Tag Archives: Twitter

Link: Did astronaut really Twitter from space?

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Did a NASA astronaut really “tweet” from space?

That’s the question bouncing around Twitter about “Astro_Mike,” or Mike Massimino, an astronaut on space shuttle Atlantis, set to land today at Kennedy Space Center.

On May 12, Massimino wrote, “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”

Ever since, NASA, newspapers, TV shows and blogs have been crediting him as the first person to post on the microblogging service, or “tweet,” while in orbit.

In reality, Massimino writes his updates in space and then e-mails them to Houston, where a NASA employee posts them to his Twitter profile. That often takes hours because e-mails are transmitted from the shuttle only a few times a day.

Read the whole article here

Facebook and Twitter Users Really More Productive

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This story appeared everywhere last week (and it was not an April Fool!) A study carried out at the University of Melbourne discovered that people using the web for personal surfing get more work done than those who do not. The study was carried out by Dr Brent Coker:

People who do surf the internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.

Dr Coker states that most projects, such as writing a report, consist of mini-tasks e.g. gathering information, entering data, creating a graph, etc. Workers were shown to take small web-surfing “treats” between these mini-tasks. That enabled the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration and increased productivity.

I’m sure this news was printed and put under the nose of bosses all round the world!

Read the original post here

Although I do not have any such kind of restriction at work but I am definitely going to pass it on to my officials :)

TwitterTweets, a PHP wrapper class for Twitter REST API

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I have just finished hosting my first OpenSource project on Google Code. Its called TwitterTweets. Its a small wrapper API that consumes Twitter REST API.

It can be easily included in any PHP script / application to support manipulation of TwitterTweets from a single user. Currently it has the following features

  • Reading updates including or excluding replies.
  • Caching support to store xml/json response locally as a file with cache-timeout
  • Built-in custom Array

I will be writing and uploading modules and plugins for Joomla and WordPress in the coming days. Stay tuned.

Project Homepage: http://code.google.com/p/twittertweets
Project Discussion Group: http://groups.google.com/group/twittertweets

Enjoy!