multitasking? you simply cannot

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A recent Stanford study shows that people who do things simultaneously are paying a big mental price. They get distracted by everything and show less capability to accomplish tasks. This study is especially focused on media multitaskers, i.e. those people who browse, IM, write emails simultaneously.

This reminds me a blog I read earlier this year, which described the issue in a more impressive way: multitasking is even worse than taking drugs. The article mentioned, “Multitasking is bad. Research suggests that you not even lose the time you spend multitasking, but you get temporarily dumber by about 10 IQ points. This is just by checking email and doing some instant messaging. Many similar tests suggest that marihuana users get about 4-8 points less. “

Twitter, Meme and Jaiku

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Yahoo silently launched meme recently. It is pretty nice. But can it beat twitter?

Interesting enough, meme launch drew a lot of Chinese users’ interest in Google’s microblogging and they found Google acquired a twitter like microblogging service Jaiku in Oct 2007, when we were busy with yahoo answers. We even did not notice twitter at the time.

http://mashable.com/2007/10/09/jaiku-google/

Almost two years have passed. Let’s see their growth.

Twitter is now the 13th largest traffic site in the world by today (rank 15 in 3 month average). It occupies 3.75% of global Internet users. The following chart shows the increase of this user reach over the past 2 years.

Then what about jaiku in the past 2 years. It almost has no growth. Traffic rank is 19648 in the world.

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tweet using curl

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curl -u username:password -d status=”140-char content” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

If your password has special characters, try to escape them with backslashes.

Chit – a useful ruby util

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I found an interesting ruby util – chit. it can retrieve cheat sheets from repositories powered by git!

http://wiki.github.com/robin/chit/user-s-guide

so far I haven’t found any especially useful cheat sheets there. but it looks interesting and promising.

what’s the difference between a cheat sheet and a man page? man pages spend too much effort to define options formally. cheat sheets give you examples directly without any explanation. that’s why i prefer cheat sheets.

Teenagers do not use Twitter

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It is not news. NYTimes just published an article Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/technology/internet/26twitter.html?_r=1

some interesting points

“Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product.”

“The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents.”

Let me add another figure of twitter demographics from comscore shared by cambodia4kidsorg on flickr.

sina will launch its microblogging service

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sina will launch a twitter-like microblogging service. when chinese clone products, usually no detail will be missed. it even only allows 140 characters too. actually i hope yahoo can clone other products in this no-brainer way, since it turns out most features yahoo missed in the beginning will be eventually added anyway. it is more important to enter the market faster.