Fun Twitter game for bright people: perfect tweets

Because Twitter has the rule of 140 characters or less for a tweet an obvious and fun game is to produce perfect tweets, defined to be 140 characters exactly, but that's not enough as here is a perfect Tweet that I tweeted earlier today to my Twitter:

In my opinion, crucial criteria for a perfect tweet is that it be EXACTLY 140 characters, have few if any abbreviations, and is grammatical.

That tweet is 140 characters exactly and is (um, I'm fairly certain), grammatical.

Ok, updating as I got in an argument over this subject, so have a variant to handle both cases in case it turns into some kind of major thing:

In my opinion crucial criteria for a perfect tweet are that it be EXACTLY 140 characters, have few if any abbreviations, and is grammatical.

And later I found another...

The perfect tweet must have the following conditions: it must be 140 characters, be grammatically correct and have few if any abbreviations.

I'm curious, how many tweets on Twitter on any given day are perfect by those rules?

Here's one more perfect tweet:

My wild guess unsupported by inside information is that YouTube is now profitable. If so congratulations Google, and what took you so long?

I will admit that I don't in general try to make my tweets perfect but will if I see one approaching perfection work at it if I can, briefly to see if I achieve that, but if not, it's not a big deal.

But how hard can it be? I have one more perfect tweet:

Ok, I've locked down both variants of the "perfect tweet" which defines itself as perfect within the tweet while also being a perfect tweet.

That tweet is perfect.

(Hmmm...editing yet again to wonder, how many times can you use the phrase "perfect tweet" in a tweet which is itself perfect? I've managed twice above, can anyone do better?)

But when it happens I do wonder, how hard is it to do really? And, how did I do it?

Doing a web search on "perfect tweet" I see other people are using the term and differently. Oh well. Also one site has the phrase "twoosh" for a tweet of 140 characters "on the first try", which I guess means no editing.

Hmmm...maybe I should call my definition a "twee-dunk"?

Oh, I know, how about a "twee-three"?

No, basketball references may not work with all viewers...so I will still call it a perfect tweet, and others can do what they want.

Want to check your tweets? Here's a convenient site I found while web searching on perfect tweets:

www.perfecttweet.info

It shows all of your tweets that are exactly 140 characters, or that of others as well, as you just enter a Twitter username.

For mine, use: jstevh


James Harris

Class Viewer now on Softpedia

I am happy to announce that the editorial team at Softpedia has added Class Viewer as a program for Mac OS, which can be seen at the link above.

They have also given the 100% Free Award:

SOFTPEDIA "100% FREE" AWARD

So I guess there are Class Viewer users out there somewhere and I think that's a good thing.

I actually am quite appreciative that the program is associated with Mac OS as to me that is a compliment on its user friendly simplicity and style and I kind of regret that I don't have a Mac focused download on SourceForge which is about the computers I use. Though I'm sure it's easy enough for Mac users to configure it on their systems anyway. What I need is to use a universal installer.


James Harris

Science and traffic jams

Link above goes to: MSNBC

Quote from the Source:

Math model may decrease phantom traffic jams
Method could help engineers design roads to keep traffic density low

LiveScience
updated 11:49 a.m. PT, Fri., June 12, 2009
Some traffic jams have no apparent cause — no accident, no stalled vehicle, no lanes closed for construction...

Great article and I'm glad scientists are studying these things as when I lived in the Atlanta metro area--thankfully in the Bay Area I rarely have to drive--it would be so frustrating when I figured out that a slow-down that could have you completely stopping at points was just about a lot of cars being on the road and nothing else.

Here's one more quote introducing a cool word:

Key to the new study is the realization that the mathematics of such jams, which the researchers call "jamitons," are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosion...

That's what I'm calling them from now on as that is just a cool word: jamitons

Ear radio

Link above goes to: MSNBC

Quote from the Source:

Human ear inspires universal radio antenna
It may lead to electronics that can pick up any radio frequency
By Eric Bland

updated 12:09 p.m. PT, Mon., June 8, 2009

Yeah! Smart technology. Why not use what Mother Nature has provided and to find even more value in the human ear! Brilliant!!!

New York Times article on Jim Collins

Link above goes to: The New York Times

Quote from the Source:

BUSINESS
For This Guru, No Question Is Too Big
By ADAM BRYANT
Published: May 24, 2009
Jim Collins is exploring big questions like why some companies succeed and, in his latest book, how successful companies implode.

A nice long article that goes over a lot of information about a very interesting business researcher. Here's one quote that I liked because it answered a question that had been on my mind:

...Mr. Collins takes issue with the criticism, even devoting a long passage in his new book to defending “Good to Great” in light of the subsequent failures of some companies it praised.

“Just because a company falls doesn’t invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best,” he writes.

I agree and after reading the article I'm looking forward to buying his latest book.

New Pay Back Value article on my other blog

Link above goes to: My Lost In Comment blog

Quote from the Source:

...However, there are two types of people in the world: those who would pay without threat of punishment, and those who would run out of restaurants without paying all the time if there were no such threat.

The ease of distribution on the Internet means that you can market to the first set, and not worry as much about the second as unlike with a restaurant where the food has a higher reproduction cost, on the Internet, there is little cost in reproduction (production costs remain high!!!) so limited loss from the theft!

I think paying after is the primary way for the Web to work as it's the primary way that people buy in the real world--we thoroughly check for value before we plunk down hard earned cash!

But, on the Web when you pay, people want you to commit money upfront before you can check for value which is unnatural. We do that for some things out of novelty, like we used to do that for print newspapers as news was novel. Now it's more of a commodity, and fewer people buy papers upfront. Simple.

The Web is behind human cultural evolution, not ahead.

I'd love to see this idea implemented and check out assumptions about the value of Web audiences as I read the New York Times a lot and think the quality of their articles is much higher than other sites, like, CNN, but CNN has these millions of readers, but would they actually pay as much as Times readers?

What if CNN has millions of cheap people reading? And what I call PBV is implemented and very few of them pay, but at the Times many more pay?

Are advertisers--who would remain with this idea--really getting as much value from those millions of readers who have shown they don't like parting with their money for value?

One might find out that some sites with millions and millions of people accessing them are actually worthless because they have the wrong people!

Wouldn't that be wild?

Seth Godin on standing out

Very enlightening. A lot about marketing, and why ads don't work like they did before.

Power struggle in pay for media issues?

I've spent a lot of time across my blogs putting forward an idea I call Pay Back Value, where people can pay for, say, a news article after they read it, but only if they saw it as valuable! So there'd be a little button that might say: "PBV". And next to it might be 25 cents, saying that if you liked the article, its pay back value is 25 cents.

If you didn't think it was a good article, you don't hit the button. You don't pay.

So it's like purchasing the article after you get to read it, which may seem unnatural unless you look at other things and realize we do that all the time, like at a nice restaurant. You get to eat first.

If people get to pay after then knowing what people truly valued in a newspaper edition is as simple as seeing how much they paid for each article!!!

Such a simple idea, and some people wouldn't ever pay--some people run from restaurants without paying--but I don't think it odd to think that most would, if they saw value. Do you get a massive impulse to run out of the barbershop, after you get a haircut, without paying the barber? Why not? You got the goods. Your hair is cut. Why pay if you can just run for the door?

Some people wouldn't do that because they don't want to get beat up by the barber! Or get arrested! But most pay because they value what they received and we pay back value, and the appropriate way to pay back value at the barbershop is with money.

What is money? A medium of exchange.

So why might people in the news and entertainment industry not like this idea if it offers the opportunity to get revenue where now they get much less?

Sadly, I'm speculating that power may be an issue, as consider, executives in these industries now pick what you can get.

Like on television the Big 3 networks dominated for years and then there was one more, but later cable spread things, but still, executives in each of those areas could pick shows or not based on what they thought best. Sure supposedly it was about profit, but there are some really bad shows that get on television: executives had to sign off on each one.

If people are more picky about quality then crappy products don't pay.

When you have a subscription to a paper for a year, you've paid upfront, giving the slide to whatever crap may come by, whereas, with PBV, the organization would find instantly that crappy journalism does not pay.

And that's a loss of power. Hopefully that is not an issue as I don't see this ancient concept of looking for value first before paying to be one that has been defeated, so it will take over.

The only question then is, how rapidly.