A little place of calm

Gowalla.com is a location game that you can play on internet-enabled mobile devices. At its most basic, it involves visiting places and sharing them with your friends, but there's a lot more to it than that. There are many different ways of using Gowalla, and i don't think everybody knows about them all. So i thought i'd share what i've found out so far.

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With all this talk of Google wanting to buy Twitter, it got me thinking about the exciting potential for real-time searching. I've seen some greasemonkey scripts for adding Twitter search results into Google, but i wanted something a little bit different. I wanted to search multiple places and bring them together in columns. Something a bit like this:

So i spent the whole afternoon figuring out how to do it (and in the process, learning how to do object-oriented PHP!) and you can try it out here: rightnow.aimee.mychores.co.uk

I need help on making it more interactive. It should be fairly easy to define new search locations like plugins. I want people to be able to choose which they wish to search on. I would like AJAX updating with auto refreshing. And of course i need a lot of help with the design!

If you fancy having a play, fork it on Github! github.com/sermoa/right_now_search :)

It worked!!

Generated purely from people around the country sending tweets with their location and marks out of 10 for snow!

I gave a 9/10 for Winchester! It is beautiful soft powdery snow, slightly crunchy under-foot. Wonderful! It's still coming down thick and fast now, and apparently will do all day!

I love how milk deliveries in the UK are always so reliable! They will do their utmost to deliver milk if they possibly can.

Some days Twitter can be such a buzz! What you get out of it is closely correlated to what you put into it, in my experience.

• You're @replying to multiple people having multiple conversations simultaneously.
• You're sending direct message to someone to arrange a meetup.
• You're following a trending topic on twitterfall.com and participating using the hashtag.
• You look at pictures related to the trending topic and make comments on TwitPic.
• You make a blog post, add a link on Delicious, make a comment on 43Things, tick off a task on MyChores, it all gets updated on Twitter.
• You catch onto a meme and help spread it and promote the mashup.

All these things and more have happened to me today! My tweeting activity has earned me 6 new followers, and i started following 2 new people.

In this case the trending topic is #uksnow, and the mashup is benmarsh.co.uk/snow. Make a tweet like this to register your postcode and marks out of ten for snow fall. The map will update automatically!

#uksnow SO23 2/10

The only thing i didn't do today is re-tweet anybody. I still haven't got the hang of re-tweeting. I briefly used Twitterfox which made it easy, but i still prefer to go directly to twitter.com for instant results!

This whole Ariel Waldman thing has turned into an enormous, fierce debate with some people strongly supporting Ariel, some people congratulating Twitter for not turning into a nanny service, some people claiming it's all lies and a publicity stunt, and many other opinions in between.

My opinion is: I don't care whether Ariel made it all up. I only care about the way Twitter react to personal harassment, abuse and racial hatred – all of which i have seen on Twitter yesterday. At the moment Twitter are sending the message that it's perfectly okay and they are turning a blind eye. This is causing people to push the boundaries further still, to see how much they can get away with.

Here's the catch: i'm strongly against censorship … but i'm also strongly against personal attacks, bullying, discrimination and incitement of hatred. So what do you do? Where is the line drawn between free speech and harassment? Who is to decide what is okay and what is not okay?

I do think that Ariel should have gone to the police rather than rally up this huge mob of angry people. It has not really done Ariel any favours at all. But as for Twitter i'd like to see some sort of statement that deliberate foul abuse of any individual or any group of people is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. They need to do something about it. If they continue to imply that it's perfectly okay to abuse whoever you like on Twitter, then i am not going to want to be associated with Twitter any longer.

Resumo: La retejo Twitter rifuzas preni agadon kontraŭ ofenda kondukto. Tiu ĉi estas komplete malakcepteble.

To all who use Twitter: you need to be aware of this:

Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service

This story is shocking in the extreme. After months of ongoing bullying, harassment, foul language, hate speech, smearing of a person's identity, Twitter had this to say:

"We’ve reviewed the matter and decided it’s not in our best interest to get involved."

This is absolutely shocking and Twitter need to change their tune fast. This kind of behaviour is absolutely unacceptable and there is no question that the abusive user needs to be banned from Twitter and all their hateful comments purged. Twitter are scared of a legal battle, but their Terms of Service clearly state:

"You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users [...] Violation of any of these agreements will result in the termination of your Twitter.com account."

As an internet community we have a moral responsibility not to let anyone get away with this kind of behaviour. I write this in support of the victim, but also for the good of the Twitter community as a whole. If one person can get away with it, people will soon learn that Twitter is a place where they can be as abusive as they like with no repercussions. This needs to be stopped as soon as possible.

Digg it, Stumble it, blog it … do whatever it takes. If Twitter will not deal with this, then we as a community most certainly will.

Update: Follow @wesupportariel and help take action on this! Oh, i love a good bit of activism!!