rich.carey

So, this weeks rant is about the infamous Twitter and how i don’t understand what it does.

For those of you who have been living under a rock without an Internet connection, Twitter is a social networking website similar to that of Facebook or Myspace but lacking functionality. Launched in 2006 as a “micro-blogging” website for mobile devices it has many-a-famous face on their including actors such as Ashton Kutcher (most followed celeb.) and earlier this year it was even rumoured that the Queen was a user (later dismissed).

The thing is, who REALLY uses Twiter? If we take a step back and analyse Facebook or Myspace’s features you can see that they serve as useful websites for social interaction with the Photo albums, Games, Walls and Status updates (Plus chat facilities). Twitter is basically a massive pile of donkey-balls which operates like a giant “status update database”  where users post uninteresting items of news like:

I would like to point out that this is only partially made up, the actual transcripts are a lot more frequent and 10x duller! What annoys me the most about Twitter is that you don’t comment on an article, you simply update your page with a comment referencing the fore-mentioned article:

10:05am @bbcnews <pointless comment>

Quite hypocritically if you look on the right hand pane it is clear that i have a Twitter account, allthough my reasoning was to reserve my username should twitter ever become useful.  It’s not that I hate Twitter, its just that I (and i know i’m not the only one) is getting fed up of the media using Twitter as a valid resource for news and also every man and his dog microblogging about every interaction said user has.

Finally i did get a chuckle out of Mr D. Camerons statement on the radio the other week “Too many twits, make a twat”

Note:  I have actually found a small use for twitter, which is to let items ‘Tweet’ (Like the man who’s house tweeted) who’s account is private anyway, taking the “social” out of  ”social networking”

Note2:

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Rich (Admin) General, News, Reviews, Websites google, review, Twitter

Joongel (www.joongel.com) is a meta-search-engine which allows you to search multiple resources within a particular category. At first the engine can seem a little cluttered and you will need the Flash plugin to use it, however you will quickly adapt and will never want to go back to plain and simple ‘one site at a time’ searching!

For example, i shall be moving to Eastleigh (If all goes well with a house viewing) when I start IBM so naturally i wanted to research the area! Google (quick stat: used by 65% of people) was my first choice and returned map information, a wiki and a couple of Eastleigh based shops. Using Joongel under a general search i managed to return the same results from Google, videos about the area, blog posts and Flikr results – just a small selection of its features!

You can specify what you want the engine to search for, for example if your looking for a torrent you simply specify ‘Torrent’ as a type – You can even specify ‘Cooking’ as a major category (No more dodgy results when you Google ‘ how to achieve the perfect roast’ “)

In conclusion: Time saving tool for those who are doing specific searches. Cons: Not as fast as Google to return results.

Note: allthough not being online long the site has had nearly a hundred unique visits which isn’t bad considering there’s nothing on here overly interesting! (and if tyou are one of the few returning visitors the site says i have, feel free to sign up for updates!)

Rich (Admin) Reviews, Websites flash, google, search, stats, website