After a few months of playing around with Twitter, the service is really growing on me. The ability to have casual IM-ish conversations without any immediacy is nice. Also, having a place to record short thoughts and interesting links that other people might like scratches some sort of itch for me. I wouldn’t want to write up a whole blog post for any of these, but they were all interesting enough to post on twitter:
- A clever proposal from Google: Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP
- Cacheset – a tool for clearing the windows disk cache (useful for testing cold starts).
- Fun fact: the Tesla Roadster carries 3 milligrams of electrons when fully charged.
- The ultimate Airplane on a Treadmill debate resource: www.airplaneonatreadmill.com
- A 728-ton tuned mass damper in a skyscraper
But, I don’t think I’ve reached the critical mass of followers necessary to really unlock the Q&A potential of the site. Having a few hundred technical folks all following each other would be a tremendously useful resource for everyone involved. For example, I’m considering upgrading my desktop to 8 or 16GB of RAM. I’m going to need a new motherboard, processor, and RAM. My normal approach for this would be to spend a few hours on Newegg and the hardware review sites trying to figure out where the price/performance curve is and making sure I’m not getting ripped off. If someone else has done this same research it would be nice to use their information as a starting point, and twitter provides the kind of free-form conversation necessary for that kind of sharing.
To really make this work, you need to run one of the desktop apps so you don’t have to constantly reload the website (I use Twhirl).