Geoff Jones » Twitter

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a plugin

Geoff — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:51:39 +0000

Experimenting with the Blackbird Pie Plugin . What should appear is Sally’s latest tweet!

Another day another fish :-) (@ Tesco) http://4sq.com/bxZgWe

December 16, 2010 8:55 am via foursquare ReplyRetweetFavorite

sally

Worked very well indeed! Just some confusion initially as there are no setup options: Just click on the Blackbird in the WordPress editor. Clicking on the Blackbird enables you to search for Twitter by Username, URL or tweet ID

Impressive little plugin!

Birthday and social media…

Geoff — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:23:59 +0000

Romeo & Juliet curtain call

Many thanks to Sally, Em, Sarah, Caroline, Ray, Liz, Chester, Karen, Roberto, Ellee, Tony & Lorraine for coming to my little birthday party organised by Sally to see Romeo & Juliet tonight at Downing College. It was a great performance and had the big audience totally spell bound. All 13 of us enjoyed Emily’s freshly baked carrot cake in the interval

For someone interested by social media this is how folks said Happy Birthday to me:-
Twitter: 6
Cards by hand: 5
Cards in post: 3
Facebook: 4
Text message: 2
Skype chat: 2
Telephone call: 1
Skype call: 1
Email: 5 All from mailing lists of companies it has to be said

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Rats force Domino’s closure

Geoff — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:50:19 +0000

Sat update

Domino's Pizza, Hills Road, Cambridge

Cambridge, Hills Road, Domino’s Pizza place has just been forced to close because of a complaint from Rebecca Jane B? which the council inspectors upheld:-

“An infestation of rats in the premises resulting in a significant risk of contamination to foodstuffs and a risk to public health. In addition, there is an accumulation of dirt and extraneous matter in the kitchen”

Not very good publicity for DPGS Ltd T/as Domino’s Pizza, 27 Hills Road, CB2 1NW

As you can see from the photos the upper two floors of the takeaway are derelict and in urgent need of renovation.

Many thanks to Richard’s excellent CamCityCouncil Twitter feed for alerting me

Sat update: Apparently three rats were found stuck to the glue mats put down by the rat catcher – apparently the rats were in the derelict flats upstairs. They are hoping to reopen on Wednesday!

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Gmail and Twitter?

Geoff — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:50:37 +0000

Twitter is just so useful. I noticed that my gmail wasn’t working online at all. In these cases its usual for me to start kicking the computer/firefox/router
But now with Twitscoop in my sidebar all is revealed:-

and looking at the time line of twitters mentioning ‘gmail’ is quite cool:-

This Twitter just made me laugh:-

Phew panic over

Stephen Fry goes nuclear.

Geoff — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:03:11 +0000

Followcost is a great little application which works out the cost of following celebrities on Twitter. Here is the cost of following @stephenfry

It strikes me that celebrities are caught in a cleft stick, someone as popular as Stephen Fry has over 208,000 followers(The old Radio Luxenbourg radio frequency for us nerds and is in turn following over 54,000 folks. This means that he can only respond to a minuscule portion of tweets without seriously overloading everyone’s twitter timeline and yet folks moan at him for not responding!

Think I will stick to just following a few folks that I know well even with that I had to silence @scobleizer with his 22 updates a day!

Thanks to Gigaom for the link.

Texting on Facebook but not Twitter

Geoff — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:12:51 +0000

Now Twitter have raised an additional $35 million maybe they will re-instate texting updates here in the UK.

If you are on O2 here in the UK then Facebook already allows this to happen on your status updates.

Here is a snippet between Emily and I from today.

iPhone Text screen

Facebook status update screen

Geoff and his Twitterings

Geoff — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 22:48:13 +0000

After reading the history of Twitter over at @Dom‘s blog 140 characters and how it was conceived “We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park.
It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us
stop eating and start talking.”

Thought I would check out my Twitter stats on TweetStats since I joined in November 2006.

Interesting I’ve never gone above 209 tweets per month. Even though I can use it on the iPhone. My most used iPhone app. is gpstwit with 112 tweets. Least used is Twinkle at 43.

Twitter facts

Geoff — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 15:16:51 +0000

Interesting wordle of all my twitters, compiled at tweetstats, over the past 26 months at the rate of 3.9 tweets per day

Thanks to Sally for the heads up!

The little eager stream

Geoff — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:51:16 +0000

The little eager stream

Originally uploaded by geofones

Sally and I passed this little bridge on the way home from seeing cloudgazer.

It immediately reminded me of my Uncle Les’s humanist funeral. Where his eulogy made reference to life being like a stream. Starting out as a tiny spring then playfully growing into a larger stream rushing with great vigour and force and then broadening and meandering before finally going into a estuary and then getting merged with the sea.

All very fitting after meeting cloudgazer her bio says “A daydreamer, loves clouds and the sky. Many interests. love people and words, animals and flowers”

A great day…

Twitter beaching the whale

Geoff — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:57:54 +0000

Very bad news from Twitter,. Twitters USP here in the UK was the ability to send & receive tweets by SMS (Text messaging) as of today, with no warning whatsoever, they have cut of receiving updates here in the UK by text.

Their so called UK number, actually its a number based in the Isle of Man, was outside most UK users calling plans (O2 it was included in the free texts) so most folks would not update their twitters at 20p or so at a time. However, incoming texts in the UK are free so Twitter was a neat way of sending texts to mobile phones from a PC. and also a way of amplifying texts 1 text to many. Alas no more.

The reasons given are cost they argue “Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year” Which doesn’t add up to me as Bulk SMS’s seem to cost between 2p and 1.3p according to Bulksms.org

Its interesting that they did not even offer an option to pay for receiving texts or even severely limit the number of texts per user? We are not all Scobles with thousands of followers.

Their alternative idea of using the internet on your phone is not so hot either, although Twinkle and twitterific work OK on the iPhone they cannot run in the background or alert you in the same way that texting does.

I think they have now left the market wide open for Google to come in with Jaiku, although the omens don’t look good on that front.

I guess the good news is that the twitter service may now be more reliable as users flood away leaving the fail whale beached rather than suspended.

Update:

First people trying to bridge the gap with tweetsms

Meanwhile over on AVC, Fred Wilson an investor in Twitter, wrote in reply to my comment:-

geofones 9 hours ago 1 point

Pity that Twitter has just hammered us in the UK. Just as i was getting my social circle to start using it via text on their phones
Also very poor customer service just chopping of SMS with no warning at all. Perhaps they hadn’t paid their texting phone bill!

fredwilson 7 hours ago 1 point

It will be back. The costs of supplying effectively free texting in the UK just got too high. People were abusing it with DMs

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