The Ayman and Naaman Show

Quite a few Twitter-related items in the news today. Twitter themselves finally take the charge instead of playing catchup with people building on their platform. The Election Center brings together all election-related updates from all over Twitter and allows non-twitterites to participate in the discussion. Nice! I like the way the messages appear without the need to refresh (definitely a feature to be added on the Twitter account pages). That’s obviously some code and ideas they inherited when they picked up the formerly-unofficial-Twitter-API-provided, Summize.

Speaking of election, Twitter and Summize… In my Rutgers group we actually started crawling the election-related Twitter messages quite a few weeks ago using the Summize (now “Twitter Search“) API. We will probably have a decent dataset (which we will be happy to share) when this thing is over. Maybe, given more time, we can do something more interesting. Dog, please let it be over already. And while you’re at it, don’t make McCain the president (he’s definitely losing on the Twitter follower count).

While Twitter’s election center is pretty simple and nice, one additional thing Twitter could have used in their Election center is Practicalist Ben’s word-cloud visualization for Twitter. Yes, another word-cloud, Ben admits in regret. But a damn nice one. Better than the cloud Twitter are featuring on top of their page, and the idea of deriving a cloud for each keyword (try: Obama vs. Palin), and the higher refresh frequency, and the better visuals… I like Ben’s better.

I hope Twitter wrote the code for the “Election Central” generally enough so that they can launch an arbirtrary set of “centrals” later. Why just election central when you can have the Twitter “Hurricane Ike” central, the Twitter “Olympic Games” central etc. In fact, why won’t let the user set up those “central” sites that collect all the information about their topic of choice? People are already aggregating messages outside of Twitter, anyway.

[Update: Twitter founder said they might do just that to this NY Times reporter].

Bleecker Street

Originally uploaded by aymanshamma

Question to our readers (Frank, I’m looking in your general direction): How come HDTV broadcasts a good 4-5 seconds behind its analog counterpart?

While hanging out with Naaman on Bleecker St, we noticed the bar had both HD and non-HD sets playing a football game. Those watching the game were huddled around the analog screens as the HD signal was brighter, clearer, and 4 seconds behind the live broadcast analog signal.

It was fun to watch them turn to the HDTV for an ad hoc replay, but we were left wondering ‘why such a big delay?’ Is it from the station? Is it buffering packets? Enlighten us if you can…

That actually made me happy. For years I’ve been telling any Yahoo! who wanted to listen that Start Wearing Purple would make a great Yahoo! theme song. While my preaching did not, in all likelihood, have any influence on the matter, Yahoo! just launched a Start Wearing Purple campaign, sporting one of the most beautiful web projects I have seen recently. And the said song in many variations. And more, for example a geotagging-Flickr-bike which I actually had the pleasure to help with (brainstorming with the super-talented folks at Uncommon Projects) before I left Yahoo!. Oh, yes, I did leave Yahoo! a few weeks ago. But more on that later…

p.s. Two positive posts in a row. I’m losing my edge. Ayman, do something.

From about 7 days of use of the latest Microsoft Office software (I guess that would be Office 2007), on both the Mac and the PC (using VMWare), I have to say I am blown away. Didn’t think Microsoft can come out with such lovely software. I love the submenu grouping, the templates and auto-formatting (e.g., for Word tables) and layouts (for PowerPoint). There are some new PowerPoint features like snap-to-align and a set of quite beautiful presentation templates (unlike any of the old boring ones) that make it pretty close to replacing Apple’s Keynote (not quite yet). Just thought I’d say it.

Also, their Seinfeld-Gates videos are funny.

Still as evil as Ayman, though.