Categories
Interweb Musings Writing

Blogging Ten

firstblogpost

Another anniversary today! 10 years since I’ve started blogging! I’ve changed so many blogging platforms over the past 10 years, bought my own domain, my posting frequency waxing and waning constantly…

Even though I don’t blog as much now as I used to, I can never let it go completely. It’s the first platform I used to put a little tiny blip on the World Wide Web, and it’s definitely not something I can easily give up, not when it is this meaningful.

So, here’s to another ten good years!

Categories
Interweb Musings Technology Writing

7 years of Twittering

2014-02-20 21.40.26

On this day (and time), 7 long years ago, I signed up for a little application called Twitter. Social Media, social networking, microblogging were not terms that were popular in those days and it was Twitter’s explosion at SXSW in 2007 that caught my attention and made me decide to try it out. It was an odd thing to use, as it forced users to be much more succinct than blogging, and you were not essentially communicating to any specific person like SMS services.

I was here,

  • Less than 1 year after the official launch on July 2006.
  • Just a little over 1 year from their founding date of March 2006.
  • One month after their wild popularity at SXSW in March 2007.

My Very First Tweet! #notmymostintelligenttweetunfortunately

firsttweet

Tweeting now is a lot simpler, cheaper (to non US / UK residents) and more meaningful than it used to be back in the early days (for me, at least). As an early adopter of this service, I’ve seen how Twitter can impact our daily lives and our social interactions, especially how it changes the way we accept how information is shared with us.

  • SMS shorthand

Unfortunately, I’m going to start with one of the annoying things that I believe is in part correlated to how users adapt to Twitter formats. Many of the newer users may not be aware that the reason why you are restricted in the number of characters in each tweet really goes back to how it was during the early days. There were 2 ways to send a twitter (as it was called in those days), via the web / via SMS to a UK based cell phone number. The 140 character limit that Twitter has is largely due to the restriction of characters in SMS. It had to be short to be able to be sent via SMS. This brevity means that if you want to say something a little longer than 140 characters, you had to get creative. So ins8 o typin in eng, u typ in shrthd so u cn put mre in a twttr dan norm. n typ lol so u cn luff.

[rant/] I remember I spent quite a bit of moolah on Twitter then, as we had to pay (~S$0.60) to send a tweet as it could only be sent via SMS to a UK number! For folks living in US or UK it was cheap, as they had local numbers to send to, but for all overseas users, each tweet actually cost us physical dollars. Plus, you get an SMS every time someone you follow tweets. So if you follow 10 people, and each person tweets 5 times a day, you would get 50 SMSes a day! It was so annoying that I even remember tweeting something like “People who twitter 3 times in a row needs to have a life.”. Imagine how invasive Twitter used to be without these mobile apps. [/rant]

  • Popularising of URL shortening services

This is definitely a result of Twitter. Even though URL shortening services were already available (Remember TinyURL?), their use was very much limited to sharing on IRC or for easy remembering. With the character limits of Twitter, if anyone wants to share links, it will be impossible to comment, as some article links just take up the full character limit. Thus services such as TinyURL became extremely useful. Why I believe Twitter is a mover in the URL shortening service world is really because TinyURL was launched in 2002, many years before Twitter, and it monopolised the URL shortening service ‘industry’. It had no competition, because usage was low. Then Twitter came about and with the character limit, the need for such services grew so much that many more blossomed, each domain getting shorter (bit.ly) and shorter (t.co). This is basic economics of demand and supply. Without Twitter users’ demand, TinyURL could be the sole supplier for more than 5 years, until that product could no longer satisfy the users’ needs (TinyURL’s shortened URL is 25 characters, yet bit.ly is 14 characters).

  • Instant information

What I mean by this is that before Twitter, we got opinions from blogs, news sites, forums; we got social updates from friends by texts, emails, phone calls, and meetups. With Twitter, there is instant updates about every thing they are doing, from what they are eating, reading, or watching; where they are going to; how they feel about the last meal they had… In the beginning, we didn’t know what to do with Twitter, so we over-shared.  It became a platform for regular people to be ‘famous’ by shouting out to the world. Then regular folks started getting into conversations with people they followed. People started sharing news and information about the things that are happening around the world. 2009 was an incredible year for Twitter. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) realised the brand enhancing power of Twitter and ballooned to 1M followers. Barack Obama won the US Presidential Election. Michael Jackson died. These news were spreading like wildfire and for the first time since the launch, Twitter found itself a new path. Even the company realised it, and changed the question asked to “What’s happening?”, instead of the previous “What are you doing?”

Whatever the type, these are all information. News, gossip, sightings, tips, all information that we can get as soon as the incident happens. There is no waiting a day for the newspapers to write it up, or the bloggers to draft a post analysing the situation. Everyone can be a reporter, posting updates on the fly. If you didn’t read it on Twitter when it happened, you would be getting ‘old’ news, because everybody else would have (I’m exaggerating, of course). This is sometimes to the point if you hear a rumour on the streets, your best bet would be to search Twitter. If it’s word on the streets, you bet it was tweeted first.

 

In any case, with this Anniversary, I became curious about how Twitter has grown over the years and their major changes and milestones. I can’t say I’ve watched Twitter grow up, as the cost put me off a bit, till I got a smartphone & Twitter got an app; but then work piled up, and the excuses went on… Now that Twitter has grown to the mammoth it is right now, and I’m back more actively in various forms, I went back in time to see what everyone else is saying on the internet. 

Dr 4ward posted a really interesting infographic of Twitter since it officially launched. I’m a bit curious why his number of registered users state that it’s 1.3M registered users in March 2008, when my Twitter ID seems to be #3,189,741… I’ve assumed that the Twitter ID is allocated sequentially, but a variety of possibilities could account for Dr 4ward’s numbers, such as deleted / suspended accounts, engineering test accounts etc. Though I have to say, the numbers are quite massive. Possibly Twitter did a major account wipe-out of dead accounts?

Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) from The Next Web created a new Twitter account to look at Twitter from an entirely new light.. I absolutely agree with what he says about handles deviating from the person’s names. When we were first asked to create a handle, all we could think of was just using our names, or variations of our names.. There were a lot of @jack @crystal @mhofner around.. Nowadays, you get more complicated handles

Newsweek hits the nail on the head back in 2007, when the article discussed Twitter, the lure and the potential.

More history of Twitter infographics on Mashable (@mashable). I love infographics!

Ah.. the good old times…

Categories
Interweb Musings 中文

再見了,我都不用的無名

無名要關啦。

wretch1

我記得無名開始紅起來的時候,我已經有了自己的部落格,這平台就都一直被遺忘著。記得當初開個無名也不過是因為要去看看吳青峰的網誌。只是看著看著也覺得無聊便漸漸遺忘這個地方。今天偶然得知無名終於要關閉了,就上去看看我以前的無名到底長什麼樣子。

最近的一封竟然是2008年!這期間發生了好多事情啊,真的是歲月不留人,轉眼5年就這樣子過去了。這5年我也成長了不少,但卻並沒有我希望的成長幅度。接下來的5年只好更加加油了。

wretch2

再見啦,無名。

Categories
Interweb Technology

I’m a registered Facebook Developer!

HAHAHA. Actually, all I wanted to do was to be able to auto publish my blog posts to Facebook, but the plugin I wanted to use requires me to create an app in Facebook. It was all surprisingly easy and I was done in a couple of minutes.

So now, this should work. 🙂

blog-facebook-developer

Categories
Interweb Musings Translations

Random JCNet Pride

I’m just randomly feeling proud of myself today. Not for my groundbreaking ability, but because I was, at some point in my life, involved in www.jay-chou.net. The people I have met and kept in touch from there is just incredible. There’s even a Whatsapp chat group now with some of the Singaporean JCNetters, and we go out every so often. I’m floored every time I think of what we have accomplished in and with JCNet.

Before anyone starts to think I must be this massive Jay Chou fan to even join a Jay Chou forum, I am not. A friend of mine was and she raved about how fun the forum was and how they don’t all just talk about Jay. So I decided I was going to try it out and see what it gives me. To my absolute joy, it was the best decision I ever made! There was camaraderie, it was fun and entertaining, and it taught me a whole lot about internet etiquette. I always smile when I remember how we would throw sarcastic remarks on trolls until they crash and burn. BURN!

This was how it looked like when I first joined, back in 2004.

jcnet2

Personally, the best thing that JCNet was known for is their news and translations. We had all the best translations of Jay’s lyrics for every single album, in Han Yu Pin Yin and English. Our translations went far and wide, pilfered left and right, all over the internet. Folks would email our web administrator and demand for the translations if we are a bit late. We were the first place folks who did not understand Mandarin came to as soon as Jay released a new album. We were known. 🙂

Translating lyrics was always hard work and it would never have happened if we didn’t have translators who were dedicated to what they were doing, even though it was entirely voluntary. I’m so proud to have been able to contribute to that team. All the lyrics translations you see on this blog were done by me, and posted on JCNet. Google the translation for 青花瓷, you’d still find my work all over the internet (Over 250,000 results by searching the first line of the English translation). This simple thing just makes me want to puff up my chest and walk with a smug smile on my face. It’s not a fantastic translation, but it was the best I could have done at that time. It’s something like a legacy that I’m leaving in the internet world.

Good things never seem to last, and when Jay stopped producing enough news-worthy albums and all the news and information we could find about him was really the same piece, recycled, the forum sort of died. Plus, most of us just, well, grew up. We were no longer University students with plenty of time on our hands. We graduated, got jobs, got married, had kids! Life outside of JCNet caught up and that phase of our lives just faded into non-existence.

This was just before it was taken down.

jcnet1

Now it’s just gone.

jcnet3

I’m a little sad, but it had its good times and I guess I’d rather have it go when it’s still good, than let it die a cold sorry death.

Categories
Interweb

Hwanhee

Because this is my blog and I have the right to post anything I want. Who cares if you roll your eyes, throw up or even stab yourself in agony. MWAHAHAHA.

The even better thing is that he’s actually older than me and not some too young dongsaeng that makes me feel like a pedophile.

HHSONY DSC  hwanhee+6 HH2hwanhee

Categories
Fangirl Interweb

The Evolution of Devon Sawa

He was so cute in Casper~~

devon-sawa-casper

Who is this man???

devon-sawa-now

 

Categories
Interweb

Google Now Has Analytics-ish Reports for Your Personal Accounts

Yeah. I know it’s all about big data right now, but this is a little too much.. Google Now Has Analytics-ish Reports for Your Personal Accounts.

Categories
Interweb Technology

Preferred Paypal member

That’s me, apparently. How exactly did I get elevated to this status is beyond me, yet I received this in my email today.

 

I did, however, checked my paypal account and voila, there it was, the banner that tells me I’m privileged.

The PayPal Advantage website doesn’t state how to get into the program, but gives some vaguely dodgy answer like “You will know if you’re eligible if you receive a special invitation from PayPal“..

However, according to some old PayPal Advantage website, I’d need to spend $5,000 in 12 months to qualify? I’m 500% sure I did not spend that kind of money.

Hope this isn’t some sort of scam, though there really aren’t many benefits that I’m actually reaping from this elevated status. The program offers priority customer service ( I get to CUT QUEUE!) and faster dispute resolutions. I have used none of them.

Maybe that’s why I’m a priority customer.

 

Categories
Interweb

A Gorgeous Look at How Books Are Born

I love books, even though they are not the easiest things to bring around town A Gorgeous Look at How Books Are Born.