twitter – Page 12 – DECISION STATS

R and SAS in Twitter Land

A tale of two languages ( set in Twitterland)

Everytime I post to the R help list, if the email contains the three words S.- A – S , I get plenty of e-spanking from senior professors and distinguished Linux people. On the other hand when I mentioned W-P-S I got dunked by the Don of SAS Global himself. We geeks are so passionate.

Here is some new stuff on Twitter for the R /Open Source community.

1) I manually made a list of

best R blogs,
R help lists ( on Nabble since Google Groups banned R help archive),
Twitter Search for #rstats ( general search word for R)

I then copied the RSS feeds of each of the above.

2) I then went to www.twitterfeed.com (uses open Id) and linked a new Twitter Account to these RSS feeds

3) I then tweaked the layout and added #rstats before each post to the new R resource http://twitter.com/Rarchive

If you are a tweeter you can follow it here http://twitter.com/Rarchive and never miss any R news going forward.

ps- I also did the same for sas for http://twitter.com/sascommunity

UPDATE

#rstats helps in SEO in Google since Google uses Twitter search as well. Existing best R search engine is http://rseek.com
In any case it is too late to change now since this is more like a automated firehose. Now you can use #rstats as well additional keywords to get more searchable useful stuff.

NOTE______

http://twitter.com/sas belongs to a guy who is wondering who is trying to hack his twitter account

, well you can check the screen shot below

Screenshot-Sky Sutton (SAS) on Twitter - Mozilla Firefox

Twitter Channel for SAS Users

Dear All,

I just created a twitter channel for everthying about the SAS language. (independent of SAS institute as of now)

That’s right -using RSS feeeds, keyword filters, key bloggers AND tweeters and using http://www.twitterfeed.com this is a firehose of information on everything SAS- includes Google Search and Twitter Search. I am still modifying it before transitioning it – Scandavian Airlines messes up some results for examples.

Anyways if you like to follow tech tweets this is one more-

http://twitter.com/sascommunity

terrific Tr.im trims Tweet time

Okay, the title of the post was bad attempt at a haiku. But the tr.im plugin for Firefox is incredible and helps you tweet interesting reading in matter of seconds. More importantly it shows you the analytics behind how many actual users went to that particular tr.im url. While Tr.im is yet another url shortening service like the tinyurl.com and bit.ly services, what makes Tr.im stand out in a terrific manner are the following innovations –

1) User friendly Firefox Plugin that can be downloaded from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10232/

See the screenshot of the Tr.im panel which conveniently opens on the left. The Statistics can be seen in the separate window ( note the Twitterfox application which is also open on the right – that is a separate application)

2) Analytics for tracking the locations, of people who click on the url and whether they were human or a bot.

3) Seamless Twitter integration even for multiple accounts

So it seems like you will run out of excuses to run away from Twitter soon, and all the additional social network data being generated could really help the next generation of response and online propensity models.

Tr.im that!!

Twitterfox- Twitter for the busy people

Here is a nice firefox plugin for people who want to start using Twitter without losing too much time. It sits nicely in one corner and gives gentle tweets – think of it as a big instant messenger, big in terms of number of followers and need to use twitter and busy in terms of time, but very nice and comfortable. The screenshot says it all and all you need to do is start using Firefox and install this from http://twitterfox.net/.

Heavily recommended for non users of Twitter who are curious on what this thing is all about—-

Screenshots courtesy� myself and the gentlepeople at http://twitterfox.net/.

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter.

This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets.

Install TwitterFox

If you want to get updates of TwitterFox, feel free to follow @TwitterFox.

New Features and Changes in Version 1.7.7.1

Supported Firefox 3.1b3

Added a context menu to each tweets which has:

Copy

Re-tweet

Open this tweet in new tab

Delete tweet

Auto extract is.gd and bit.ly links.

Added Mark all as read menu item to main context menu.

Increased contrast of background color of read/unread messages.

Added in-reply-to-status-id parameter for status update.

Added da-DK, th-TH, vi-VN, ar-SA, ar, and kw-GB translations.

Bug fixes.

Does Twitter reduce Blogging ?

One more post on Twitter you may sigh, but wait. I am examine Twitter as an economic complementary� or substitute product to Blogging and trying to come up with a mathematical proving rule to dis prove the Null Hypothesis-

Twitter does not affect blogging of individuals or communities as� a whole. or does it ?

Twitter reduces blogging because

Twitter is easier to do. Creating a blog is different ball game.
Tweeting is two way and interactive while Blogging is mostly a one way broadcast.
People respond to Tweets and re tweet them much more than they comment or forward blog posts. This is due to the inherent design of the softwares.
Twitter is chaotic, but so is real life in which human brain processes different information from people like collegues, family, friends and sorts them. Blogging has a structure which helps the reader more than the writer
It is easier to tweet and faster to get your point across than in Blogging.
People allocate a set amount of time for social media activities and personal branding. Now this may be elastic but not totally so. Hence the rise of twitter time in people’ lives would mean lesser time to read and write blogs.

Now to a more quantitative study.

We get statistics from Technocrati – State of the Blogosphere and add in WordPress Stats to boot.

(credit -http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ )

A chart of total WordPress.com blogs since� launch:

(credit- http://en.wordpress.com/stats/ )

Note new signups can be seen for WordPress.com at http://en.wordpress.com/stats/signups/

Fatigue could be a reason why Twitter is hotting up while Blogging sees steady state growth.

The following figure from Technocrati’s 2008 report sums it best.

http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/

But if I compare June 2008 numbers of Blogging Frequency with the 2007 report – I am not able to compare the numbers

(Source -http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/the-how-of-blogging/ )

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html

It seems that Blog posts did get a boost with the 2008 elections and the current low traffic may simply be due to a lack of issues in Blogosphere. The rise in Twitter traffic is also due to creation of applications by third party providers and this trend has led to Twitter being the number 3 social media site.

Based on the data, it does not seem Twitter reduces Blog posts to a significant degree. After all Twitter is also a great medium to disseminate or spread the word on good blog posts.

It is simply too early to say that Twitter is reducing blogging though there seem clear trends along that line.

What about you ? If you were a blogger, is� your blog post frequency affected by your tweeting activities.

How to spend less time on Twitter and get more work done

If you are interested in using Twitter, can�t spend too much time and often wonder �Now What� after sending an update —-this post may be right for you.

If you think Twitter is less important than reading email, this may help change your perspective.

If you don’t use Gmail and wont use Twitter, then this is an irrelevant post and you can skip to the end of the post)

Enter the Twitter Gadget

http://www.twittergadget.com/

What does it do-

It embeds Twitter in a handy margin next to me. So I can do my emails ( which are on Gmail by the way) and also tweet from time to time.

Take a look. Read more here – http://www.twittergadget.com/how_to_install.html

(Note from Ajay–

Names of Twitter Applications begin with Tw (Tweet this tweet that) the same way names of iphone applications begin with an iNote, iCare.

Fortunately names of Facebook applications do not begin with Fac�.but you need to look harder to find where applications are in the new Facebook layout. The new FB layout should be called Flackbook but seriously�)

Tweets, Viruses and Bubbles

Twitter seems to have some design flaws which may not have included the possibility of security concerns in its innocence.

A potential security concern is the automatic url shortening that twitter users use to send links to each other , you don’t know where you are being re directed to until you are there.

Identity theft is another concern – twitter users almost revel in sheer joy of opening up with un protected tweets.

A possible solution is having two twitter streams – one protected and personal while the other is for personal branding and promoting yourself.

This risk is enhanced with the sheer explosion of auto bots that feed off rss,automatically follow ,automatically send messages that say hello thanks for joining me. How do you know who the other person is ?

Inability to segment your followers into people I want to share this stuff with and people I don’t want to share this tweet with is thus a data concern ( unlike Facebook which does have multiple privacy levels for potential contacts)

I refuse to recognize that there is a recession going on.

The sheer explosion of twitter app developers see www.twitter.com/downloads (just like the now not so chic Face Book application bubble) means that the techie world at least refuses to recognize the recession.

Innovation ,creative destruction and the invisible hand of economics are still working even if the CEOs and Politicians have frozen.

Application developing bubbles are better than real estate bubbles as long as venture capitalists and website owners remember 2001 (Nasdaq)

On the 1 Billion refused by Twitter reportedly –The inability of Twitter to upload, share pictures, share videos without diverting and losing traffic means they better start think slivers of stock for funding even if they don’t want to sell the whole company yet.