tweetsh

A shell for Twitter

Remember the good old days when you had a terminal screen and you typed ls, cd, and man? And, if you were a little more advanced, you might have used pushd, popd, cat, head, and tail. Well, there is a very alpha project called tweetsh. Tweetsh is a command-line shell interface for Twitter. It treats Twitter users/tweets as a big directory/file system and lets you access it with basic shell commands. Very cute and clever.

From what I can tell, this project is one guy in Amman-Jordan hacking for four days, so understandably there are still some bugs in it. But I think it’s cool in that geeky sort of way, and TechCrunch thought it was noteworthy, too.  And in the comments of the TechCrunch articles are a few other back-to-basics Twitter interfaces around such as a Ubiquity plugin for FireFox and a Twitter wrapper for emacs.

These are geeky cool, but I think they represent (or at least make me think about) a more significant trend. Let’s take a closer look.

I took a sabbatical from blogging for the last 1.5 years. It was not because I was making a statement. It was not because I switched to a flashier tool. It was just because I took a job that was not very conducive to blogging. In essence, I was immersed in a business VP role and there were too many sensitive issues I would have had to navigate around, so this made it difficult to write posts. Now I’m a in CTO role which I find to be much more conducive to blogging.

Since I had a year and a half away from the blogosphere, I had the opportunity to “see what changed” now that I’m back. I looked for my blogging tools tucked away in various corners of the internet, afraid of what I’d find as I reached into the cobwebs. Fortunately, or should I say unfortunately, I remembered most of my passwords. There they were, remnants of decayed accounts and dismal blog stats everywhere.

Regardless of my own situation, this did give me a chance to notice some significant changes that occurred in the blogging world over the last 1.5 years. Here are a few significant changes that I think are worth noting:

•  The players have changed.
•  The tools and methods have changed.
•  Subscribers are dead. Actually, they’re not dead, but they’ve taken a new form.
•  Comments are dead. Actually, they’re not dead, they just dispersed.
• Services churn.

Let’s look at these a little more closely with a little Q&A.