• Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
• The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
• YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement
• ShareThis on Multi-Post & Fast-Sharing.
• OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.

• Help! My Half-Elf is Pregnant! – The 11 strangest Dungeons and Dragons questions from the “Sage Advice” Column
• 15 things worth knowing about coffee by The Oatmeal.
• Photos: When Niagra Falls Ran Dry

And now some techie stuff:

• Interesting idea: Paper.li extracts links posted by Twitter and Facebook accounts you follow, then creates a daily newspaper page featuring headlines, links and excerpts from the top stories.
• Who Came Up With Computer Symbols?
• Thomas Hawk’s Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc. on why Yahoo! should consider Flickr a core product.
• Firefox made of LEGO

Edit: Not a link, but I should mention: between a bug in Akismet and me not having time to go through it, I ended up with more than 2,000 comments in the spam folder just from the last 3 weeks. I don’t have time to look through that many items for false positives, so I just cleared it all out. If you left a legitimate comment that hasn’t shown up on the site, I apologize.

So now you can follow daily humor pulled from real spam in three ways:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Buzz

For now, the older quotes (before November 2010) are only on Twitter, but eventually I plan on importing them to LOLspam.net. I figure WordPress 3.1′s built-in support for asides would make it an ideal platform to create a searchable archive and still tie into the same networks.

Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie wondered if the beta testers hadn’t been testing the limits.

You want to know what convinced Mozilla to issue an update so quickly?

Farmville.

Apparently Firefox was detecting Farmville as frozen and closing it. It turns out that on many computers, Farmville regularly freezes up the browser for longer than 10 seconds, and its players just deal with it and wait for it to come back. Mozilla decided that the simplest thing to do would be to increase the time limit.

What this tells me is that the type of person willing to beta-test a web browser these days is not likely to be playing Farmville — or if they are, it’s likely to be on a bleeding-edge computer that can handle it without 10-second freezes.

In more practical terms: Mozilla needs to convince a wider variety of users to help test their software!

If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.

*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.

The Links

• Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
• Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
• WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses.
• I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
• Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
• Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)

In addition to letting you follow the blog through Facebook, it also lets me auto-publish new posts to my profile. I haven’t decided whether I want to enable that. It’s convenient, but I’m not sure I want every post to be imported. When I had the blog, Twitter and Facebook all linked together, I found myself occasionally making a post on one network and then deleting it from another because it was redundant, or didn’t really apply to the other audience, or there was a better way to cover the same thing in a different format. I also found myself trying to craft posts in one medium for another, rather than playing to their individual strengths. (Consider Facebook vs. Twitter link sharing.)

Follow K-Squared Ramblings on Networked Blogs!

The reason it’s called Selective Tweets is that it lets you choose which items to transfer, instead of just blindly dumping everything from Twitter to Facebook. You do this by adding the #fb hashtag to the end of each tweet that you want to also appear on Facebook.

On the downside: after the message is copied, that extra hashtag is just clutter. You can’t do anything about removing it from Twitter itself, but you can filter it out of your digests on your WordPress blog!

All you have to do is install and activate this plugin (after installing and activating Twitter Tools), and it will use the Twitter Tools API to filter out the #fb hashtag instead of linking it.

Download it: ktv-twitter-tools-skipfb-1.0.zip

• Requires Alex King’s Twitter Tools.
• Requires PHP 5.
• No configuration needed.

I had intended to also filter it out of the sidebar, but the Twitter Tools API doesn’t seem to provide a way to do that.

If I ever do future versions, I’ll track them here: Twitter Tools Skip FB Plugin.

Good: It worked! Every instance of the #fb tag was removed, and everything else stayed.
Bad: Twitter Tools posted four copies of the digest.

Well, Twitter Tools does that sometimes. I’ll frequently see it post 2 or even 3 copies, and while I’ve determined it’s not related to WP Super-Cache, I haven’t gotten around to seriously debugging it. So I don’t know if it has anything to do with my plugin. Actually, it probably doesn’t, since it runs within the digest-building code.

For what it’s worth, Friday posted only two copies of the digest. I only found one item worth saving, though. (Well, two, but I expanded the other one into this post.)

I guess it still needs some testing. When I’m sure it’s working properly, I’ll post the code.

Update: Check out Version 1.0.