Twitter… It can be useful.
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Personal, Technology, Web, opinion
Many people see twitter as simply being nothing more than the most recent incarnation of online narcissistic community. This may be true, as it is littered with banal tosh, however it can indeed useful, as i found out myself when my iPhone inadvertantly disconnected from the o2 network. Usually when such a problem occurs, I; and I’m sure many others do, once ruling out it isn’t a local problem, try to contact the perceived source of the trouble, in this case being o2. But the problem with this, you often find either a slow response, an inadequate response and, of course, an unnecessary cost via the form of premium phone lines (which if you want to avoid paying I recommend Say No to 0870) The next port of call is naturally a search engine, but this is inefficient as search engines update on slow cycles. The solution of such dilemmas used to be, and of course still are, found in the form of newsgroups or forums, but the flaw in these are that they are specialist in single areas of interest so every time a new problem arises in a different area, a new one is required. The beauty of twitter is that is just a stream of up to date information.
To find out that the problem was not just something happening to me I simply searched, via twitter search, for the keywords O2, iPhone, and Signal. Within 0.04 seconds, or so the search engine claimed, I had been provided with information which quickly confirmed that it was not just a national but international problem. With Jonathan Ross in LA complaining of no service, people in Hungary for the f1 grand prix doing and loads of people in the uk from Lancaster to London doing likewise, the problem occurring was clear from just from the first page of results. In my mind Twitter, while choosing; in the post at least, to ignore it’s bad points, truly demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing in a way that is genuinely practical for all.
*Apologise if I’m a bit rusty, had Internet problems at home, and I don’t quite fancy blogging via my iPhone.
Tags: 0870, Crowdsourcing, Information, iPhone, o2, Search Engine, Social networks, Technology, Twitter
Macbook Failure
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Technology, blog
I first must apologize for being leaving it an awfully long time since my last post. My macbook, my main computer, decided it didn’t want to boot after doing a system update. I could have blogged from my iPhone or dusted off an old computer but instead I spent many a night trying to get the problem fixed. Basically after a software update my hard-drive wouldn’t boot, and as the CD drive in my macbook is completely dead I had to try and find a way round the problem, which i eventually did.
I intend to post much more frequently and to go back and cover a few topics of thought which I was going to post, but due to my recent outage, never got round to. (Three of which come to min: a recent incident at a bar, the film In The Loop and the European Elections)
