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It rose up like a storm. Building up slowly in intensity and growing larger and larger until it seemed like the whole world was being covered by twitterers.

People were tweeting from China, from Africa, Australia. Every few hours you’d see another country wake up…or head to bed. Time zones didn’t stop meetings, they just gave you an estimate of how long you’d have to talk.

One of the best parts of Twitter was that you could receive it over instant messenger programs like G-talk or Yahoo. Running it through an IM meant that you could easily receive updates without having to open your browser. Even better, it meant you weren’t stuck at 140 characters if you really had something to say.

I chose to use g-talk with it. I love g-talk for it’s size anyway, I can easily put it in the corner of my screen and see chats while I have my browser set at just a bit smaller than screen size.

Chats would fly by at every hour of the day or night, and often I’d look up from a web page and catch an interesting comment that I’d have to add my two cents to, or see a friend post a link that they liked and have to check it out. It was one of the only things that made Twitter manageable if you had more than 40 or 50 friends who liked to send messages.

One of the best thing about Twitter was that it was real. A while back someone asked on which social media sites are you real friends with people. For me, there were only 2…Twitter and StumbleUpon. Both give you real people without all the extras to hide behind.

Twitter had many lovers. For most of us, it didn’t take very long before we started thinking twitter was the greatest thing since Don Juan. Twitter even made it easy to share with friends. The tweets that flashed across my screen were often riddled with @ symbols, showing that conversations were being carried on.

Perhaps it would have been better if Twitter had died with a bang. Like social martyrs, the sites that go out quickly are remembered and missed. I still miss SixDegrees and it’s been gone since 2001. In fact, I’d join today if it ever returned.

Instead, Twitter is dying with a whimper, a sob, and a sigh. No, it’s not on it’s last gasps yet…not quite, but if it doesn’t make some giant changes soon, it will be. And I’m not entirely convinced that it hasn’t already turned terminal.

There is a promise made between people and a website. The promise that if we invest our time and effort into it, then the site will do its best to meet our needs in its specific area. Twitter seemed to do that, and do it well. In fact, many people were making plans to move their company business communications to twitter. Even more amazing, people were suggesting on their own that twitter come up with a way to charge us. And we were willing to pay.

Twitter was awesome during the first political debates. I left the TV off and followed real people who were actually there instead. Tweeters were impressed and we talked about how much we love twitter. But then we saw signs of things to come.

Twitter went down during Steve Jobs speech. It struggled during conventions when people were trying to tweet the events.

Soon, it didn’t matter if anything special was happening, twitter was going down at least weekly…and then daily…and now it’s not surprising at all to see Twitter’s “Fail Whale” and the poor birds trying to lift it up. Or to miss notifications that people have added you as a friend. Or even to not be able to get your direct messages for 3 days and no notification e-mail to see what it says (that happened to me and it was a business message no less).

There are other messaging sites out there. They’re good, but they’re not Twitter. And although I still love Twitter, I’m not going to try to run a business on it. It’s too risky now. Twitter’s already been down this morning. How many more times it goes down today remains to be seen.

No, I won’t leave Twitter. I’ll put up with it’s whimpers, sobs, and sighs. But it won’t be a monogamous relationship anymore. I’ll turn to other sites to provide me with what Twitter’s taking away.

So, you can still look for me on Twitter, I’ll be there, but I’ll also be on FriendFeed, brightkite, Plurk, Plaxo Pulse, and Pownce along with the other social networking sites. And I’ll be on Ping.fm trying to manage all the sites that it takes to replace one Twitter (if you want to try it, the current beta code is “tastyping”).

So what do you think? Is Twitter in its last days? Will you stay with it and bring friends and business partners to join? Or is it time to declare it dead, bury it and move on to if not bigger and better things, at least sites that will be more stable?

By Guest Blogger: Marc Berry

Marc and his wife write real talk about all areas of relationships, from sex to abuse to pure love and the language of flowers at The Incurable Romantic. Marc is also the author of techne-eikon, a blog about Web 2.0 and Internet Marketing. Follow Marc on FriendFeed and Twitter.

You can also follow Teeg on FriendFeed and Twitter.

FriendFeed for the Socially Inept - Part 2
Read Part 1

Once you have your friends listed in your FF profile, you can start adding the services that you use. The available services are:

* Amazon.com
* Blog
* del.icio.us
* Digg
* Disqus
* Flickr
* Furl
* Gmail/Google Talk
* Goodreads
* Google Reader
* Google Shared Stuff
* iLike
* Jaiku
* Last.fm
* LibraryThing
* LinkedIn
* Ma.gnolia
* Mixx
* Netflix
* Netvibes
* Pandora
* Picasa Web Albums
* Pownce
* Reddit
* Seesmic
* SlideShare
* SmugMug
* StumbleUpon
* Tumblr
* Twitter
* Upcoming
* Vimeo
* Yelp
* YouTube
* Zooomr

Once you’ve done that, your FriendFeed will automagically be updated with all your online activities.

Your friend’s (and their friends’) activities will also be posted to your page for your convenient perusal, and your activities will be posted to theirs (assuming that they have also added you as a friend).

There is one other feature that I just discovered today that I would like to mention: FriendFeed Rooms. FF Rooms are mini FriendFeeds that are usually centered around one topic or group of people, rather than all the diverse activities happening in your network, all at once. I don’t know much about Rooms yet (I did say that I just discovered them today), but I like the idea that I can further refine my FF for certain areas of interest, rather than needing to scroll through multiple pages of updates to find whatever has my ADD fuelled attention at the moment. Rooms can be made public or private, with the public version getting posted to your public feed. There are possibilities here that have me intrigued….

All in all, FriendFeed is wonderful in its simplicity, and does a excellent job of bringing some semblance of order to the chaos that is my online network. I almost feel like I can actually go from socially inept to socially adept, via my FriendFeed profile. Hopefully. Yes, I think that FriendFeed is my newest, bestest friend.

By Guest Blogger: Marc Berry

Marc and his wife write real talk about all areas of relationships, from sex to abuse to pure love and the language of flowers at The Incurable Romantic. Marc is also the author of techne-eikon, a blog about Web 2.0 and Internet Marketing. You can also follow Marc on FriendFeed and/or Twitter.

You can also follow Teeg on FriendFeed and Twitter.

FriendFeed for the Socially Inept - Part 1
Read Part 2

As a blogger I am understandably interested in Web 2.0 and online social networks such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Facebook. Unfortunately, when it comes to these networks I am the very definition of socially inept.

I’m not afraid to admit it: I’m a bad friend. I forget about people and sites and networks and all that. I have online ADD, jumping from one thing to the next, and immediately forgetting what I was just doing. It doesn’t help that in order to maintain my involvement in most of these networks, I have to actually go to the site, log in, and play catch-up. Thumb something up, digg it, and oh yeah, twitter it. Add in forums, groups, chats and RSS feeds, and the information overload becomes unbearable.

It’s a wonder I haven’t thrown my computer out of the window yet.

Enter FriendFeed, my newest friend… FriendFeed is an aggregator for all your online social activities. It brings all your friend’s network activities under one roof, making it easy to keep up with what everybody is doing.

Of course, first you have to add them as friends on FriendFeed, but that is usually just a matter of searching for them, and subscribing to their updates. If there is someone that you want to follow, but they aren’t on FriendFeed, sending them an invitation is as easy as typing in their email address, or having FF import your address book.

This naturally brings up the question, “Must my friends be FF users in order for me to follow them”? Thankfully, they do not. FF has a friends setting called “imaginary friends”, which allows you to follow non-members around as they post stuff to their favourite sites.

Only publicly submitted information is tracked, so your friends won’t think that you are too creepy, which is always a bonus. You can also add their blog’s RSS feed, making the service a simple RSS reader, though if you really use RSS, you may find a dedicated reader a better solution.

I love trying new restaurants. Thankfully my husband and sons also enjoy it, so one day we might be at the little rinky-dink eat-outside place watching traffic go by and another evening might find us enjoying an excellent steak to the mellow sounds of a waltz.

I learned quite a while back, that you can get a good idea of how a restaurant is by trying one of the staples for that type of restaurant. So at a new seafood restaurant, I order the clam chowder. At an Italian restaurant it is a question of how good their bread is (and if it’s real Italian bread) and how their spaghetti is.

Photo courtesy of Rick Dikeman
Almost without fail, I’ve found that if a restaurant doesn’t do well on the basic items, they probably aren’t going to excel at the other items either.

In any business, staples are the mainstay. They are the things that people are going to look for over and over…and what will keep people coming back to you. If you do well at those, you will have fans. Fail, and people will leave to find someone who understands the basics.

Twitter is having a hard time with this right now. Lately it seems that it’s up almost as often as it’s down. Almost.

Even when it’s up, it’s having problems. Last weekend, for example, clicking on the ‘Older’ tab at the bottom of the page took you to the top of the page. You had to manually add “/home?page=2″ (or whatever page) to see the older entries.

For two days, I had a direct message I couldn’t get to. Every time I’d try to check, Twitter would error out.

And people are noticing. Other communication sites are gaining followers as people decide reluctantly that Twitter doesn’t have the basics down anymore.

Big companies make great examples. It’s easy to point to one and say, “See, here’s what they’re doing wrong.”

But it’s not just big companies who need to pay attention to their staples. Even the smallest blogger needs to know what people expect from their site…and make sure that above everything else, each visitor receives that.

So what do you look for when you visit SU Comments? And for your own blog, what are your staples? Are you meeting your visitors’ basic expectations?

I know a girl who was schooled in Manhattan
She reads dusty books and learns phrases in Latin
She is an author, or maybe a poet
A genius but it’s just this world doesn’t know it
She works on her novel most every day
If you laugh she will say

Seize the day, seize whatever you can
‘Cause life slips away just like hourglass sand
Seize the day, pray for grace from God’s hand
Then nothing will stand in your way
Seize the day
Carolyn Arends

Yesterday I spent a good part of the morning talking with Allan and Ange about seizing the day. As Allan writes in his own post on the subject, he’d been to the doctor’s earlier that day and in one of the conversations that come about when your medical practitioner is as much friend as doctor, was told to stop wasting his talents and seize the day.

Last Thursday, I was invited by Dr. Mani to participate in an exciting blog group. I spent Thursday night evaluating myself and my goals, not wanting to join the group and be an anchor, but also recognizing one of those open doors that comes along every so often in life, offering us opportunity as long as we’re brave enough to step through. Then, while cleaning out some clutter this weekend, I discovered a CD with one of my very favorite songs on it, Seize the Day by Carolyn Arends.

So, while Allan told about his doctor’s visit, I was ready to share the YouTube video of the song.

Do you ever have one of those moments where it feels like everything comes together for a purpose?

I’ve been thinking about an article Allan Cockerill wrote a couple weeks ago, about anonymity on the web.

In the article he talks about the cons of using an avatar or user name different than your own name, a discussion that struck home, since I actually use both.

Now let me say first, that for the average internet user, I still believe that privacy is more important than recognition. In other words, if you’re not doing business online then it’s better to be safe and stay as anonymous as possible.

If you are doing business online, identifying yourself might not be a bad idea, but even so, I suggest considering it carefully first, especially if you’re adverse to finding your information showing up somewhere like Wink or Intellus.

When I started this blog, my user name and avatar were easy choices, I used the same ones I’ve used on SU for years. Teeg is a shortened version of my real name, Te-ge (pronounced Teeg E or T G).

I do use my picture for my avatar on Facebook, but when I started out on SU, my son was a toddler, and he fell in love with the Pooh picture. He’d look for it everytime I went online. Having it as my avatar meant that I could work on my StumbleUpon page and he’d be totally content while I was doing it.

After he got older, I considered changing my avatar, but too many friends asked me not to, so I’ve been Pooh ever since. If you’d like to see what I really look like, here is a link to my Facebook profile. Feel free to add me as a friend.

So what do you think? Is it better to share your information or do safety and security outweigh other considerations? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I realized recently that it’ll be time to renew my website in a few months, and that got me thinking about financing for it. When I started this site, I considered adding Google ads, but the whole idea of insta-ads appalls me…I can’t stand them on sites I visit and can’t stand the thought of them on my sites.

After a lot of exploring, I’ve decided to do two things.

1) I’m adding Amazon links when it fits with the discussion (and I’ll explore their list of widgets, not sure if I’ll use any or not).

2) I’m adding links to Dreamhost. If you decide to use them for a provider, I’ll get a bonus for referring you which will go towards my annual subscription fee (if you use the link above, you don’t need to add a promo code or referrer for me to get the credit). For the next month, if you use the promo code SUCom1, you’ll get an extra free domain registration (giving you 2 free domain name registrations when you sign up with them). There is also an option to support the blog and donate towards my blog without creating an account if you prefer.

I switched to Dreamhost from GoDaddy after having problems with GoDaddy’s phone support. When I switched, I was concerned about the fact that Dreamhost doesn’t offer phone support, but it didn’t take long to realize that Dh’s e-mail support is better and even faster than GoDaddy phone support. I’ve even had less downtime with Dreamhost.

A little while back, Allan Cockerill, my favorite Facebook expert, asked me if I’d seen a website called Wink.

Wink gathers your information from various social sites and then sells advertising space to information companies so they can help people find out more information about you. Right now, their biggest advertiser seems to be Intellius, which means that people who don’t live in the US are safe for the time being, but if you live in the US and have used Facebook, myspace, Linkedin, Friendster, or Xanga, be warned. Having your information on Wink means that by clicking the link for more information (which isn’t obvious until after the fact that it takes you off site) anyone can find a list of cities you’ve lived in and known family members. For a small fee ($2.95 -$7.95) they can find out your current address, date of birth, telephone number, income, home value, relatives and associates, not to mention running background and criminal checks.

Scared yet?

I’ve explored the Wink site this morning. There’s no opt-out option, which would make me happy. Even the telephone company allows me to have an unlisted number.

Now, Wink says they gather information from Twitter, but my Twitter account isn’t listed on there. Not sure why, but I’m definitely not fussing.

I’ve written before that I don’t like the Facebook TOS. This is exactly the type of issue I was afraid of when I first read their terms, and it seems that they didn’t learn a lesson with Beacon, and still aren’t telling people when your information is given out…or giving you the option to opt out before it is shared.

But I have finally broken down and changed my facebook profile to private. I have removed all applications, although I hated removing some of them. And still, I’m in danger of having my information shared, according to this sentence about Privacy and Applications: Applications may be able to access a limited set of information about you through friends who opt in to other applications. Scroll further down to see “Share my name, networks, and list of friends, as well as..” and 18 other items that Facebook is willing to share with applications your friends (not you) use, including education history, personal info, current location, work history, relationship status, etc.

In order to stop that, you have to select “Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API.” If you can’t select it, a pop-up box will explain that you are currently using applications that use the API. But here’s the rub, I am unable to select it, and I have no applications on Facebook. None, zilch, nada. Not sure yet how to fix that, but I’ll keep looking.

So what do you think? Is privacy an important issue to you? How do we stay safe in the “Information Age?”

A couple months ago, Mousewords asked me to write a bucket list. I’m sorry that it’s taken so long. >_<

A bucket list is taken from the movie of the same name, and answers the question, “If you found out you had a year to live, what would you do with it?”

In the movie, the money is provided by a rich donor who also has a year to live, but no idea what to do with the year, so I’m not counting cost here.

I think the first thing I’d do is to move back to North Carolina. New York is a nice state, but it’s not home, and especially in these months that should be spring but are still winter up here, I miss home.

I’d get a house, one that was big enough to dance in, and with enough yard to run in.

I would encourage my husband to follow his dreams. To find something and even someone, who would make him happy. I’ve been very blessed being married to him, I can truly say he is the one person that my soul connects to, and I would hope that he could find someone else to love him dearly.

Then I would travel. I would take my older son out of school, and the four of us would go to all the places I’ve always wanted to see.

First, across the US, stopping at all the battlefields along the east coast, learning US history by being there.

We’d go see the Liberty Bell, I’ve always wanted to, driven by it many times as we drive down the coast, but I’ve never gone to see it.

I’d go to DC and let Ken take the boys, then spend a whole day in the Library of Congress, exploring books to my hearts content.

We’d go to Charleston, where we spent our honeymoon, and ride in a horse-drawn carriage on a tour of the town. Then we’d stop on Market Street and I’d buy one of the sweetgrass baskets that I enjoyed watching them make during our last visit.

On across the US, stopping at all the landmarks that I’ve wanted to visit but haven’t gotten to yet. We’d visit Lincoln’s birthplace in Illinois, since my 5 year old loves the story of Lincoln and the footprints on the ceiling. We’d go see Mount Rushmore, and ride in a barge down the Mississippi river.

In New Mexico, we’d stop at an adobe and look inside. The houses fascinated me the first time I saw one, and I want to visit one. I also want to learn how to tap water out of a cactus, something I’ve wanted to learn since I was a child. My older son has also inherited his Mom’s love of rocks, so a stop at the Petrified Forest would be on my list too.

In California, we’d work our way up the coast, after a stop in San Diego. From my first visit there, Point Loma has been the place where I’d like to retire to someday, so I’d stop there and look once more at the house I’d picked out there. Then up the coast, not forgetting to stop and let the boys try their hands at gold mining.

By this time we should all have our passports, so time for the world tour. Greece would be my first stop, I’ve loved everything about the country since I first heard the Greek myths, probably around the time I started school. I suspect I could easily spend more than a year there, exploring the country and islands, but highlights would be seeing the Parthanon and other ruins, seeing what I could of Mount Athos (translated Holy Mountain) and the monasteries there (since I’m not male, I wouldn’t get to see much, but the Byzantine era has always fascinated me, and the first monasteries here were built then) and the Roussanou Monastery built on the side of a mountain.

After Greece, we’d explore the rest of Europe, stopping in Paris to visit the Louvre and in England to see the Tower of London and Brighton Beach, two of my favorite places from my last visit.

Back over to Germany to visit friends and ride on the Autobahn, and then to Hungary, which, the first time I saw it, when it was still behind the red curtain, seemed to be one of the most beautiful and saddest countries I’d ever been to.

Budapest at Night by uzo19

By the way, my husband despairs of my knowledge of geography, so I know I’m jumping all over the map here. Sorry about that.

Thanks to Herman Wouk’s books, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and Ayn Rand’s We the Living, I’ve wanted to visit Russia for years. I’m not sure what I would be looking for there, but I think that I would find it.

A quick visit in China, and a stop at Hong Kong to see friends, and then on to Africa. I want to go on a safari at least once, to see the animals that I’ve only seen in zoos living in the wild.

I’m skipping a lot of countries I know, but last would be to Australia, to meet in person some of the great friends I’ve made online, and to see a kangaroo for reals, and then back home to NC.

I am not a stay at home person, perhaps especially when I’m sick, so outside of trying to find the time to write every day (I have a half written novel that I’d love to finish, and would write a letter to both boys) I would still be on the go. Up to the mountains of NC, to mine for gems, and give the boys a sense of some of their roots. Up in the NC mountains, life is a bit different. When the settlers first headed into the mountains, they were just off the boats from England and Scotland. For years, the roads into the mountains were so bad that even cars had trouble making it and truckers hated the route. So, that area was closed off from the world in a lot of ways. Even in the 1970’s the language spoken there was considered the purist form of the Queen’s English in the world. If you’d like an idea of what life was like up in the mountains, I highly recommend Christy by Catherine Marshall.

I can’t imagine a bucket list for me that didn’t include visiting the Blue Ridge Parkway. For many years, before I got married and moved away, the parkway was my hideout, my thinking spot, my refuge. I still recall coming down from Devil’s Courthouse one day as the fog was lifting over the greenery and I could imagine that this was like the first day looked like to the first man.

Devil’s Courthouse is a cliff where legend has it, a local Indian tribe would test guilt by pushing people over the cliff. If they were innocent, the winds would blow them back up, if they were guilty, they would plummet to their deaths.

I’d camp out once again in Graveyard fields, where boulders big enough to lay on dot the treeless expanse. Tree stumps that resembled gravestones used to cover the area, but fires cleared the stumps and now it is a beautiful hike, with blackberries and blueberries to be picked in the spring.

I’ve always been fascinated with legends and myths, I grew up reading the Carolina ghost books of Nancy Roberts, who I actually got to meet when I was helping my Dad one time. One of NC’s oldest legends is Devil’s Tramping Ground. Located in the middle of a forest, it is a 40 ft circle where nothing grows, and hasn’t for at least 100 years. Supposedly this is either the place that connects hell to the earth, where the devil comes out when he’s causing some mischief, or it’s the place where the devil goes to think up new mischief and he walks in a circle as he thinks, causing everything within that circle to die. Legend also has it that anything put in the circle over night will be gone the next morning.

At night, I’d teach the boys to play cards. I think a lot can be taught with cards, with games ranging from Old Maid to Poker. How to lose well and how to win better are two important lessons. Cards also teach you to trust your instincts, read others’ body signals, and how to stand up for yourself (don’t believe me? Lay down the best hand at poker when someone is trying to steal the pot).

Finally, I’d teach them to fish. Fishing demands quiet, time for discussions and introspection, time for listening to others, yourself, and God. Things that little boys, especially, need to learn.

Then, with only the regrets of not seeing my sons grow into men and my husband and I growing old together, I think I could die peacefully.

So now it’s my turn, who am I going to pick to write a bucket list? I pick Allan Cockerill, Ken Bramhall, Ange of Buzzing with Ange, Dr. Mani, Despil of Fractured Bloughts, and Oza Meilleur. I’m looking forward to reading your lists.