Technician Online

August 21st, 2008

Better than your Facebook status

By slbrinkl on August 21st, 2008

You checked your e-mail. You added Thomas Jones, changed your status and wrote on Katie’s wall. You changed your AIM away message. Now what?

It’s the question some ask themselves: How else can I tell the world exactly what I’m doing, all the time?

The answer: Twitter.

Twitter, the site exclusively for those who can’t get enough of status updates, has become a new phenomenon among the Web-savvy.

Imagine your Facebook news feed, but solely with status updates and replies to your friends. It’s all updates, all the time.

But it’s not a blog.

You get 140 characters per entry, and no more. And that includes punctuation and spaces. There’s hardly room to include URLs to Youtube videos or New York Times articles, so Twitter automatically changes long links to “Tiny URLs,” which are shortcuts to the links, to allow for more room in your posts.

Twitter makes it easy to keep up with your fellow Tweeple, too. You can “follow” friends, and they can follow you too. Following someone allows his or her updates to list on your home page. And if you like, you can even “@reply” to them, but again, only if you keep it to 140 characters.

While Twitter lacks the fluff that Facebook and MySpace thrive on, like walls, photos and applications, Twitter makes up for it in simplicity. A clean, uncluttered design makes the site easily navigable for its users.

However, the site is relatively new (it got its start in July of 2006). Twitter is growing in popularity, but the servers can’t seem to keep up with all of its more than 2 million users. If you decide to tweet, expect to see the Twitter “fail whale” — an illustration of a whale being lifted out of the ocean by signature Twitter birds — during the occasional down time.

On the other hand, Twitter isn’t usually down for long, and you can always post a rant about the outage when it gets back up. The updates just keep rolling.

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January 15th, 2008

My time as a virtual reporter

By Tyler Dukes on January 15th, 2008

It’s been almost five years since I first began reporting for the Technician. In all that time, I’ve never covered a story quite like the DELTA team’s creation of the Wolflands in Second Life.

That’s because I’ve never conducted an interview as a virtual reporter.

But that changed last night as I walked (and flew) around N.C. State’s island to meet a few of my sources not as Tyler Dukes, but as my avatar Marconi Darwin. Read the rest of this entry »

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January 7th, 2008

Microsoft apologizes to Xbox users… again

By Tyler Dukes on January 7th, 2008

It seems Microsoft is starting to get the hang of crawling back to its loyal following of Xbox 360 gamers on bended knee.

After the company announced this summer that it would triple its warranty on the next-generation gaming system over it’s general hardware failures, Microsoft said Thursday it would offer a free game download because of the Xbox Live problems over the holidays. Read the rest of this entry »

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