Turning Twitter into my friend-feed 

I was doing a little work on a tool I wrote in April 2007 that pushed RSS content to Twitter, and made a simple enhancement: instead of having a Twitter account reflect the content of a single feed, I made it reflect the content of an arbitrary number of feeds.

This let me do something I've been wanting to do for a while, but never thought of using Twitter for -- I set it up to reflect the content of my blogging friends, people like Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Scoble, Sylvia Paull, Andrew Baron, NakedJen, Nicco Mele, Michael Gartenberg, Marc Canter and a few others.

As usual with experiments, I'm not sure if this is going to amount to anything, but I thought it was worth noting. The tool is twitterRiver.root, and the feed it's associated with is friendsofdave:

http://twitter.com/friendsofdave

You may of course choose to follow this feed if you find it interesting, and I will probably release the tool at some point in the future.

PS: Arrington and Calacanis will find it gratifying that this is an aggregation of blog posts not Twitter fire hoses. That's why it's possible to include Scoble alongside Andrew Baron and Scott Rosenberg, without drowning them out.

Julie and Julia 

Just got an email from Andrew Grumet with an amazing story.

He writes: "Julie Powell, who blogged her way through a Julia Child book on blogs.salon.com. Then the blog got her a book deal and some minor celebrity. Now they're making a movie out of it... with Meryl Streep!!! (in the role of Julia Child).

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/

Chris Lydon did a podcast with Julie Powell in his pioneering 2004 series where he interviewed many of the early bloggers.

How newspapers tried to invent the web 

Fascinating Slate article about how Newspapers "tried to invent the web." A lot of it absolutely true -- I thought I was in the "videotext" industry when I started out in tech in the early 80s, so much so that I named my company Living Videotext. I made countless trips back to NY to meet with people at CBS and Dow Jones, to try to anticipate the kinds of authoring tools we'd need, and how news would flow in the new system we were anticipating. That's why I wrote ThinkTank, I thought of it as an environment for authoring and reading news.

I became a netizen on Compuserve's CB radio, and wrote my own bulletin-board software, LBBS, which then became TankCentral, a way for ThinkTank users to share outlines. When we merged with Symantec, I was still hung up on the idea of the outliner as the way of modeling online discourse, that's why I pushed for us to merge with Think Technologies, and also another company which we didn't get a deal with, who went on to become Microsoft Mail. I felt that MORE was the best way to do networking.

Had Sidhu done a halfway decent job with the Mac networking APIs, I am sure the web would have happened on the Macintosh in the mid-late 80s. We spent countless man-months trying to get MORE to network. When it finally happened, Unix was the central OS for our communication future, and low-tech interfaces took the place of Apple's much more sophisticated networking.

You know it would be great to have a conference someday with all the people who tried to make the web happen before it happened. I'd see a lot of old friends there.

One thing I love about Twitter 

Is the way they display individual twits so bold and big.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/1099906420

The other guys should follow this cue.

Apple keynote on Twitter? 

How are you getting the latest news on the Apple keynote on Twitter?

Who are you following?

Here are some of the people I'd watch...

http://twitter.com/appleinc

http://twitter.com/Gartenberg

http://twitter.com/gruber

http://twitter.com/Veronica

http://twitter.com/LeoLaporte

http://twitter.com/ryanblock

http://live.gdgt.com/2009/01/06/live-macworld-2009-keynote-coverage/#sort=desc

Chris Pirillo has the audio. What a trip. You get his editorial comment and the applause is deafening. Hilarious!