Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Web
Two new Twitter ideas that miss the mark
Everybody says there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter, but sometimes a ridiculous Twitter app comes along to make me wonder whether that's true. Right now there are two of them: Tweetstalk and Twollow. Tweetstalk lets you "stalk" a Twitter user, reading his or her tweets without formally following. Twollow automatically follows anybody who posts the keywords you specify. I'm conflicted about these two services. Tweetstalk is a Firefox plugin that adds a "stalk" button next to the follow button on users' Twitter pages: click it to subscribe to their tweets without following them. This doesn't do anything you can't do by going to a user's Twitter page and reading it. But if you intend to do it on an ongoing basis, you might as well let him or her know you're doing it by following.
Twollow could be useful for business Twitter accounts, and marketers who want to reach out to people who are discussing their clients. Depersonalizing it by making it automatic hardly seems productive to me, though. Why not use search.twitter.com to see who's talking about a topic, and decide whether to follow them yourself? Otherwise, you might end up following some really lame people, based on only one of their tweets.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
