Congratulations! You have a Twitter account, and somehow you have stumbled across my account. That follow button may look awfully tempting after you read over the past few pearls of wisdom that I’ve dropped onto the Internet. Before you click that follow button and regret it a few weeks later when I’m linkspamming or talking about abstract algebra, it’s best that you know what you’re getting yourself into. A page of tweets (or two, or three) rarely does anyone much good. So what are you getting yourself into, anyway?

Wrimos, you should make your way over to this page in the next few days.http://www.nanowrimo.org/birthdaycard

First, I direct tweets at people a lot. This means that while it looks like I tweet a lot, you may not see a lot of them for awhile–unless, of course, we happen to follow several of the same people. If you know me through NaNoWriMo, this is not impossible and in fact may be the case. I’ve jumped into several conversations with other Wrimos in my Twitter circle, and they’ve jumped into conversations that I was having because we share followers.

That’s it, iTunes. I am this close to quitting you. Goodnight.

I tweet a lot of links. Honestly, I probably tweet more links than anything else. You’ll probably learn something interesting or want to gouge your eyes out with a spork, or at least wonder where on earth I find my material. Thankfully, I do not tweet every single link that goes into my Delicious account because if I did, at least twenty more tweets would show up on my stream outside of my own accord, and that would annoy even me. Why not? There’s already far too much feed pollution going on with everyone linking their Twitters and Facebooks and Tumblrs and blogs and what have you, and it is time to stop that nonsense. I don’t even tweet every single post I make here–just the particularly poignant ones, like possibly this one.

I like how Twitter keeps suggesting Sweet Valley High characters for me to follow. I never read the books!

Some days my tweets will be more interesting than others. What determines that? It’s a complicated formula that involves how interesting my day is, what’s on my mind, my mood, my whereabouts, and the phase of the moon. There’s a similar formula that calculates how many tweets I’ll make in a given day that uses similar variables. In short: it varies a lot. I tweet a lot when I should be doing something else, and sometimes I’ll go nearly a day sans update. Some things just aren’t worth a Twitter update. No, I do not need to broadcast every single aspect of my programming progress to the world unless it’s spectacular in some way. Be grateful.

Pleasant surprise of the day: checking my bank account and seeing more money than I had thought. Not much, but still.

I livetweet things on occasion. Not often, but it does happen. The last time it happened was with the national spelling bee finals. The time before that was something Apple-related, not because I’m an Apple fangirl, but because I knew I’d be hearing all about it in the tech blogs I read, so I may as well get the news firsthand. In case you’re wondering, I’m not an Apple hater, but I do use Linux. That should tell you a lot. However, when I do livetweet, I try to keep it interesting. Well, except for the spelling bee. Then I just do whatever I want.

Emma Watson is trending because she got a haircut. What’s next, Ke$ha trending because she forgot to brush her teeth?

It’d be a good idea to know what I like to talk about, isn’t it? After all, my Twitter profile (at the moment) says “Writer. Math geek. Grammarian. Internetologist. Triviac. Nerd.” This is pretty accurate, but that’s not all I talk about. I’ll talk about anything. Between October and December, I talk about NaNoWriMo a lot, and in March and April I chat a lot about Script Frenzy. Current interests are a popular topic, and they tend toward the geeky and techy. Be warned.

Oh my, RSS has finally caught up with Facebook. This will be interesting.

If I could keep up with all my followers, I would! I want to, even, but keeping up with everyone who follows me would be an impossible task these days. Thanks to wanting to do other things besides stalk Twitter all day, I don’t follow everyone. However, if you look interesting, there’s a chance that I’ll follow you. I would try to define interesting, but that usually depends on my mood on a given day. Sometimes it just depends on what you’ve been tweeting lately, which is why I’m writing this in the first place! I do go through my followers list now and then and see who I’m not following back; maybe I just finished trawling through my Twitter feed and didn’t want to add anymore because of that. That’s part of the beauty of Twitter, though: you don’t have to be mutual followers, and we can still interact. I still read all my mentions, so chat away!

Wait, there’s a museum of mathematics. Why did no one ever tell me this? http://www.momath.org (P.S. @momath1, are you hiring?)

Convinced yet? Scared off? Follow away.

So I started investigating the features of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I had a hunch from the start that Google would come out as the winner, and as much as I love using Goodsearch for my searching needs, there are some things that the Yahoo-powered Goodsearch just can’t find. (Sorry.)

The primary item I investigated was searching within a timeline. If I knew that, say, Mr. Ian Woon came along before 2003 (and he must have since he’s mentioned in the 2003 forums quite a bit, though I can’t find a post where someone realized that Mr. Ian Woon is a nifty NaNoWriMo anagram), then being able to search the pre-2003 Internet would be a wonderful thing. There’s just one problem.

None of the major search engines can do that. Bing can’t do it at all from what I can tell. Yahoo and Google’s time-sensitive results can search only recent results, not exclude them. Yes, excluding recent results would likely lead to a much wider pool of results, but not if you can put a cap to when the results were created. It would be a great way to create a function of that search term. How many terms were being added in this interval, and how quickly were they being added? How many disappeared because the pages or relevant search terms were removed? This function would definitely be increasing with large derivatives when the term is getting discussed a lot. As an example, last week the iPhone would have a large derivative. Actually, the derivative would still be large and probably increasing since people have the things in their hands and rumors are buzzing even more loudly about the iPhone going to Verizon.

But what’s the long-term behavior of a given search term? Or more interestingly, how could such a function be useful?

It’ll be interesting to see how the Twitter community reacts to David. Will they tweet food to him on a regular basis? How about sleep? What about hygiene? What about basic bodily needs? What will David do about two contradicting commands that come in at the same time? Will there be a couple of people making sure he gets those basic needs, or will it be up to a few altruistic followers to do that?

And what if someone tells him to stop taking commands? What happens then? Given the conditions of the stunt, part of me wants to find out for kicks. Another part of me doesn’t want to disturb that part of the universe.

Here’s one more if you want to extend your Google Pacman-playing days. Someone put Google Pacman on a non-Google site. Enjoy. I was on level three before getting interrupted repeatedly.

Update: Google has kept Pacman on their site. Hooray!

There are a few things I have to do first. The first is to grab all the photos of me (and perhaps of friends) for my own safekeeping. The second is to tell everyone, or at least the people I care about. The phith is to make a post here explaining the deletion and link them to it, perhaps making a Facebook note because that’s what most people will read.

Of course, I could take the easy way out and do the rumored wipe from existence delete–upload a profile picture of human genitalia. But people I know on a professional basis are in my Facebook network, and I can’t shock them that much.

I have a large collection of Delicious bookmarks, which sits at over 11,000 right now. As my collection grew, I’ve wondered if there was an upper limit to bookmarking in the cloud. Wasn’t having the ability to store and access all those bookmarks the point of cloud computing? Would I eventually bookmark every site on the Internet, then bookmark the Delicious URLs of those URLs, causing the Internet to implode?

Don’t worry. I’ve taken extra precautions to prevent that. If the Internet implodes, it won’t be my fault.

Tonight I discovered something that may change the way I think of bookmarking. Delicious users, consider this a bug report.

After a round of Wikipedia-hopping, I stumbled upon Joshua Schachter’s Delicious bookmark collection. That name should sound familiar; if it doesn’t, he founded Delicious, so I wasn’t surprised to see that his collection was larger than mine. Since he’s the first user I’ve encountered with more Delicious bookmarks than me, I clicked his last page to view his first bookmarks. The date on those bookmarks were 2004. Reasonable, but odd since the site was founded in 2003. I clicked the page before that and saw the same bookmarks. And the page before that. After about five minutes of experimentation and URL tweaking, I discovered that I could view up to ?page=401 (or 401 pages of bookmarks) before seeing the same few bookmarks from 2004 over and over.

My bookmark collection is slowly creeping up on Schachter’s, so it was time to test this hypothesis on my own collection. While logged in, everything was fine and dandy. The bookmarks on the last page were those imported from my browser and dated 2006. When logged out, I encountered the same problem.

I signed up for Delicious in 2007. Don't pull these shenanigans.

I tried exploring the bookmark collections of some users with over 4000 bookmarks. Same problem. After asking Twitter and asking friends off Twitter about this conundrum with my own account, it’s not just me. This has happened in Windows (Firefox and Opera, no reports or IE/Safari/Chrome yet) and Linux (Firefox and Epiphany). No Mac reports yet.

So what does this mean? Overall it’s not that noticeable. Several searches show that it hasn’t been caught yet. I’m always logged into Delicious, so the bug wouldn’t affect me often. Every now and then I want to find something on the go or see what others have bookmarked over time. This bug stands in the way, and as long as it’s still outstanding, I’ll worry about the future of my bookmarks at Delicious.

Of course not. That’d be blasphemy. You ask the Internet, of course. Ask Facebook or Reddit or places like The Question Club or Can I Eat This (I wish I were kidding) or Shitty Advice. Ask Twitter.

You may not get the best advice, especially if you ask any forum dedicated to giving you bad advice, but if you’re looking for opinions, it turns out that asking Twitter isn’t a terrible idea. The entire Twitter community doesn’t care if those pants make you look fat, but if you’re after public opinions like Facebook’s erosion of privacy and whether the iPad is a huge iPhone, go ahead and ask Twitter. According to a study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department, Twitter sentiments correlated with the results of public opinion polls whose results you hear all the time. Think Gallup here.

This method isn’t perfect, of course. Computers still aren’t great at reading sentiment. Retweets and articles linked with just a news headline and no opinion by the user would have to be either taken into consideration or eliminated entirely. A computer wouldn’t know whether the user approves of the message from a retweet or the link alone. Despite Twitter users coming from all walks of life, Twitter’s main demographic may affect the result, although slightly.

Speaking of which, I have some yogurt in the fridge. I wonder if it’s still good.

The Constantin Film legal team contacted Youtube about these parodies, and Youtube started taking a lot of them down. Watch what’s left because while they may be floating around the Internet for awhile, they may not be in a central location like Youtube for much longer.

Now all we need is for someone to make a Downfall video about this.

Today also happens to be Hitler’s birthday. Was the date intentional?

You can find a lot of old websites in the Wayback Machine, but today the Library of Congress announced that it would acquire the entire public Twitter archive. Every single public tweet since 2006 will now be archived in the Library of Congress. There are some interesting tweets: the proposals, the updates that chronicled events, the updates that spurred action. Most of the updates aren’t all that interesting and would make no sense outside of context–say, in a conversation with another user. A lot of updates are also spam or consist of “zomgwillufollowme”. All of these updates will be kept, but from the way it sounds, one can search the archive, something Twitter search has struggled with.

Think before you tweet. This should be common sense. No one cares about what you ate for breakfast unless it was particularly exciting. (Hint: cereal and yogurt, though my preferred breakfast, is not exciting unless I’m eating with a celebrity.) Will this action make people more careful before they update, or will they continue to update in their haphazard ways?

All I know is that when I go to the Library of Congress one day, I’ll definitely be checking this out if possible.