Alexander Williams

In Egyptian Hieroglyphics, names were always circled--an early example of semantic tagging. Twitter users created the '@username' convention on their own almost as soon as the service started, and it has now spread beyond twitter. Usernames are prefixed with a more...

“According to Kaspersky Lab’s Viruslist diary, this week Twitter has hosted an attack that is targeting both Twitter users and the Internet community at large. A malicious Twitter profile with a name that is Portuguese for ‘pretty rabbit’, has a more...

“I just posted a new application in my projects section called Twitter StreamGraphs. It is an interactive tool to let you create StreamGraphs from the latest tweets containing a given word or from a particular user. A few examples are more...

“Last month, in Has FriendFeed's Comment Activity Eclipsed Native Conversations?, I reported that comments on blog posts and Twitter post notifications on FriendFeed represented about 40% of the total comments I received on the same number of posts, natively, on more...

Twitter started as a side project and blew up fast, going from 0 to millions of page views within a few terrifying months. Early design decisions that worked well in the small melted under the crush of new users chirping more...

There’s an interesting kerfluffle going on regarding the scaling woes that Twitter.com is going through, especially since it’s built on Ruby On Rails. Here’s the original interview with one of the Twitter coders, the somewhat evasive reply by the lead more...

Linking blogs to Twitter. Brilliant!