Cat's Pyjamas

Twitter entered my online life in Nov 2007 as part of a course in emerging learning environments. My workgroup wanted to pick a ‘really out there social networking tool that you would not think of using in education’ and take it for a spin. And we chose Twitter because how educational can answering the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters really be?

Well it turns out that not only is it educational, it is addictive. How? In a variety of ways. For instance by helping me find neat tools as today I discovered 3 new tools and Adobe AIR in the space of an hour.

This can happen directly and indirectly.

First an example of the indirect way. Will Richardson (willrich45 on Twitter) is one of my fav bloggers and so one of the people I started following on Twitter rightaway. His tweets appear in my Twitter list. And when the following 3 messages cropped up in a short time, it piqued my interest…

willrich45 (@ – W): Wow…only 27 tabs open in Firefox…slow day! 1H Ago

 

willrich45 (@ – W): @tgelston Nope…what is it? 56M Ago

 

willrich45 (@ – W): @tgelston Thanks for the link…the offline reading looks great! 15M Ago

So I decided to visit the other side of the conversation whichWill Richardson was having with tgelston. Now tgelston is not one of the people I’m following, but I can go and have a look at his tweets:

@willrich45 something between tabs and bookmarks about 1 hour ago from im in reply to willrich45

@willrich45 http://tinyurl.com/yrlqrj about 1 hour ago from im in reply to willrich45

This tinyurl led me to tool no. 1: Read It Later, a promising extension for Firefox which allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest..

A more direct route to a new tool is the imprint that most tools leave within a Tweet,  as in this Tweet from kboutelle

@ATC_tobias FYI – if you don’t already know, Moodle Meet times are CST. 8 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to ATC_tobias

From thwirl? Never heard of it. So I clicked on the link and discovered tool no.2 Thwirl which is a twitter desktop client based on the Adobe AIR platform.

And sometimes it gets even more direct, when someone simply posts a Tweet about a tool they like:

NancyWhite (@ – W): I find twits much easier to read in Snitter – love the images. They allow me to visually scan for people. 1H Ago

And that led me to tool no. 3, Snitter is “Snook’s Twitter”: an Adobe AIR-powered application for twittering. (The tag line is “I can’t believe it’s not Twitter”, har har.)

And the last two apps make mention of being Adobe AIR-powered, another thing I had not heard of until today, but which appears to approach an Apple-like desktop with widgets. This will warrant a closer look…

3 tools and Adobe Air in under an hour. Thru Twitter I’m keeping my finger on the techno-pulse…