Twagnetic Poetry munges the text of a person’s Twitter posts and scrambles it into “magnetic” poetry, which you can shuffle and rearrange as if your browser were a refrigerator door. You can use it to take your most banal tweets and turn them into something more exciting, or to take your friends’ tweets way out of context and use their own words against them.

few windows for the saint / what seems like easy plans / will still involve foul doubt

Since Twagnetic Poetry uses your Twitter text as its source, it’s only natural that it allow you to post your poems back into Twitter, forming an endless cycle of gobbledygook that will surely collapse into a black hole of disconnected words. When we are all sucked, screaming, into a vortex of haiku, I’m sure I’ll regret having made this.

A poem posted to Twitter.

Anyway, it’s all still pretty rough and probably full of bugs, so if you run into any problems, please give me a holler. If it actually works for you, great! Enjoy.

In the last couple of days, I’ve seen two different Twitter-based games percolate through the stream that act a lot like the more Facebookish variety of social game: Spymaster and Tweet Lord. Because Twitter doesn’t provide the shell for applications that Facebook does, developers have to approach it more obliquely, which makes for some interersting interactions.

Spymaster is a spy-themed variation on Mafia Wars, in which you perform various spyful tasks, transfer money in and out of Swiss bank accounts, and most importantly, assassinate other spies. Those other spies are also Twitter users; in fact, the only way to log in is through your Twitter account. Your player stats are determined based on the size of your network, with bonuses applied if your followers/followees are also playing the game.

Beyond the initial sign-in and the notifications that get posted to your Twitter stream (possibly to the annoyance of your followers), pretty much all of Spymaster’s interactions happen on their web site. There’s pleasure in seeing the names of your Twitter friends on your kill list, but for the most part, Spymaster tends to play around Twitter — keeping your network in sight, but only tangentially making contact with it.

Tweet Lord takes a different approach to using Twitter. The game is an RPG in which the moves take the form of various emotes, which are sent out via player tweets: the game records all “@” replies to its bot and parses hashtags to determine the actions that players take. Many of those actions are transitive, like #wave or #bite, which gives the whole thing the feel of a Vampires/Zombies/Slayers/etc. poking game.

There’s a lot more use of the player’s Twitter stream in Tweet Lord than in Spymaster (probably too much: if I were to play the game, I’d probably want to create a separate account to do it, in order to avoid flooding my friends’ streams). Getting feedback on player actions still requires going to the web site, however, to see stats and levels and whatnot. In fact, there are buttons on player profiles that will compose tweets for you, requiring minimal interaction with Twitter itself. In this way, Tweet Lord plays through Twitter — using the site as a conduit, but funneling players back to its own site at both ends of the feedback circuit.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of games that don’t try to graft Facebook/MySpace/etc. mechanics onto a site that really isn’t built to support them: various bot-driven games that work through DMs and filtered “@” replies; most of them seem to be trivia games or polls. Then there are the less formal games that people spontaneously play: word association, riddles, hashtag memes, etc. One of the big game events of last year was Color Wars: by the time it was all over, there was a fairly elaborate web site that gave the games more of a “playing through” feel to them, but most of the fun was in the spontaneous formation of teams and attendant trash talking — the games themselves ended up feeling like just a formality. Twitter, with its loose formats and lack of formal structures, tends to feel more like a playground than a baseball field, supporting free-form paideia better than rule-bound ludus. I am OK with this.

N.B. One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of is games that play with Twitter, using the text of your stream in one way or another to generate or influence gameplay. Someone get on that!

N.not-so-B. I hate writing about Twitter for the same reason I hate writing about blogging: the more times I type out the word, the sillier it reads. Maybe I should just stick to Flib-Flarb.

There are movements underway to unify site logins and even the network of networks, and something similar might be useful for statuses. MoodSwing and MoodBlast will post a single status line to a number of different services, which would seem to solve the problem of too many dangling statuses.

The problem with the all-in-one solution is that I don’t necessarily want to post the same status to all my different profiles. I might choose to present myself differently in my status line depending on the kind of people I interact with on various networks: relatively professional for work-related IMs, full of non-sequiturs on Facebook, tracing the flow of my day on Twitter. All of these services serve slightly different purposes, and simply mirroring the same status across all of them might make me look hobgoblinishly consistent. Also, I’m sure that anyone with enough free time to track me across all the sites I frequent would get awfully bored.

Instead of having one status mirrored across many sites, it would be better to have all of my different statuses aggregated into a single point, where I can see at a glance what I’m doing. Something like this:

Presence of Mind mockup. (Click to see the actual page.)

Statuses are sorted from most to least recently updated, and sized and color coded to suggest that the statuses I update more recently or frequently are the ones that are more important to me. If this was a real app instead of a mockup, you’d be able to update your status inline and watch the table resort itself in some clever DHTML way. Of course, while we’re living in my fantasy world, all the listed services would have open APIs that would allow you to read and write things like statuses without resorting to screen scraping.

At any rate, I think that something like this would be a nice way to maintain a sense of your own presence around the Web and give yourself a chance to meditate on your own public personae. If I get really ambitious, I might see if I can fill in at least some of those lines with real data, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you; I’m sure something else will catch the fancy of my online OCD tomorrow.

I got my first word about this on Twitter. Turning on the TV, I was treated to images of flaming trucks, piles of concrete, rebar poking out of the water. Not the most soothing images to come home to at the end of a long day. Hearing newscasters talk about bumper-to-bumper traffic, buses full of schoolchildren, and how this was totally NOT a terrorist attack — like thanks, I hadn’t even thought of that yet — I started wigging the hell out. It didn’t help that announcers were warning people to stay off their phones for fear of overloading the cell grid.

What else could I do? If I couldn’t make use of the normal communication networks, I’d have to make do with the online social variety. I IMed and SMSed to make sure my friends were accounted for. I kept checking my Twitter feed, and reached out along the network to find other Minneapolitans who were tracking the events. I kept reloading the postings on MNSpeak and Metroblogging Minneapolis to see their comments lists grow with check-ins and roll calls. I saw photos cropping up on Flickr, and groups cropping up on Facebook.

Maybe it was all just empty pointing and clicking to keep my mind from dwelling on the fact that a whole bridge just up and dropped into the water — seriously, that is omgjeezus freaky. If all I had were the reports on the TV and radio, I might have felt like the entire city was being sucked in along with the bridge. As it was, all the multifaceted reports and “I’m OK” messages and good wishes helped to settle my nerves, to remind me that most of us were, in fact, OK, and here, and caring all at once about the same things.

Sometimes the real world crumbles and falls apart, and we need the virtual world to help us keep our shit together.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use Twitter to publish thoughts that are too small to warrant a proper blog post. I use it to follow the thoughts and experiences of various friends, acquaintances, and interesting people. I use it to hear about things as they happen (e.g., the VA Tech shootings, the Digg/HD-DVD flap), even when I’m away from the computer or TV or radio. I use Twitter to reestablish and reaffirm my sense of connectedness with all the random people that make up the Internet; it’s a form of online communion.

The problem with Twitter is that it’s almost too random; it’s difficult to find anyone specific without poking through your friends’ lists of friends and hoping for the best. The randomness and tenuous networks of Twitter may be part of its appeal, but it’s not so great when you actually want to do something specific, and can’t.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

One of the unusual things about Twitter is that unlike blogs or other public social profiles, you have a pretty good idea of who your audience is, or at least who your regulars are. Mine are mostly real-life friends, some folks that I met at Minnebar, and some random (but very nice) strangers.

The only people that I truly wish were in my audience are the ones with spare iminlikewithyou invites for me.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read Tweets through Twitteriffic when I’m at home, and by text message when I’m out. Because both of these formats are push, I do see all of the tweets that come at me; I’ve had to leave (silence) a few bot-driven Twitterers in order to keep my traffic under control. I don’t know all of the people whose Tweets I read, but I do know what some of them are having for dinner and watching on TV. For some reason, postings about everyday minutiae don’t seem as frivolous on Twitter they do on blogs, LiveJournal, Facebook, etc.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

What’s appropriate for Twitter is the same as what’s appropriate for the rest of the Web, which is the same as what’s appropriate for any public forum: if you don’t want your mother or your boss to hear about it, don’t post it.

I’ve gotten pretty good over the years at knowing where my boundaries are, so I usually don’t need to second-guess my Tweets. The only times I’ve decided against posting are when I feel like I’m getting a little too stream-of-conscious or spammy. I can convince myself that people are interested in the minutiae of my life, but I can’t believe that they want to swim in a veritable sea of my posts.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

Again, I try not to post anything I don’t feel comfortable making public, so public it is. If I don’t want people to know about something, I keep it to myself.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

When I first saw Twitter, I thought it was just .plan files for the Web 2.0 generation. And it is. But no one on a VAX ever thought to finger everyone on the network, all at once, and feed the collected .plans of everyone I know to my cell phone (or if they did, they probably crashed the server and got yelled at by the sysadmins). I’m sure that a year from now, we’ll all have abandoned Twitter for the next novel form of online interaction, but for now, it’s proving to be an awfully nice way to keep in touch.