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May 18
A short story about usability
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Apr 20
Twitter as social computer
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techAU troubles - techAU.tv complains, new domain is born
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Announcing the launch of techAU.com.au
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Mar 27
TechAU repurposed as Aussie tech blogger aggregator
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Mar 20
Are aggregator sites getting a free ride?
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About the Blog

I'm a web designer and web application developer in Melbourne, Australia. If you find anything useful, leave me a comment, and if you need web design, development, or accessibility and usability consulting, contact me! Cheers.
Twitter: joshsharp
Posts tagged twitter:
Twitter as social computer
Sunday 20 Apr, 2008
Twitter is a funny little thing. It's one of those services that has been pared back to its most basic, essential ingredients — asynchronous chat/messaging. Or is it microblogging? Or lifestreaming? Whatever you'd like to call it, it provides the one service, and that's it. No file sharing. No 'social network' (well explicitly, anyway).
It actually sounded incredibly banal to me when I first heard of it. It seemed far too basic to be interesting, and once I did get into it, I found that it didn't really provide me with much. But as noted by Scoble, the service's value is in its users. Once I started adding people to follow, I started to get addicted. It gives you an insight into people that you don't get reading their blog posts, and an added benefit of finding out about news as it happens.
But the way in which Twitter lets people interact has provided other interesting developments as well.
