Twitter

I've been getting into this web 2.0 thing since I was laid off in December and have been using the social networking sites as a job hunt assist. It has enabled me to get my personality out there for prospective employers to see.

The most fascinating site I have come across is Twitter. The idea is to keep in touch and inform with a 140 character message with friends and followers. With this said, I don't know if Twitter will help me obtain gainful employment, but it is a universe unto itself.

Below are some of the most interesting sites that work in conjunction with Twitter. If the world has been flattened, Twitter brings the ends much closer together. I've got two accounts, my primary is:
http://twitter.com/jonkolbe
and another which is:
http://twitter.com/bocasquare for my neighborhood. The latter is a sociological experiment to see the usefulness of instant communication between neighbors - I have just started it so there is not too much going on. Besides I have to find a job or there will not be any point to it and I'll need to start another for a different neighborhood :-O

What I really love about this new way of communicating is that the computer code is open. This means that any programmer with a good idea can use this open source code and create something great.

The links below are some of the more interesting that I have found:

The site below is a map of real time tweets (messages).
http://twittervision.com/ and http://twittervision.com/maps/show_3d for a 3D version.


This site enables you to find out if people who follow you are friends (where you both follow each other) or just followers.
http://friendorfollow.com/

This one shows a "tweet cloud" which is a compilation of words in the one line biographies of the people who you follow. It actually gives you a pretty strong indication of the interests of the person you search for. The link below is for my account, but if you type a user name in place of "jonkolbe" at the end of the url, it will give you a cloud for that user. GREAT STUFF!
http://twittersheep.com/results.php?u=jonkolbe

This is a chart of hot topics people are talking about.
http://twist.flaptor.com/


This is all for now, but I will update as I find new interesting concepts.