Courtesy of Tweetstats.com.

One of my pastor friends was considering taking the plunge and becoming a twit (officially). He posted that on his Facebook status… Since Twitter and Facebook are probably the two main competitors in the microblogging world, I found that interesting to begin with. He asked for input on whether he should Twitter. What developed from there was even more interesting. The vast majority of respondants (including family members) urged him not to waste his time Twittering.

Rather than defending some of the relational and influential benefits to becoming a microblogger, I think I’ll link to another preacher’s defense of why he chose to capitalize on the Twitter trend. I love how John Piper framed part of his response:

I find Twitter to be a kind of taunt: “Okay, truth-lover, see what you can do with 140 characters! You say your mission is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things! Well, this is one of those ‘all things.’ Can you magnify Christ with this thimble-full of letters?”

To which I respond:

The sovereign Lord of the earth and sky
Puts camels through a needle’s eye.
And if his wisdom see it mete,
He will put worlds inside a tweet.

On tire sounds

Yesterday was T-Day: a day I’d scheduled to get our tires rotated and balanced and Wal-Mart. I felt so Arkansan heading back to Wallyworld to take advantage of their lifetime rotation and balance deal (if you buy your tires from there). I’d hoped that this would solve the developing wah wah wah sound emanating from one of the rear tires.

After 2.5 hours and a hike to Target and then to Chik-Fil-A with Adelyn, we drove away.

The wah wah wah sound was now in the front instead of the back.

Darn.

So the car was back at Wallyworld this a.m. trying to determine if one of the tires is bad. I hiked over to Starbucks from where this beautifully crafted blog entry was written and posted. By the way… Feeling sweet? Copy this number: 6038201464013622, and then reload my Starbucks card here! Since there are three locations in the Blacksburg/Christiansburg area, I anticipate many meetups and office days inside of coffee shops.

I’ll tweet about the results of my tire trials. And if you’re still with me and want eye candy, here is a nice Wordle of my July tweets ala Tweetstats.com.

It didn’t stay on my radar screen long.

Enter peoplebrowsr.com.

You’ll notice quickly that it has the ability to display as many columns as you want. You can shrink the column width or expand it. From there on it, it’s just downright amazing/fun to discover all that this site (and its corresponding Adobe Air app) can do. Everything is mouse-able.

I particularly love the ability to view my Twitter contacts’ “@” replies as a threaded conversation. That’s extremely handy for figuring what in the world is going on in your Twitterverse. Sure beats scrolling back a mile to figure out who said what.

Hovering over any contact photo gives you a plethora of options to respond to your contacts. Shift-clicking on a status update allows you do something pretty nifty… create a Tag Group.

The Adobe Air app has all the same features of the web site. One of the amazing things you’ll find about peoplebrowsr is that after many minutes exploring, you’ll discover that there are different levels of use for different levels of users. I typically use the Lite Mode, but there is also Advanced and Business Modes. Very nice.

The Settings are also a great feature at the bottom of the window. You have all kinds of options, and you can even change settings per each column.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one social media browser that combines the two most popular services – Facebook and Twitter, you may have finally found a great solution. Better than Tweetdeck. More full featured than Streamy. At home on whatever computer you choose… PeopleBrowsr.

That’s why I accidentally sent out a massive bulk email last week from Friendfeed. I thought I was searching for my friends that already use the service (turns out, all 5 of them). What I actually did, however, was send an email to my entire Google contacts database – more than 1000 – urging folks to use Friendfeed. Don’t. It’s just not ready yet for consumer use. I don’t have time hear to gripe about FF’s imperfections (and they are many).

However, I saw a quick review of a service I’d not heard of called Streamy.com on TechCrunch.com, and of course, I clicked over to the service with mounting excitement. I had soothing baby music ready to play as I coddled this new addition to the world of lifestreaming. What I found, however, was a pretentious preteen. It was a full-featured, fast and consumer friendly service!

I had some problem figuring out how to create my account rather than just linking one with Facebook (in itself a nice feature). After solving that, I was off and running. The screenshot below shows you how I’ve configured (so far) my custom Streamy window.

Within a few moments, however, I was disappointed that I was apparently going to have to enter manually each blog I follow. I couldn’t figure out how to import my feeds from Bloglines or Google Reader. I clicked over to support (they use Get Satisfaction), found others with a similar question and clicked “I have the same question.”

Imagine my surprise when within a few hours later, I was notifed by email via the Get Satisfaction site that Streamy.com had created the option to import feeds from Bloglines, Google Reader and exported opml files! Talk about service (and satisfaction!).

I’ve now made Streamy.com my homepage in Safari and Firefox, and find that I am enjoying it more than drifting back and forth between Twitter and Facebook. I like it better than Tweetdeck because I can also keep up with my blog subscriptions. Yes, you can post to Facebook, Twitter and other services from it as well.

Swing by and check out Streamy. It may have, in one fell swoop, put Friendfeed and other services in the grave trying to keep up. (Of course, most parents of preteens feel that way at one point.)

While I use both Ping.fm and Hellotxt.com from my iPhone almost interchangeably, my web preference for status updates has shifted to Hellotxt. In fact, the Hellotxt.com website has had a significant, although quiet, update in the last month or so. It now streams the status updates of your friends from Twitter and Facebook. You can also reply to them directly from the Hellotxt site. Very nice.

While there are lots of desktop apps out right now that allow you check the status of your friends, the advantage of Hellotxt is being web-based. You take your social stream with you everywhere. If you haven’t signed up for an account yet, I highly recommend it.

I’m curious. If you update multiple your statusphere with a service, what is it? What desktop apps do you use to monitor it? What other websites are you aware of?

A Wordle of my recent Tweets. You can make one too at TweetStats.com.

I want to thank AJ Huffman for pointing me a new site that has incredible content about Twitter, consistently. It’s rare that I read posts in their entirety on any site. However, Twitip.com is setting the pace for the world of microblogging, specifically Twitter.

Other microblogging sites just can’t keep up with Twitter. In spite of all its downtime and fail whales, Twitter continues to grow and set the standard. It’s done so by refusing to get complicated. Where Pownce allowed users to send files and photos back and forth in addition to status updates, it has now announced it’s shutting down. 

With Twitter, you can only send 140 characters of text. No more or it cuts off your content. That’s it. No images, no files, nothing fancy. It’s even succeeded forcing the user to learn a little code for messaging. 

In a recent post, Twitip summarized the four basic ways of communicating on Twitter:

1. For general posts, simply either log in and type your Tweet in the message box on the Twitter website, or use the message box in your desktop app (140 characters is the maximum length of message).

2. To reply to someone, use the ‘@’ symbol, then their Twitter username, e.g.

eg: @ramskill your message, whatever it may be

Bear in mind that this reply can be seen publically, by your followers and the followers of who you are replying to.

3. To ‘Retweet’ / repost a Tweet from someone else, use ‘RT’, a space, the ‘@’ symbol, then their Twitter username, e.g.

eg: RT @ramskill your message, whatever it may be

4. To send a private direct message to someone, use ‘D’, a space, then their Twitter username, e.g.

eg: D ramskill your message, whatever it may be

For the purpose of instant communication with family, friends, organizations or consumers, you need to consider Twitter. Finally, here’s a great short video explaining the concept behind Twitter (also linked in the above Twitip entry.)