twitter

You can do market research. You can study focus groups. You can try to start a Facebook group or roll your own online community. Or, if you are Robert Scoble and Seagate, you can invite your fans to meet you in Times Square for a free hard drive.

Seagate just launched the fall lineup of their FreeAgent external hard drive family. They rented space on the two biggest screens in Times Square to tell everyone about it. And they gave away a handful of drives to some of their best fans.

the @colorwars are taking the twittersphere by storm. it's time to choose a team, kids.

and that team is @theBlackteam

1. pick your team (text follow theblackteam to 40404)
2. show your support... change your avatar to something more fitting, add a banner to your myspace page or blog, etc.
3. visit theBlackteam home base for resources and more info.

to get a ribbon that looks like mine, you should be able to copy and paste this code into any post on your blog/website/myspace. if that doesn't work, add it to your header or footer.

how to add your own ribbon after the jump.

i think twitter is a huge experiment in human interaction. what does a group of users do when given a service (for free) which does essentially nothing, with no real direction or constraints on its use? they play. yesterday i got to witness a twitter microevolution firsthand.

a less known feature of twitter is the ability to track certain phrases. whenever someone posts a tweet containing that word, you will see it even if you're not following the user who tweeted. the most common example is "overheard". in fact, twitter has been telling its users to "track overheard" for quite some time. judging from the lack of tweets they must have disabled it. until yesterday, that is.

sometime around noon, all hell broke loose. twitter began sending out updates to all the curious users who had ever tried to "track overheard". most of them had no idea what was happening. so they start responding:

one of my favorite things about twitter is that it doesn't attempt to place bounds on, or even really define, how the service should be used. keeping track of my gas mileage is just as valid a use for twitter as letting people know when i post to my blog.

@dacort has a really spiffy script for generating twitter stats.

i ran it on mine... it's not to hard to guess when i usually go to sleep :-)

check out my twitter stats after the jump.

and all i can think is, "but i had something interesting to say!"

i'll prob'ly forget by the time it's back up.

i mentioned my newfound twitter addiction a couple of weeks ago. my addiction has now been upgraded.

if you haven't been using Remember The Milk, you should be. it's an online to do list with all the functionality you'd expect from a Web 2.0 app.

today i hooked the two of them together. RTM now lets you interact with your tasks by sending Twitter messages. they'll send you messages back when tasks are due. you can mark 'em complete, or postpone 'em via messages.

because Twitter likes text messages, i can now text my productivity to my Remember The Milk account too. i think this just replaced my phone's to-do lists and calendar in one fell swoop, and i've only been using it about an hour.

i guess the upside is that this will prob'ly increase my productivity instead of just fueling my addiction to Twitter. and it's a good thing i signed up for unlimited texts.