Unless you have client access to their API, URL shortener tr.im is no longer shortening URLs:

tr.im is no longer accepting URL shortening requests via its website. May we respectfully suggest that you choose one of the many other wonderful alternatives available.

Please understand that this does not affect any software that has tr.im available within it. tr.im’s API is available, and redirections are working normally.

TweetDeck used to support tr.im, but dropped it after the alleged coronation of bit.ly as the Sort of Official URL Shortener of Twitter.

(Via tr.im user Elizabeth A. Terrell. Previous tr.im coverage here and here.)

This juxtaposition, snipped from TweetDeck, just struck me as funny:

Got that, old people?

We’ve had URLs both Tiny and Huge. Now we have ShadyURL, which says: “Don’t just shorten your URL, make it suspicious and frightening.”

The Twitterati will just love that.

(Via http://5z8.info/smut_a5a0d_creditscore Miss Cellania.)

Cobb questions one particular benchmark of life online:

According to Facebook, I have 501 friends. (According to Levi, I have 501 jeans.) According to Dunbar, I can only maintain real relationships with 100-150 or so of them. If you want to know the honest to God truth, I think I have about 3, excluding my immediate family. A friend is somebody who comes whenever you call, according to me right now. According to Twitter, I have 150 followers, but I inflate. On none of these scales do I come remotely close to Tiger Woods.

Cobb being a sensible fellow, I figured I should check out Dunbar, and this was the first thing I found:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

I think my own capacity for such things is probably a bit lower than that. I can keep track of people fairly well, after a fashion, but I’m also a great fan of distance, as in keeping a certain amount of it.

And life online, I think, demands a separate tier of social relationships, simply because it presumes, for that distance, a different vector. There’s some serious question in my mind as to whether an obsession with someone 1100 miles away counts the same as an obsession with someone 11 miles away. (Numbers chosen for illustration only: do not assume a Great Secret can be revealed with a couple of Google Maps.)

Then again, anyone can follow anyone on Twitter for any reason; Facebook expects you to verify your friends. And I have five times as many Twitter followers as Facebook friends. On the other hand, I’ve been on Twitter five times as long.

Countering the conventional wisdom, Marcel allows that Twitter might not actually be a complete waste of time:

I’ll use it for links, or observations too pithy to blog. (Because, you know, one mustn’t have an unpublished thought…) But I’m not using it on my cell phone. People will just have to wait for status updates until I get back to the house. And how does Twitter (d)evolve? Next year Amazon will present a new service where users just grunt at each other. “Yo! Huh? Lookit. Ungh! Heh.”

They’ll have to pay Glenn Reynolds royalties for at least some of that.

Eventually, there will be a smartphone device that attaches directly to the synapses, bypassing consciousness completely. With a little bit of development, the Two Minutes Hate can be whittled down to a matter of milliseconds.

For the second time, I have been tapped, so to speak, by Mark Peters’ Wordlustitude for having come up with a neologism, and this time it’s from a tweet:

“Potential #newsok enhancement: Chirpiness control for Wendy with Wimgo. Right now, she’s got it up to a Spinal-Tapezoidal 11.” (Jan. 17, 2010, Charles G. Hill, Twitter, http://twitter.com/dustbury/status/7891370317)

Wendy, incidentally, defended herself: “just being me.”

(First recognition here.)

Addendum: Supplemental verbiage tacked on.

It has finally come to this:

And by “finally,” I mean several months ago:

If there was any doubt that Twitter is a massive, global cultural phenomenon, we bring you: Twitter “Stalkings”, now available on Etsy.

Tel Aviv-based Gabby Nathan of TattooSocks.com tells us several hundred pairs have been snapped up since the company started selling the $13-$23 (shipping not included) nylons last August.

I’m guessing there are no takers for a Fail Whale design.

A letter from out of the past (December 1987):

I am interested in making a list of the most common passwords chosen by users. I’d like to see if anyone knows of any studies that have been done (I vaguely recall hearing of at least one such study). We are writing a program to check for poor passwords on our systems.

Which drew the following response:

At one time “Susan” was reputed to be the most popular American choice. I recall a British clipping citing dogs’ names as popular passwords. However, since many prudent system managers now insist on randomly generated pronounceable passwords, your study might be dated.

Today, sysadmins and such prefer unpronounceable passwords if at all possible. I’d been online for about three years back in 1987, and I never quite understood the assumed popularity of “Susan” as a password; presumably it was simply a reflection of the fact that it was almost all guys on the wire back then.

Apparently, though, we’re over Susan: this 2008 list of the 500 worst passwords doesn’t mention her at all, and Twitter won’t block a registration using “Susan” as a password, though they’ll block “Angela” and “Samantha.”

In the midst of this week’s FMJRA, which incidentally does not include this item, Smitty comes up with an idea for a technical improvement:

I need to write a cron job to go through Sitemeter and scrape this sort of hilarity more often.

Devoted as I am to SiteMeter — I actually pay for their numbers, which I suspect is a rarity in blogdom — I submit that better details are going to make no difference if you’re not getting all the numbers in the first place.

Which, I believe, we’re not. WordTwit, a WordPress plugin that automatically sends a tweet every time a new post is made, counts pretty consistently 20 to 30 clicks on each new post from this site; SiteMeter invariably shows one or two arrivals from twitter.com. This means, of course, that folks are arriving from sources other than twitter.com — but SiteMeter isn’t always recognizing them. (Unfamiliar user-agent?)

And then there’s the ongoing feed issue. Since the first of the month, I’ve had a shade under 7,000 visitors, as counted by the Meter; however, this site has served up 10,700 copies of the feed. Not all XML transactions represent actual readers, of course, but clearly some people are reading this stuff and not being counted. I experimented briefly with embedding the actual SiteMeter count code in the feed, but this didn’t seem to work very well. (Perhaps Jscript and XML don’t play well together.)

Finally: does anyone comprehend Technorati anymore? I don’t.

Someone wandered into the shop office, peered over my shoulder, saw the TweetDeck screen, and commented: “A lot of women.”

“A ‘lot’,” I noted, “is in the eye of the beholder,” but given the relative ease with which I am propelled into vaguely-related activities, later I went down through the list of people/places/things I follow on Twitter and counted the recognizable females.

The tally: 135 out of 249. Which, if you’re keeping score, is 54 percent. Not an overwhelming majority, but clearly a majority.

I wonder if I should have tried to argue that, well, the ladies talk more.

Entertainment Weekly, listing the 100 Greatest Whatever of the last ten years, mentions Twitter at #65:

Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy once you get the

Which, if I’ve counted correctly, is 139 characters. (Actually, I didn’t count; I dumped it into TweetDeck. Full disclosure, y’know.) Doesn’t quite kill the joke, but you knew someone had to check this out, right?

Possible defense: Due to the interaction between column width and right-justification of text, “yourself,” as it appeared in the magazine (page 81, issue #1079-1080), was broken between two lines, and was duly hyphenated; maybe that accounts for the 140th character.

Then again, if you’re gonna pick nits, you might as well go for the nittiest.

The arrival of the Twitter List will mean — well, nothing useful, really:

Ultimately, lists are nothing more than filters, built-into the service instead of achievable through TweetDeck or other clients. They’ll further devalue the following/follower numbers, and give numbers-gawkers something else to track. That’s the extent of it.

As a TweetDeck user, I haven’t had much occasion to play with the list function, which is called Groups therein; this is mostly because I couldn’t think of any reasonable criteria for setting up groups. Ultimately I outlined — but never actually implemented — the following scheme:

• Women I lust after greatly;
• Women I lust after somewhat less greatly;
• Guys.

And TweetDeck’s Groups function, I suppose, will be ultimately supplanted by Twitter Lists, simply because they’re supported by Twitter. I have noticed that TweetDeck, since 0.31, has dropped support for tr.im and has added features for bit.ly, which has been anointed as The Official URL Obscurer Of Twitter.

Meanwhile, I muddle through the best I can, without Groups or Lists or What-Have-You.

Earlier this month, I was somewhat critical of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation’s approach to its Twitter account, dubbing it “the path of least assistance.”

Anything I may have had to say, however, pales in the light of this startling revelation:

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation just paid Saxum PR $7,500 to create and “analyze” a Twitter account. There’s no word if ODOT also bought the clear coat rust protection, extended warranty and a credit report monitoring service, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

Seriously, $7,500 to create a Twitter account and get 500 followers?!? That seems kind of steep. Hell, it only took us five minutes to create a fake ODOT twitter account and then analyze that it’s much better than ODOT’s official one.

And now you know why the Crosstown Expressway replacement is going to cost more than a billion dollars.

The Oklahoma Department of Transportation has opened a Twitter account, which, says the AP, “plans to post traffic and construction updates,” which is theoretically handy if you’re traveling. Of course, if you get your updates sent to your cell phone, you might be the subject of one of those updates at some point, but that’s another matter entirely.

Then I took a look at their timeline, and they get major malus (opposite of “bonus”) points for using HootSuite and ow.ly, which means any links they dish up are going to be framed. Worse, the traffic updates I checked were identified as, and indeed turned out to be, identical to the Traffax stuff they send out via fax, in the worst way: they’re PDFs of the original faxes, and if there’s one thing worse than a PDF file on a mobile, it’s a PDF file in a frame on a mobile.

But what am I thinking? This is ODOT. This is what they do. I just wonder how many computers they tore up during the development process.

(Suggested by Shawn Wright.)

I concede that I’ve worried a bit along these lines myself:

The more I see of Twitter and our push toward putting all of our lives on the internet, I wonder if fun moments at bars with friends really matter if they’re not captured on a digital camera and then immediately posted as a Twitpic. Can we really taste how great that pork sandwich is from Ko if we’re so worried about typing in to the hundreds of strangers following us, just how much the line was worth the wait?

What I’m looking for, I think, might be the parameters of this range: at one end, events too mundane or unimportant or uninteresting to tweet, and at the other, events sufficiently transcendent that trying to fit them into 140 characters is sheerest folly. Unfortunately, I have a surplus of the former, and a marked dearth of the latter — unless, of course, I’m completely misreading things, which is always a possibility.

Still, weighing everything on this scale exacts a price of its own:

I can’t help but think that we’re no longer capable of feeling in real-time. Rather, we are so caught up in our own self-importance that we don’t even know how to function without hiding behind our screens. Case in point: what can you really say when you meet someone at a bar who doesn’t take the opportunity to talk to you beyond a casual hello, but then later, (some way, somehow without a name or number), tracks you down on Match.com based on your picture alone and sends the message — “Was that you at the bar on Sunday night? Want to go out sometime?”

The likelihood of something like that happening to me is vanishingly small — if you arranged all the unlikely things I could theoretically find in my inbox someday, “Want to go out sometime?” ranks slightly below “We’re prepared to offer you a book deal” — but I have noticed in myself a tendency to stay behind the screen. One of the reasons I took all those road trips was to force myself out of that hiding place for brief periods.

But given my compulsion to document things as my days presumably wind down, I don’t want to find myself wondering “Did that really happen? I didn’t write anything about it.”

Is Twitter worth a billion dollars?

If it is, then this is the time for some highly-dubious speculation. The last tweet I put up before this post was this one, which is numbered 4132710518. Up to that point, Twitter has presumably had 4.1 billion tweets. I calculate from this that each tweet — what else have they got? — is worth at present about 23 cents, and that I’ve been responsible for a whole $440 of that putative billion.

You’re welcome.

As mentioned before, I use WordTwit to send an update to Twitter whenever there’s a new post; as a bonus, it creates a shortened URL from this very domain, although it can be configured to use, say, bit.ly.

I was noticing that about 10 percent of my Twitter followers actually do click on those new-post links, which got me wondering how much response I get to random stuff I tweet. So I went ahead and got an actual bit.ly account, just to track those links. The result: about 10 percent of my Twitter followers actually do click on those links.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this: the Web site draws maybe 500 a day, and I have a core of about 50 regular commenters.

Maybe I can’t answer that for myself, but this is as good an explanation as I’m likely to steal find:

What am I using Twitter for? Not there to sell anything. Don’t have anything I created that I want you to see. Just want to know what other people out in the world are doing, seeing, eating, creating. I have to stay here and do my own everyday stuff, but my mind would often rather be out exploring.

Then again, she put this on a blog. Go figure.

Actually, I had two motivations here, one of which was to see if it would even work here, since there are plenty of WordPress plugins in widget form that do much the same thing, and this much-modified theme I’m hacking away at is officially not “widget-aware,” which means I can’t drag stuff onto the sidebar and expect it to work. Hence, Twitter’s own little box, which worked on the second try. (It technically worked on the first try, but the positioning was Highly Dubious.)

The other one? I’m still trying to make one up find the right words.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit much to hope for. But Dr. Ellen Brandt has noticed some encouraging trends:

Equal numbers of Followers and Following: More and more often, we see users whose Follower-Following ratios are just about dead-even, meaning they are shunning the concept of following Celebrities or Big Media pundits and choosing to connect more naturally and equally with potential friends the way they do on Linked In and Facebook. There are now some applications that allow you to see if any Followers have recently dropped you, in which case you can easily drop them, too.

I’ve tried one such application, and haven’t been able to get it to work. That said, I’m among those folks with about the same number of followers and following. (Dr. Brandt, last I looked, was literally dead-even, so she manifestly practices what she preaches.) I do follow a handful of celebrities. Then again, I tend to define “celebrity” as “anyone more famous than I am,” which makes for a pretty broad spectrum. And I of course follow Diablo Cody, who is a pretty broad, but that’s neither here nor there.

Reluctance to Retweet — Or Blindly Recommend — Pieces of Information On Somebody’s Say So: As a lifelong member of the Media, I find it absolutely appalling that anyone should agree to Retweet a link to an article, blog, or any other kind of commentary without first reading it themselves and agreeing it is worth recommending. I don’t want people to Retweet my articles and blogs unless they like them and believe they might be informative and enjoyable to others. And I would not consider Retweeting other people’s work I didn’t like and find interesting. Thankfully, more Twitter users are beginning to agree.

I tend to practice the same rule for retweets that I do for long expropriations of other people’s blog material (such as this): when possible, add value. If you had a good one-liner, I may RT it as is, but if there’s room (light editing is a consideration), I’ll tack on something of my own. And I won’t RT a link unless I’ve actually looked at it.

Refusal to Follow Someone Without Making the Choice Oneself: It may be profound heresy to say so, but I think Twitter’s popular Follow Fridays are essentially silly. It’s bad enough that Twitter’s one- or two-sentence profile bios tell you next-to-nothing about candidates you might want to connect with. But at least they tell you something. (Buffy the Cat’s says she’s a astrophysicist who plays the clarinet and reads Proust.) More Twitterers are passing on the chance to add folks to their Following roster because that fella with the beard in Pensacola — how the heck did he get into my network? — says they should.

I’ve picked up a handful of followers on Follow Friday, I think — at least, there are some people out there who have willingly promoted my name — and I appreciate the gesture. But I have the same sort of ambivalence about #followfriday that I have about blog awards and such: I’d almost rather be one person’s absolute favorite than be widely acknowledged as, um, acceptable. But maybe that’s just me.

The 160-character bios, though (and why not 140?), are indeed fairly (read “extremely”) limited.

Shunning the Concept That the More Followers You Have, the Better Off You Are: Not only is Twitter ineffective when viewed as a popularity contest, but networks patched together randomly can easily harm their amassers. Take a look at virtually any politician’s Followers list on Twitter, and you’ll find crowds of Ladies of the Night, Tooth Whitener salesmen, Stock Tip purveyors, and Trump Network groupies. Opposing politicians could have a field day publicizing these lists, if it weren’t for the fact that theirs are probably just as bad.

Indeed. I’ve purged my own list several times. Fortunately, I’m far enough below the radar that I attract relatively few skanks, soi-disant social-media experts, and skanks. (There are a lot of skanks.)

Dr. Brandt, incidentally, deserves kudos for this delightful post title: I Don’t Like What You Wrote. You Should Be Poisoned, Garrotted, Stabbed With Stiletto Heels, Thrown Off A Tall Building, and Have Vultures Eat Your Liver. Some of us can only aspire to incurring that level of wrath.

First there was dawdlr, which updates your status like, whenever.

Now there’s Woofer, utilizing a Twitteresque interface for true macroblogging: unlike Twitter, which has a 140-character maximum per update, Woofer has a 1400-character minimum.

I admit to putting up two Woofs, and, given my general objections to halfway measures, they totaled a whopping 6,760 characters. (The determination of exactly at what point characters begin to whop is left as an exercise for the student.)

Of course, this whole concept is based on the traditional motivation Because We Can. It has, so far as I can tell, no actual connection to Twitter.

You may already have your very own stalkers followers:

[T]here were a few people whose Twitter pages, if existent, I would check obsessively. Who am I talking about? I’m referring to those very-not-ugly guys whose names are scrawled all over random papers on my desk. The ones who I daydream about instead of being productive.

Sound creepy and stalker-esque? Probably because it is. And it seems that the only reason anyone would want to know what a specific person was doing at every hour of every day is if they are a creepy stalker who is obsessed with you or really really desperate.

Now I’ve had my fair share of people telling me how dangerous having a Facebook page is and I’ve gotten plenty of stories about random men who stalk women’s Facebook pages. I could care less. My profile is set on private and I don’t add creepers. I think I’ll live. But despite my annoyance at all this stalker preaching, I can’t help but think that Twitter is probably the home page of every stalker in America.

I figure anyone obsessed with me is “really really desperate” by definition, but I’m reasonably certain that no one meeting that description is among my 160 or so Twitter followers, not counting the 50 or so I blocked for reasons of suspected spammage.

Doc Searls, with an assist from the Incredible String Band, comes up with a metaphor I must deal with:

For a long time I harbored a fantasy about writing a history of radio, titled “Snow on the Water.” Now I’m thinking that metaphor applies to social media as well. Rather than geology, it’s an ocean over which tweets fly and fall like flakes.

Blogging is geology. Its posts may be current and timely, but they accumulate like soil deposits. You can dig down through layers of time and find them. Each post has a “permalink”. What are links to tweets? Temp-o-links?

Especially in view of this startling revelation:

I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes my point. Not many people expect anybody, including themselves, to revisit old tweets.

I have no idea what that number might be, either. Last night I went back through about 800 of my own tweets before realizing that geez, I just went back through 800 tweets. And I’m somewhat flummoxed by the fact that in seven weeks I have put up over a thousand examples of semi-effervescent evanescence, though I console myself with the thought that probably 30 percent of those were generated by WordTwit, which sends up a tweet (and a nice, short URL off this very domain) for every blog post.

Still, all the blog posts, the 6100-odd here in the WordPress database, the 7000 produced before that in Movable Type, and whatever was going on here before that, remain readable in the general sense. (Whether they’re readable in an aesthetic sense is yet to be determined.) And I suppose I could archive the Twitter stuff, were I so inclined, but I can’t think of any good reason to do so. Yet.

The reports of tr.im’s death (such as this one) were greatly exaggerated:

We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.

We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.

This is not to say that things have changed, exactly: Twitter still swears by bit.ly.

And, just for the record:

This was not a public-relations stunt. At all.

Never thought so, myself.

The twelve-bar blues? Forget it. Now we have the 140-character opera:

The Royal Opera House is to stage an opera created through social networking site Twitter. Members of the public have been invited to submit their “tweets” online — messages of up to 140 characters — which will form the new libretto.

The first scene of the as-yet-untitled work has already been completed and features a man who has been kidnapped by a group of birds.

Excerpts will be performed at the Royal Opera House in September. The opera will be set to original music by composer Helen Porter along with some more familiar opera tunes.

Olivier Messiaen was not available for comment.

And remember: it ain’t over ’til @thefatlady tweets.

It’s curtains for URL shortener tr.im:

Regretfully, we here at Nambu have decided to shutdown tr.im, the first step in shutting down all of our products and services within that brand.

tr.im did well for what it was, but, alas, it was not enough. We simply cannot find a way to justify continuing to work on it, or pay its network costs, which are not inconsequential.

Nor is all that data going to help:

And, the data that tr.im generates — the hottest links that people are sharing right now — is all well and good, but everyone has this data. tr.im gets hit by countless bots every day farming this data to create and operate websites such as tweetmeme.com. So, everyone has this data, meaning it is basically worthless by itself to base a business on (as bit.ly and others are attempting to do) at least in our humble opinions.

Nambu’s Eric Woodward, who pulled the plug, blames Twitter:

He laid most of the blame for tr.im’s demise on Twitter, which made bit.ly its default shortening service last May. “They’re the default, and even if we’re better, it won’t matter, so what’s the point?” he said. “As soon as bit.ly was made the default, the game was over.”

Nambu faced the same uphill battle with its Twitter client. “They give Tweetdeck and Tweetie and others priceless free and targeted advertising,” Woodward said. “We’re not going to invest the same ad dollars to get that market share, because those [who get the favored positioning] have larger margins. So there’s no point in proceeding in that business either.”

All existing tr.im links will continue to be redirected through the end of the year.

Twitter’s been unreachable for the last 45 minutes or so. I expect full-scale rioting in the next fifteen minutes.

(Except, of course, from Dawn Summers, who is too cool for that sort of thing.)

First tweet ever.

Findings after fourteen days and change:

• Twitter is indeed a time sink, but not so much of one if you manage things properly. TweetDeck helps.
• TweetDeck’s notifier beep is almost identical to, albeit shorter in duration than, the noise emitted by my desk phone at the office, so they’re almost equally ignorable.
• About 25 percent of my New Post tweets get actual clicks.
• This has not, however, garnered any increase in blog traffic, since the people who click on them tend to be people who were already reading me.
• The follower count seems to have leveled off at around 130, which is about a third higher than I anticipated. Around a hundred of them seem legitimate, as distinguished from potential spammers.
• I’m following about a hundred, which is not quite the maximum I can handle, but which is certainly a lot.
• Time from first tweet to first actual follower: two hours, 26 minutes.
• If I’m followed by someone I don’t know, the first thing I look at is the following-to-follower ratio. Should it exceed 10, I get suspicious.
• In the past two weeks, a dozen people have told me they didn’t want anything to do with Twitter. Ten have since signed up.

I assume, of course, that once my presence on this network becomes more widely noticed, all the cool kids will migrate elsewhere.

Finally, is anyone else following both Queen Rania and “Weird Al” Yankovic?

It’s all here:

LizzieB:
@JaneB If I could love a man who would love me enough to take me for a mere 50 followers, I should be well pleased…

LizzieB:
@JaneB …but such a man wouldn’t be sensible & I could never love a man who was out of his twits. LOL

JaneB:
Oh @LizzyB, it is my ardent wish to marry 4 love. Love, respect AND dual laptops would be most agreeable. #iamdullbutpretty

CubicleSurfer:
Does anyone know what #Bingley is and why it’s suddenly the no. 1 trending topic?

No zombies, though.

(Retweeted @syaffolee.)

Cursebird is a “real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter.” Out of kindness to your workplaces, I’m not going to mention the top ten terms here, though you can pretty much guess where the F-bomb doth fall.

(Via BPD in OKC, who “swears like an enthusiastic porn star.”)