I contributed to a group interview on the Trada blog about How to Market Your Business on Twitter and ended up mentioning pandas and something I described as programmatic slime:

What I meant was that if you're a little too clinical and precise about your Twitter strategy, you may make folks queasy. It's the same principle as the uncanny valley. Just as humans are better when they be real, so are conversations.

Here's a panda:

Twitter announced its website revamp yesterday. In its wake, all the social media experts are blahblahblahing about what it means for the internets, how their expertise foresaw it and why you should download their white papers. 

Lost in the shuffle is the sole casualty of Twitter's evolution - the "More" button:

We had some good times, baby.

As someone who favors Twitter's web interface over more feature-heavy apps, I'm certainly excited about the changes. Making multimedia accessible without leaving the page is a huge step forward, don't get me wrong. But the announcement that the More button would be removed in favor of a bottomless supply of visible tweets was a rude awakening.

I'll miss using the More button, that friendly gatekeeper that rested quietly at the bottom of the page over the years, beckoning me to read another 20 tweets with its velvety voice.

"I really should head to the gym..." I would say.

"Awwww - c'mon, Ef!" replied the More button. "Give me a little click, there's bound to be some not-to-be-missed updates from your favorite strangers."

"Well, I guess a few more tweets couldn't hurt..."

I'll miss you, More button. Not for the tweets that you showed me, but for what you showed me about myself.

I consider myself a writer, but I don't always have time to write. I was complaining about this to a friend of mine, and she pointed out that I write a lot on Twitter. I balked. Twitter isn't actually writing, right? It's one-liners and links. But I started to wonder how much writing I'm actually doing without knowing it.

There are websites that will tell you how often you tweet on average, but that doesn't mean much to me. I needed a visualization.

So I copied and pasted my tweets from Aug. 27, 2010 into a Word doc, omitting the @username portion from @replies (since I don't actually type those out). This is how much I write in a single day:

I'm stunned. If you added line breaks for paragraphs, it would be a solid page of writing. I had no idea. For you numbercrunchers, here's what Word spit out when I clicked on Word Count:

Close to 3,000 characters without breaking a sweat. How many characters do you tweet a day? If you can think of an easy way to figure it out, I'd love to hear it. (My process was a little arduous - bleh.)

I just played around with a site called TweetStats and got some fascinating information about my Twitter usage. There's an option to generate a tweet cloud based on the stuff you update about. Here's mine:

It's funny that @jennyjenjen is such a central part of my cloud. She's one of my closest friends, but this rendering would lead you to believe that we are married. We are not. She could do way better than my dumb face.

I will try and post one of these every month or so to see how my cloud topics change. Very fun.