daily minutia on Twitter

  • via @BikeCrave: A tribute to cycling legend Laurent Fignon who lost his battle with cancer. http://bit.ly/apec9n. What a legend. 2 days ago
  • Classy. I just hand-poured washer fluid on my car with the wipers going because shit is broke. 2 days ago
  • RT @jvaleski: New Blog Post: "Exits; You're Doing it Right" - http://bit.ly/dmaSvK (Nice post, & I could not agree more with your examples.) 2 days ago
  • @CaroDonahue Happy Birthday! As a convenient gift, you should keep my Spiritual Gangster T-shirt. You are a much better wearer of it than I. 2 days ago
  • Could not have had a better morning. Why, you ask? Because @jmalan dropped off some lemon blueberry scones. Thanks love! They were great. 2 days ago
  • More updates...

I'm Ingrid Alongi, a developer in Boulder, Colorado. I'm a co-founder at Quick Left, a Web Engineering company. I used to be a software engineer at Gnip where API integration and social media data were my world. Prior to that, at OneRiot, I wrote web applications using Java/Wicket/CSS. I've got experience with CodeIgniter for PHP, but mostly use Zend with Doctrine when it comes to PHP. Got some JQuery too.

I've been in the web development/interactive agency world for almost 10 years, with most of my experience in building database-driven web applications (PHP, ColdFusion) for consumer facing clients (e-commerce, email marketing, advertising, cms, etc.). Lots of strategy, lots of driving traffic back the web site types of stuff. Oh, and managing an amazing team of developers.

I'm an electronic music snob, ex national level cyclist, I play violin and cello, and have an MA in Women's Studies. You can contact me at ialongi at yahoo . com. Or, mosey on over to the Quick Left blog to see what I'm up to.

5 Tweets

June 19, 2008, 8:40am by electromute

I love Twitter. It fits into my multitasking life perfectly. I can keep up with my friends and even get to know new people over time via their tweets. I make plans through Twitter, I vent my frustrations through Twitter, and I share my joys through Twitter.

Over time, I have noticed a few patterns emerge and this post is dedicated to 5 common tweets.

1. The Boring TMI Tweet

The boring TMI tweet is the type of twitter that is pretty much useless to the mass audience. It’s too much information but not even in a sexy, gross or cheeky way. Common tweets include “Good morning Twitterverse!” and “Eating cereal”. “Stepped in dog shit” or “Cleaning up cat puke” also fall into this category.

2. The Namedrop

The namedrop tweet makes one appear( to have a heavy social calendar filled with parties, outings and meetups (or, tweetups if you’re one of the cool kids). The tweets are filled with a long list of @. Little do you know that they are merely standing next to the person, but it’s all about the spin, right?

3. IM through Twitter

These tweets are entire conversations between twitter users IM-style. If you are not following both of them, you only get the partial story. While sometimes this can be amusing and can lead to learning about interesting new people, the volume of tweets for this case makes the distraction level a bit too high–even for a power multitasker.

4. Auto self promotion

This kind of tweet is usually a bot that automatically feeds links to Twitter. While in moderation can be cool, the robotic tone of these tweets is a turn off. I mean, how hard is it to announce that you posted on our blog yourself? My worse experience with this type of tweet was when Twitter wasn’t letting you page through to old posts and someone’s feed re-posted each and every one of their blog entries. LEAVE

5. The Love Fest

Love fest tweets are those where lots of kudos are handed out in a public forum. These are fun tweets and they make a person feel all warm and fuzzy. There should be a twitter app called “share the love” where you can review them all when you are about to cry because your regex isn’t working.

BONUS: The Mental Twitter

This type of tweet doesn’t make it to Twitter and is perhaps my favorite kind. These are tweets too inappropriate for the mass audience or are inside jokes that end up not being funny to anyone else (and fall into the boring TMI tweet category). My friends and I will often tweet these directly to each other, just to have an outlet, however many mental tweets are just that–mental, said in your mind in under 140 characters.

You can find me committing most of the above crimes at www.twitter.com/electromute


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