DISQUS

Some of my best work experiences ever have been in those last few bug-squishing hours. Isn't it an incredible feeling? Like being part of an orchestra with no conductor where everything just happens, or part of a complex basketball play where you can't even see the guys you're passing to.

I started capturing IM transcripts of moments like these a few years ago and have a bit of an archive going. Have always wondered if there was value I could mine from them, like a book, a lecture or a blog post.

But so far, when I let others read them, if the reader wasn't there at the time, it doesn't seem to matter how much pre-story explanation I give, the magic isn't apparent.

However, the people who were involved in the transcript are taken right back to that moment and enjoy it immensely.

So lately I've been wondering if there's something in the idea of a web service that 'plays' IM transcripts, using the time/date stamps for timing with some play/skip/replay controls. Let people who were original participants annotate it with their reflections on it with hindsight. Maybe add soundtrack and editing controls.

Anyway, probably only a tiny, niche audience of fellow web development people who'd be interested in it, but I'd love to be able to do it.

Yes, absolutely agree that Twitter needs to scale and add payloads. Also absolutely agree that Flickr is on the edge of having its lunch stolen in mobile. But really, in a takeover-offer-paralysed Yahoo!, where are you going to get the dev resources?

For me, the one thing I like most about Twixtr that I don't get elsewhere (inc. Twittergram) that you don't mention is geotagging. Twixtr seems to do a pretty fair job of guesstimating my location with each image i upload from my iPhone. That's very handy. I don't usually bother geotagging my pics cos I don't have a way to do it while shooting on my camera or my cameraphone, and usually can't be bothered when it comes to uploading them to Flickr.

...here's a fun game: restrict a Google search to the public Twitter stream and then search on a phrase such as "so horny"... bet the Twitter users in question didn't think about this before they were so open about it!

There are some problems with Twitter as a news delivery system.

Unlike a typical newspaper CMS platform, there's no undo and no delete with Twitter - try to edit an incorrect assertion, try to retract an opinion and you'll find you can't.

You can publish a follow-up post, but between Twitter users' attention flitting from one stream to another and Twitter's frequent downtimes, there's a good chance your follow-up post won't be seen, especially at times of high usage.

Unless you change the default preference, all the content you publish on Twitter is republished as a public RSS feed, indexable by search engines and republishable by anyone with an RSS widget. Plan on tweaking that series of twitterings into a pro story later and selling it to a magazine? Good luck: the magazine already has it if they really want it.

You retain the copyright to the content you publish on Twitter, but you have to delete your Twitter profile - and all the associated content with that profile - to remove just one message. Big decision to make after you've built up a following of thousands of users.

If you were to publish something incorrect, and needed to retract it to avoid legal action, you'd have to hope the entity taking the action was satisfied with a follow-up retraction post, since the only way to remove your post from Google would be to delete your entire Twitter account and content, and lose all the hard work and time you'd put into building a following. Not a great choice to make for an up-and-coming news blogger.

Here's my recent post about how Twitter really needs to lift its game on privacy and content management soon.