As I said on Friday, Friday was IBM Hackday 5. I didn’t really explain what HackDay is, but if you’re not familiar with it, Kelly has posted a good description.
I made all my excuses in my last post, so with them out of the way, here is my hack.
The idea is an old one – but I’ll summarise it again here.
The hack was to extend the twitter.com website to provide additional context for people’s tweets.
Every twitter user can maintain their own personal dictionary of terms, that describe their personal significance when they use them in tweets. When one of these terms is used in a tweet, it is highlighted in some way, and if the user hovers their mouse over them, the full description is shown in a pop-up.
For example, my twitter dictionary might include entries like:
- Grace – my three-year old daughter
- Faith – my baby girl
- Hursley – IBM Hursley Park, the site where I work
- SYA – a youth charity that I started and am now on the board of trustees for
The idea isn’t to say what something means (why try and replace people’s ability to use Google?) but to say what it means to the tweeter.
Other uses could include to provide ‘disclosure’. For example, when I see posts by James Governor, I often see a few lines at the end such as:
…IBM is a client. RedMonk runs Google Docs. Google and Salesforce are not clients. We don’t currently use Salesforce apps…
But in the twitter world where thoughts fit into 140 characters, there isn’t the space to include this sort of context with every tweet. So James’ twitter glossary might include entries like:
(more…)
I am a big fan of Remember The Milk (RTM), the online to-do list manager. It’s one of the few sites (like flickr) that I’m happy to pay for.