is it just me

There is much going on these days at Twitter. After they introduced the new lists feature last week and a spanish version of Twitter, today they roll out a limited access to the new re-tweet feature. I can’t wait to see it in action and implemented in Artefact-Actor-Networks – re-tweets will be the next step of mooring Twitter in the Semantic Web. Hopefully they will allow the geolocation for single tweets soon, which would be another great step in a better connected and semantically annotated web world.

The lists feature obtained mixed feedback. Some people like it that they can put their followers in lists according to their location, community, language or any other criterium, others are saying it was a snapshot of the Twitter team. If you look at the profile of Tim Berners-Lee you’ll see he is listed nearly 1200 times. A lot of these lists are  related to technology, the WWW and semantic web. Unfortunately (or luckily) there is not the One technology lists where anyone you get started (mainly because such a list is pure imagination). On the other hand, if you look at the lists that Stephen Downes is on, you’ll get 90 lists, all dealing with education and learning in the web 2.0. Like so often each coin has to sides and we will need to sit and wait what Twitter lists will be useful for. For me I like it that now I can sync my lists with several tools and the Twitter website – a great gain in mobility and consistency.

If you are developing applications built on the Twitter API maybe the experimental Twitter Streaming API is interesting for you.

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Here ist the 3rd and last presentation I’ll give at the ICL 2009 conference in the Special Track on Mashups for Learning. It’s about a tool we implemented to track the dynamics in communities on Twitter and treats the CoP at the Edumedia 2009.

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These are my slides for the presentation at MASHL09 Special Track at ICL 2009 Conference later today. Let’s see what the Mashup experts tell me about the idea of connecting several tools in the context of software engineering…

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It seems like Twitter heard my call for the implementation of a proper ReTweet API. In their  API announcement group there is an early developer preview of the functionality and the API wiki already holds useful information for this feature. I think this step will make Twitter even more competitive in the semantic web.

Thanks for this Twitter.

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In the last couple of months some initiatives started that deal with microsyntax and semantics in Twitter. I am working on the concept of Artefact-Actor-Networks (in german), an approach for connecting social networks with artefact networks. The most important thing in the upcoming years are semantics. They will allow us to aggregate, re-assemble and re-use artefacts in a new way, based on their content and context.

For me Twitter became to my main mean of communication because it’s lean, easy, mobile accessible and so fast. Twitter is like a soap opera – you don’t need to watch every episode to not lose the plot. If you attend meetings the whole day, you just look at your timeline and review the last one or two pages, if the other stuff was important you will find it somewhere else very soon. If people wanted to communicate with you, they sent you an @-reply (they call it mention now).

As Steve Wheeler discussed,

[Twitter] employes a number of simple and abbreviated filtering features such as #hashtagging, @names, RT (Retweeting) and DM (Direct messaging) which many social networking tools do not have.

Twitter seems to be a good step in direction of the Web 3.0 aka Semantic Web. Twitter stores some nifty semantic relations for tweets, such as in_reply_to_status_id, in_reply_to_user_id and in_reply_to_screen_name. But they do not store the status_id of a retweet. If I do a retweet (RT) of a foreign tweet it would be great, if Twitter would store this semantical information as metadata. Thus I created an idea at getsatisfaction.com that asks Twitter Inc. to implemented this feature. If you like my idea please vote for it here

Image source: www.redbubble.com

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Ich habe unser Paper für den E-Learning 2.0 Workshop auf der diesjährigen Delfi eingereicht. Mal sehen, wie das Konzept der Artefact-Actor-Networks bei den Reviewern so ankommt.

Soziale Netzwerke spiegeln Kommunikationen, Kooperationen und lose Bekanntschaften in vernetzen Gemeinschaften wieder. Mit Hilfe zahlreicher Metriken lassen sich dann Aussagen über die Zusammenhänge, wichtige Personen oder Kleingruppen in der Gemeinschaft treffen. Weiter lassen sich Netzwerke aufspannen, welche Dokumente, Blogeinträge oder Wiki-Artikel miteinander verbinden. Ein solches Netzwerk wird als Artefaktnetzwerk bezeichnet. In diesem Papier stellen wir den Ansatz der Artefact-Actor-Networks (AAN) vor, bei dem versucht wird soziale Netzwerke mit Artefaktnetzwerken zu verknüpfen, um semantische Aussagen über die Verbindungen von Personen zu vielfältigen Artefakten treffen zu können. Dazu stellen wir zwei Anwendungsfälle für AANs vor und diskutieren die spezifischen semantischen Anforderungen und die entstehenden Mehrwerte durch die Existenz der AAN.

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