Twitter has become an integral part of both work and play for millions of its users. It’s insanely useful and highly addictive. So addictive, in fact, that psychologists are starting to talk about it as a legitimate problem for some, in the same way they do  World of Warcraft and other online addictions. For smart, rational people like you the chances of becoming obsessed with Twitter (or anything else) are low – but it can be a distraction and hinder productivity. Attention deficit disorder has become epidemic in the 21st century, and Twitter is yet another diversion that feeds the plague.

A colleague recently asked me how to manage Twitter so that it remained useful, but was less of a distraction. “How do I use Twitter productively” is also one of the top questions I am asked when speaking about social networking. I’ll give you the list of recommendations I usually respond with – but note that these are more aimed at personal Twitter users and do not necessarily apply to using Twitter as a business, for example; (more…)

My parents are now on Facebook. Which is cool – it’s probably the best way to share pictures of the kids with them. But the days of it being cool and edgy to engage with social networks is over. It’s just another cog in the wheel now. When your bank and great aunt joined Twitter it stopped being rad and became just about as exciting as a telephone. Not that phones aren’t exciting – but it’s more about what you do with them now that matters. Same with Twitter.

I’m not sure why I wrote the above paragraph. It was supposed to be an introduction to a story about a new service called Web 2.0 Suicide Machine that lets you use API connections to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social network services to lock yourself out of them and delete all your contacts. Commit online social hara-kiri. Pretend that my introductory paragraph gave you a compelling reason to want to do that. Which it doesn’t. (more…)

The Nokia ‘Search for N’ competition is over and we have a winner. Anthony Lourandos was the first person to tweet the correct answers, according to the Twitter timeline, and will be one of the first people on the planet to get a new Nokia N97.

The correct answers were: touch, widgets, QWERTY, 32GB and Ovi Store. Anthony’s answers are good enough to take it. Enjoy your N97 dude =)

Thank you to everyone who entered. I wish I had something to give all of you.

Nokia is giving away 97 N97 smartphones worldwide to celebrate the launch of the device and has decided to give one of these to a Twitter follower of mine. If you win it you’ll be one of the first people in the world to own one. And I’ll be jealous.
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Darren Smith recently posted on Facebook with a link to twtapps – developers of Twitter applications for everything from polls to travel and event scheduling tools.

The applications are lightweight and make the most of Twitter-integration. They also don’t require your Twitter password, respecting privacy and security of users.

I created the following poll to test out their twtpoll application. Come to think of it, these results will be interesting…


I like the clean layout and simple, intuitive usability of these applications. Well done to twtapps. File this one under ‘why the hell didn’t I think of that?’