that canadian girl

Today, Biz Stone confirmed that Twitter has acquired Summize, which used to crawl online reviews and blog discussions to create summarized reviews of music, movies, books and more. Or so says CrunchBase.

To be perfectly honest, I’d never heard to Summize until Twitter kept crapping out, and Summize was the best option to find out @replies and snooping on what people are saying on any given topic. And now, it’s joined that big happy Twitter family - or at least, 5 out of 6 Summize staff have.

I’m wondering what purpose Summize will serve in the future, other than an improved search and replies tab. Imagine if PR companies turned their megaphone the other way, using Summize as a way to get genuine, candid feedback from the community? Odds are Twitter could find a way to monetise that while keeping the end-consumer service free and accessible.

The web is rife with shouty public relations, it’d be a refreshing change to see companies use honest, simple tools to communicate with their users.

Talios: “I wonder if Scoble could be used as a scalability term. “This application support five 9’s and is fully scobalable.”

Anyone who’s witnessed a typical weekday for me will have noticed my slight addiction to Twitter, a service that simply can’t be explained and has to be experienced.

But in my attempt to justify the thousands of updates I’ve posted on it, I’ll highlight a few amazing ways Twitter has helped me and those around me this week.

It helped me discover how other bloggers felt about being accosted by PR agency, resulting in an article for The Blog Medic called “Marketing Ethics: Ten ways to piss off a blogger”. An ad hoc conversation led to a friend getting a job offer, and the entire conversation up to scheduling an interview call happened over Twitter. It allowed me to find a couple of new contracts for Pepsmedia redesigning blog templates & site launches. Since SXSW, I’ve managed to stay in touch with many of the lovely people I met there without going through the usual “ok I’ll reply to that email later”, where later becomes never. By keeping it bite-sized, Twitter makes it easy to stay in touch. I’ve found amazing support for the idea of SocialMediaCamp in London in July through fellow Twitter users who are interested and can provide skills and contacts I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. A few people offered sound advice with regards to the process to setting up a limited company, again calling on the experience of others. It was the fastest channel through which I heard about Russell’s decision to stop developing Mowser on Monday night. It’s a great way to swap kitty photos with Mel Kirk

So there you go, it’s a business resource like no other, a great communication tool and an entertaining place to have water cooler conversations with like-minded people.

A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

Anyone got a better idea?

This evening, looking at the activity on Twitter, I was fascinated to see how quickly the usual Jaiku crowd had migrated. For those who haven’t noticed, Jaiku was showing a big fat 502 Bad Gateway error for a number of hours before it was replaced by the Jaiku birdie telling us that busted hard drives were to blame for the downtime.

Now, Twitter is notoriously flaky and known for going up and down more than a kid’s see-saw in a busy park in midsummer. Yet, everyone flocked over as the default alternative to Jaiku. If it wasn’t Twitter, it would have been something else. Pownce? Facebook? Seesmic?

In a magpie-like fashion, the web 2.0 crowd will look for the next shiny thing. I know. I’m one of them, and I sure as hell am guilty for chronically creating accounts on every new service, just to promptly ditch it and move on.

So what makes a service people come back to? A site that makes it past the 12-18 months “best before” date? Or are all new web 2.0′ish services destined to peak quickly then die just as fast? Lots more thoughts to add on this, but first, I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks.

I’ll leave you on this thought… What if Twitter and Jaiku were down at the same time? Would the world collapse? Or would everyone’s productivity increase by 200%?

For now, I must go tweet about how sick I am of packing boxes. It’s more bearable than it was some years ago but it still bites.

Tomorrow morning, really bloody early, I’ll be heading off to Barcelona to attend Mobile World Congress, an event of gargantuan proportions (from what everyone tells me). I’ll be blogging as much as possible on the Taptu blog and twittering away*. If I’m lucky, I should have the time to post a few videos to my Qik profile.

If you’re also attending Mobile World Congress, then pop by and see me at the Taptu stand, 7D42, in hall 7 and join me for a coffee or a beer!

[* Thanks to Alex Payne at Twitter, I now have the username Vero, which uber-rocks!]

If you’re going to South by Southwest in March, let it be known. Add yourself to the wiki list started by Colleen and Adele, two Twitterers I’m following.

It’ll be a first-time for me, so I’m open to any opportunity to plan to meet and hang out with other bloggers or Twitterers!

[Update: Durr, forgot the wiki link the first time around. Thanks Mark for pointing it out…]

On Thursday, I got annoyed enough with my half-assed Twitter username, and not getting a response from the team that I made a blog post out of it.

The next morning, I woke up to find a response to my feature request from 6th August from Crystal at Twitter:

So there it is, I won’t get my full username back, which means I’ll continue to miss most @replies unless I change my username altogether. Part of why I’m making a big deal out of this is out of curiosity to see what it would take to get a response, but also because it strikes me as a bit of a lazy fix to truncate usernames of legacy users to 15chars retrospectively. Oh well, I still love Twitter.

As for the tshirt, I’m a sucker for schwag, so hopefully Twitter will send it to me even though I’m not based in the US.

Recently, I’ve been falling in love with inanimate objects. I self-diagnosed I had a problem when I found myself talking to said objects while home alone. Either it’s cabin-fever from having spent the past few days in the house or I’m just losing my marbles. (Generous reward if marbles are returned)

First gadget I’m in love with is my new Senseo coffee machine. I bought it from Amazon about a month ago, and literally picked the cheapest single-serve coffee machine I could find.

In the past, my dilemma with making coffee at home was that, with Andrew not being a coffee drinker, it was difficult to find the right coffee maker. Normal filter coffee machines made too many cups at once, Bodum coffee makers were out of the question because of the amount of grinds at the bottom of my cup (some people disagree on this one, and it’s possible I’ve been doing it wrong all along, but I just don’t like the one-person Bodum), and we live in a small town with no Starbucks or coffee shop within any reasonable distance (thank god, or I’d be very broke).

So I thought for £45 (doh, it’s even cheaper now, it’s down to £35!), it wasn’t a great loss if it turned out to be rubbish. I only tend to have one cup of coffee a day, and only in the morning, so after settling myself down for a day working from home, I made my first cup. And I have to say, it makes great coffee, and takes no time at all.

Before seeing the pods, I was somewhat concerned of the waste I’d be causing, but it turns out that the pods are nothing more than a paper filter, wrapped around pre-ground coffee. While snooping around SingleServeCoffee, I heard about the Ecopad, which was presented as both a more environmentally-friendly solution and a way to use ANY coffee type you liked instead of the few that are offered in pod form. Promptly ordered two Ecopads, but have yet to use them, as I’m still using up the pre-made pods I ordered on CafeCo (Great site, but they forgot to include the little coffee bean stressball in my order!)

I haven’t tried very many coffee machines, but based on my experience, not only is this coffee very drinkable (and strong!), it’s also easy to make and the machine is easy to clean - Just press both cup size buttons at the same time and let it run a water cycle through. So highly recommended for the casual coffee drinkers who might like to cut down on the share of their salary they donate daily to Starbucks.

The second gadget I’m in lurve with these days is Asimo. I think I even had a dream where I was running in a field of flowers holding hands with my best friend Asimo… Ok maybe I should’ve kept that to myself. That’s ok, AWESOM-O-lovers will understand me.

This one stretches beyond just Asimo, though. I’ve been talking to Keira, my little Nabaztag/tag bunny, and she’s been responding. She even sang me “Au pays de Candy” last weekend, and my family knows how much this means to me (put that video online and I’ll have to kill you!).

Mmmmkay, I’ve probably spent more time with non-sentient, robotic little beings this week than I have with real people, and it’s sending me loopy. So of course, I’ll communicate this via my blog, while listening to music via the Airport Express, then Twitter some work colleagues who are at SxSW and check the latest YouTube videos I’m subscribed to…

Right, I think I need to get away from technology, go live in the woods, do some camping and hunt for my own food for a while.