you just need to watch it. I’ve already reblogged it via Tumblr but wanted to put it on here too. It’s a cover of Cat Steven’s song Here Comes My Baby, performed by a group of YouTube artists who are going under the name of Sons of Admirals for this project. They all have their own solo “careers”, but have combined to see what they can create as a whole.

There’s something about the voices on this group that just sound so good to me. It’s probably why I love their other works as well. As any good fan would do, here’s a link to buy the song via iTunes: http://bit.ly/soababy

Listen to it¹.

1. What are you doing? Why are you reading this notation INSTEAD OF LISTENING TO THE SONG?

Why I don’t use Facebook much.

This comment posted on my Facebook wall has had me thinking over the past few weeks, “Why do I have a Facebook?”. I went here because it was originally much nicer than Myspace, which I happened to go on a lot. But now, I rarely go on Facebook for more than 10 minutes, and never really do anything. Trying to think of why this is so, the answers are fairly obvious.

I’m a member of other services which do it better.

Besides the fact that conversations are threaded, the News Feed is almost exactly like Twitter. I can see peoples posts, a time stamp, etc. I can reply to them, or make my own new post. The things people say are fairly similar too; usually nothing overly profound. Twitter has all this, plus conversations just seem so much more sociable, and I end up talking to people a lot on there instead.
I prefer sites like Picasa and Flickr for photos too. While it’s awesome that I can share a photo of last night with the friends involved, I feel better using a platform specifically built for the endeavour. The same goes for video, with videos being widely better. So what does Facebook have that’s unique?

James just joined the group I FUCKING HATE GROUPS WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT MAKE IT STOP. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

One of my most major gripes with this website is how many stupid groups and pages there are, and how people always seem to be joining them. They can be lumped into multiple smaller groups:

• Mundane – “Looking in the fridge and the cupboard repeatedly thinking food will appear” and “I HATE IT WHEN CRUMBS FALL IN MY BRA!” are two examples of this. These are stupid groups and pages based on stupid everyday things no one cares about, but now it’s on Facebook it’s suddenly awesome. I see people spending ages just joining and liking as many of these things as humanly possible. Guys, while I know it’s devastating to realize you’re chewing on a pen you borrowed from someone else, there’s no reason to make a Facebook group out of it.
• Spellcheck just exploded – Now I can understand if people want to join a really dumb group. I mean, it’s your prerogative if you want to join “I’M 15, PREGNANT, AND PROUD OF IT!”. However, if that group is named “IM 15, PRGNT, N PRUD OV TI~!!!” I will stab you. No really. I will fucking murder you. If you’re going to join a group or a page, at least make sure the person put enough effort into it to actually spell the title correctly. And if you’re the one who created the page, may god have mercy on your mentally disabled soul.
• If ______ people join this group, then _____ will ______. – You know these groups. Theyre the ones who refer to someone you have NEVER heard of, doing something you will NEVER see or hear about, provided a certain amount of people join the group.
  Just like you guys, I have never met, nor even heard of Nick Abbott, yet if I join this group, apparently he will be 0.0001% closer to dying his hair. Exciting right? No. I am sick of these groups existing, and the amount of people who actually join them.
• Everything else – Lets be honest, some groups are okay, but 99% of them are retarded, as are the people who join them.

Of course I’d be a hypocrite if I said I disliked the idea of all pages and groups on Facebook. I joined a couple of good official ones, and those who’s updates genuinely interest me.

The various things you get requests for.

I can cope with the idea of an inbox. They’re a given in social networks, and the idea of private messaging is one that I for one enjoy. However, there is also another sort of inbox, and it’s one that contains all the various requests you receive including friend invites, and page invites. I like having them all in one place, but the problem lies in that there are so many applications that send so many “requests”. If you leave it just a little bit too long without clearing it out, you can get inundated with hundreds of useless requests to join groups like “IF I GOT ALL THE CASH IVE SPENT ON ALCOHOL BACK I WOULD BE ONE RICH FUCKER!” and the various “gifts” I apparently receive in games I have never played. Basically, while the concept is good, no one wants the equivalent to spam.

Apparently my friends.

You know those people you never really spoke to if at all in your life, that you know you’ll never see again in person? The ones who sat in your home group in high school, or worked indirectly with you and you maybe said hello to once a week? I don’t know why but the moment I got Facebook suddenly these people considered me a friend and added me.
I’m considering deleting all the people I’m not in contact with, because I don’t really feel like having a lot of them seeing what I do if I do anything. Fact is, a lot of these people I didn’t talk to or weren’t friends with for a reason, and the fact that they want to add me is kind of weird.

Privacy

This is a big one, and not really something that stops me using Facebook, but it does make me a bit hesitant on the whole thing. It’s no secret that Facebook is questionable when it comes to what happens with your information, who can use it, who can see it, and so forth. Editing your privacy settings is a time consuming ordeal, and I’ve learnt a few things while doing it, such as the fact that certain applications seem to have permission to use my email address as they see fit¹. I see a few of my friends deleting all the information on their Facebook over all the privacy issues, because not only is it hard to make your stuff private, it’s almost impossible to delete your Facebook profile. Which is the most retarded thing Facebook could ever do.

There are possible a few other reasons why I don’t use Facebook much if at all but seriously, these are reason enough for me to want to invest more time on blogs or Twitter, or maybe do that crazy old fashioned thing and actually call or text someone. Insane, right?

1. not sure if this is actually true, no one seems to know. However “Give my email address” is different to “Email” in permissions, and that scares me.

I do love playing with them.

Yesterday, my friend Craig was so fed up with my out of date Twitter background (he’d been bugging me about how it linked to my now defunct website and the like), that he actually made me a new one. I like it:

 

I really just wanted to show it off, so if you want to see it in it’s proper glory, you can check it out here.

iPhone Web Apps

I learned something new about my iPhone’s functionality. This doesn’t happen very often but when it does, it’s kind of awesome. I’m writing about this in case you don’t know about this either; it’s kind of handy.

I use Google products a lot; Google Reader is probably one of the few sites I have to visit every day, it’s such a useful website. When it comes to the iPhone though, I haven’t found an application that works quite as well. I end up using Google Reader’s mobile version. Unfortunately, things like Google Wave aren’t exactly having the best applications made for it on the iPhone format. All I see are negative reviews, and when I tried to use one it proved too clunky and weird.

But today, while taking a look at Google Buzz on my phone, a little bubble appeared that made me grin. I’ve always known you could bookmark websites on iPhone’s safari browser to come back to later, but Google felt the need to point out that you can “Add to Home Screen”, treating the particular website/webapp as it’s own freaking native application. This is done through the bookmark button, and choosing that option; simple.

The application icons take you straight to the website, and while Google has it’s apps prepared for people to do this, you can do it with any website really, even a blog you frequent or Twitter.

This discovery has made me happy, and will, apart from making things easier, probably make me try using Google Wave more (even though the iPhone doesn’t really support it yet), and look into Buzz a little bit. If you didn’t know about this, I hope this post proved informative for you fellow iPhone users.

What’s the Buzz?

I’m one of the many people out there on the internet attracted to the new shiny things. When things like Google Wave are released I’m there to check it out, even if I don’t really understand it yet. It’s a problem.

However, since the release of Google Buzz, I’m still not sure what the hell it is, or why I should care. Checking it out, it just seems to be a copy of the service Twitter does, but through Google. It shares your activity in a number of Google-connected sites (Google Reader, YouTube, etc) and any other sites you wish to connect to it (which Twitter does) with people who follow you  (which Twitter does). You’re able to comment on other people’s “buzzes” (as I assume they’re called. Bizzes? Bozzes? I would of expected Google to come up with something catchy.) and “like” them, which seems to be the only significant difference to Twitter, as Twitter instead lets users retweet anything another user wrote (effectively showing you like it and sharing it), and to talk to people directly using @replies.

All I know is I want to play UNO now…

I wish I knew what was so special about Buzz that Google would release it alongside Twitter. Can anyone enlighten me as to what Google Buzz is really meant to accomplish, and whether I should actually care at all?

ATUBGIRL

I’m a day late, but in my defence the reason I didn’t write this yesterday was no I don’t need to explain this to you, shush.

Yesterday was the monthly ATUB meet up, where all those epic people who use Twitter and also happen to live in the glorious city that is Adelaide meet up, drink and talk nonsense. I’ve only ever been to one other meet up, all the way back in October/November, but this was by far more fun and just a little exciting.

The meeting was held at The Highway Hotel where we had multiple tables reserved specially for the event. We rocked out the drinking, drawing on every conceivable surface and remarking on how much of a woman I am for jokingly wearing a skirt. I saw the old faces who I’ve talked to since I don’t know when (although as usual Rubenerd didn’t make an appearance. ONE DAY!), plus a fair few new ones. This is where I segue into a shout out to Brenton, Ash, that FlitterbyG person and that KerryJ person. I also finally met both Cypherage and HugePedlar (The antelope are fat this year) who I have to admit, wasn’t as British as I expected, but was still pretty awesome.

After hours of fun at The Highway and most people had left, the last of us went to the Ed Castle (?) for dinner. It wasn’t as nice a place, but with the meals being just ten dollars I wasn’t really going to complain.  After dinner, we all talked for a little while, before going our separate ways.

Thank you for the fun times guys, it was nice catching up, and meeting the new people. I’m going to try and be more of a regular to these events, and I do promise to be (slightly) less drunk.

Other places you can read about the Feb ‘10 ATUB:

• Harnessed Crayon
• Adelaide Tweeters (I guess you could call this one the “official” post)

There are photos about the place as well:

• Monnie’s Picasa gallery (From which the above photo was “borrowed”. I’ll return it when I’m done!)
• Brenton’s Picasa gallery (Not as big as Monnie’s, but I’m in it so it’s instantly awesome)
• Flitterbyg’s Flickr gallery (I didn’t photobomb any of these ones, but they’re still worth a look :P)
• Aliyaki’s Facebook gallery (She’s too good for Picasa or Flickr, and everyone in her photos seems abnormally happy)
• Hugepedlar created a random video from photos taken that day “introducing” everyone who came, which can be checked out here (you could of used a more flattering photo of me man, I mean, come on!)

More will be added as I find them/can finally load them. CURSE YOU CAPTAIN PLANET HITLER CAPPED INTERNET!

Next Page »