Just a small housekeeping note: I decided not to renew the domain name for a little Twitter experiment of mine, so Plovr now lives here (it scans Twitter for people looking for help, and lets you respond if you want).

Just a short administrative note: you can follow my weblog on Twitter, if you prefer. This has been true for awhile but it just occurred to me that I never actually told anybody.

I wanted to do something with Twitter, so hatched plovr. It scans Twitter looking for people who need help, and helps you help them (you can reply via the plovr Twitter account, without belonging to Twitter yourself, or you can click through to Twitter and lend a hand as yourself).

If you have a minute, check it out, maybe help a stranger while you’re there!

your.flowingdata: Collect Data About Yourself via Twitter. Like Nicholas Feltron’s personal annual reports (and his related service, Daytum).

Every time I hear something about Shaquille O’Neal he just sounds like a fun guy. And as of today, he is responsible for the best Twitter story to date.

Stephen Fry on Twitter:

However, I love to see your tweets: I love your wit, your kindness, your observation, your occasional mean streaks of bitchiness, remorseless logic and your long memories that pounce on my all too frequent inconsistencies and rashly made promises. I love how Twitter confirms my all too often assaulted belief that most humans are kind, curious, knowledgeable, tolerant and funny. The absurd constraints of the 140 character tweet seem oddly to bring out the best in wit, insight and observation.

I still don’t get Twitter (perhaps not having a cell phone and living in the sticks puts me at a disadvantage?), but Stephen Fry makes me want to keep trying. He’s the consummate Twitterer, it seems to me.

I’ve linked up Dolores Labs before (when they tackled The Trolley Problem). They do fun stuff employing the anonymous army at Amazon Mechanical Turk. Their latest is getting Turkers to judge twitterers on how smart vs. interesting they are.

P.S. From there, I happened to stumble on Cursebird, “a real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter”, and another DL project, FaceStat, where you can upload your photo and have random strangers make snap judgments on you. From here, a fairly amazing coincidence: I get almost no blog-generated e-mail, but within an hour of finding FaceStat I had an e-mail from a fellow who put up a similar, simpler site where you can have strangers guess your age based on your photo. Strangely addictive, and I suck at it. I’m usually off by six years or more.

I’ve been trying, trying, trying to understand Twitter’s appeal from the outside looking in, which ain’t gonna work, according to this excellent NY Times piece of a few months ago (if nothing else, read the section where he talks about “ambient awareness”). I still wasn’t sold, but then I found out that Stephen Fry twitters, and makes it interesting. Is there anything that guy can’t do? Anyway, here I am, if you want to drop in. Can’t imagine this experiment will last very long solo!