The Twitter community has a very positive feel to it. This is in part because unfollowing other users is easy, and unless the people being unfollowed have special tools in place, they’ll never know.

But sometimes, simply unfollowing someone is just not enough. That’s why there’s now Gunfollow.com, the Twitter hitman. You can “hire” Gunfollow to unfollow and block a user. It’ll be quick an painless, and you can choose a message that gets delivered to the “victim”. If you prefer, this message can be delivered anonymously.
More Introducing Gunfollow, the Twitter hitman

As some of you may know, Twitter is fading out support for “basic authentication”. This basically means that app developers (like myself) can’t just send a user’s login information to Twitter’s server when we want to send a tweet or change a setting. Instead the application needs to be “authorized” by the user using a process called oAuth.

For Snapatar, this meant I needed to make a lot of changes. OAuth is far from trivial to implement, and I was lucky to find a library that handles most of the complicated stuff. With it, I was able to get oAuth working on snapatar.com, and beat the August 16 deadline. More Snapatar now uses oAuth (phew!)

Less than two days ago, Blondmonster asked me to review a haiku she’d written for (if I remember correctly) her employer’s Christmas greeting card. We both love haikus and we immediately started brainstorming. “Cow” stanslates as “koe” in Dutch, and we’d joked before about a “haikoe” (which is pronounced just like “haiku” in English). Sometimes you just need to act on impulses like this, so without further ado, I present to you: Haikoe.nl.

The website is extremely beta, and was hacked together from Snapatar leftovers, the Twitter API and some great artwork by Blondmonster. It will break. Possibly even today. But I’ll fix it when it does, and I hope that in the mean time you’ll feed our little bovine friend some haikus. Simply tweet a haiku and tag it #haikoe. You’ll then need to refresh the page to update.

Netfirms just launched a contest to promote a pretty cool new feature they have. If you sign up with them you’ll be able to register domains by sending them a Twitter direct message. Not only does that save you from having to log into your account, it also allows you to snatch that cool domain name you just thought of anywhere you have access to Twitter. Clever. Here’s what you have to do to enter the Netfirms contest. You may just end up winning an iPod Touch or a MacBook.
More Tweet your domain and win a MacBook or an iPod!

I’ve searched high and low for a good native Linux Twitter client, but there’s nothing out there that can really compete with TweetDeck. At least not in terms of functionality. TweetDeck is based on Adobe’s AIR platform and as a result is quite heavy on resources. But the biggest problem I had with it was getting it to open links in my default browser. It disregarded my setting and used Firefox to open all links. Twitter is far less fun if you need to carefully copy paste every link to a new tab in your browser. As it turns out, the issue is with AIR, not just TweetDeck, and it took quite a while and a lot of help for me to find a working solution.
More Getting Adobe AIR to use the default browser under Ubuntu

Twitter by it’s very nature is a very limited service. That’s what’s fun about it. Some people manage to be really clever and witty in 140 characters. But there’s only so much you can express in a tweet. The other main way to express your personality on Twitter is through your avatar image (or ‘profile picture’ as Twitter calls them).

Many of the people I follow have carefully designed avatars that they don’t change very often. But what if you could have your avatar be as current as your tweets. Showing you exactly the way you look today, doing what you’re doing right now? That’s where Snapatar comes in.
More Introducing Snapatar: Update your Twitter avatar from your webcam

Symbian may be the smartphone OS with the most experience, it does suffer from a certain dullness. It’s like the MS-DOS of mobile phone operating systems. Where the iPhone basically runs a trimmed down version of Apple’s OSX, Symbian was built to be light. Also on eye-candy. And it shows.

Fortunately, there are developers out there that create software that goes beyond that typical boring Symbian look and feel. Like mobileways.de, who recently released Gravity, a native Symbian Twitter client that brings both features and eye-candy.
More Gravity adds some sexiness to Symbian

I’ve been using Twitter for a few months now(*), and I can’t imagine life without it. But I’m still not sure how I’ll want to use it in the long run. I see many people trying to get as many followers as possible and then using it as a glorified marketing tool (similar to RSS or email newsletters). I know ‘me marketing’ is hot, but the longer I think about it I believe these people will eventually kill Twitter. And I’m way too fond of it to let it die without a fight.
More Why I’m not following you back on Twitter

One of the silliest things a blogger can do (imho) is to blog about why you’re not blogging. I’ve had “blogger’s block” now and then, but have always resisted the temptation to write a “I’m still alive” type of post. Until now. Sort of.
More Offline for almost a week now

I really should ‘egosurf‘ more. It was only because I was testing a seach engine yesterday that I stumbled across this post on ZDNet’s Linux and Open Source blog. In it, Dana Blankenhorn argues that social media make this recession different from previous ones, and that releasing open source software can help advertise your abilities as a media professional. And he does so by taking me as an example.

While it is true that WP-Cumulus has brought me some modest fame in the WordPress community, I wonder why Dana didn’t contact me to confirm some of the details in the story.
More On ZDNet, the recession and optimism