technology

Tools for managing Twitter followers

Here are links to two services I’ve begun using to help understand and manage the followers associated with my Twitter accounts. They help you to analyse both who is following you and the accounts that you are following. This means you can then do various housekeeping tasks such as making sure you are following back those following you or unfollowing inactive accounts.

Friend or Follow

This is a simple service that divides your Twitter connections into three types; following: those you are following but who don’t follow you, fans: those who follow you that you don’t follow back, and friends: those with whom you have a mutual connection. It also works with Instagram and Tumblr.

ManageFlitter

This is the more advanced service and breaks you Twitter connections down using several different measurements. For example it looks at the ratio of followers to followed for each connection or can tell you who are the most ‘talkative’ accounts. It can also identify fake or spam accounts. I’ve found particularly useful the list of inactive accounts it provides.

Both services are free but have premium options for power users.

Codes that Changed the World

Codes that Changed the World

Just been catching up with this series from April, ‘Codes that Changed the World‘, from BBC Radio 4 about the history of programming languages. Really enjoyable and accessible so I’m linking to it here. The series is presented by Aleks Krotoski and looks at four key programming languages – Fortran, Cobol, Basic and Java. I really liked the idea that Basic was the punk rock of programming. Also notable how many women were prominent in the story of these languages. The music for the series was very good too – but sadly I can’t find any further information about who made it.

The Web’s 25th Anniversary – a Message from Tim Berners-Lee

Last week it was 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee first proposed to his boss at Cern his idea for what was to become the World Wide Web. A magical combination of concept, technology and imagination that has transformed our lives.

Note that it is not, as far too many people and media organisations have claimed in the last few days, the anniversary of the invention of the Internet. They are not the same thing. The Internet is older and has a different story.

What is inspiring to me is that Berners-Lee, and the organisations associated with him, want to use the anniversary to reiterate and strengthen the principles of openness and access to knowledge that motivated the original creation of the web. To make real the promise that “This is for everyone“.

More at webat25.org

Sadness at the closure of Editorially

I’m really sad that the collaborative online writing and editing tool that I’ve been using, Editorially, is to close.

The team behind it announced the closure in a blog post on Wednesday;

We’re proud of the team and tool that we built together and incredibly thankful that so many of you were willing to give it a try. And we continue to believe that evolving the way we collaborate as writers and editors is important work. But Editorially has failed to attract enough users to be sustainable, and we cannot honestly say we have reason to expect that to change.

I haven’t been a particularly heavy user of Editorially, but my use of it had been growing and it was gradually becoming an important part of my workflow for some tasks. I’d been planning to try and make more use of its collaborative possibilities in the future. So its closure on May 30th is a real disappointment.

I thought it was a really good example of an elegant user interface and was a pleasure to use. So it is distressing that such a well designed tool has failed to become sustainable.

Goodbye Editorially and thank you.