In essence Twitter uses a 140 character mini-blog post from a user, me or you, about anything you think is important, and sometimes what some people say is important. Scott Gu is easier to follow through Twitter, as is people like Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. The social media’lites also use Twitter extensively. So when you post a Tweet (thats the term used) you have a choice of ways to do it, each with their drawbacks:

• Twitter: Go straight to the source, to the fountain, to the mothership. You will need a browser for this though (Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox) and although it does the job, once you close that browser window the connection to Twitter dies and any new content coming through wont be seen. Your Twitter page itself also refreshes content, but you need to click on a UI (user interface) element to get it to show the new tweets. So this is not my favourite way of connecting to Twitter. I do like the once-in-a-while changes to the main twitter login page though.
• Tweetdeck: I have been using Tweetdeck for quite some time now and I like it primarily because it allows me to update Facebook statuses and Twitter at the same time. I also like it because it notifies me when new Tweets are made. I dislike it because the UI that appears when a new Tweet comes in can get in the way sometimes, even though it has a close buttons
• Seesmic Look: I like it because it has been written using WPF and it looks slick and pretty. It does not display notifications of new Tweets though, which I wish it had

Social Media provides trends which to me directly relates to a measurable value. I also think Social Media relates to things such as Cloud Computing.

You can read the full article on Scott Gu’s website.

At the moment I use two wiki’s, a php/open source one and an open source ASP.NET version:

• MediaWiki (php)
• ScrewTurn Wiki (ASP.NET)

The Silverlight issue, though, was not the issue that occupied my mind the most. What occupied my thinking and strategising the most was to understand why content management for a website is so important, and particularly why it is important. The most important reason or benefit for that matter of content management on a website is that you can separate business logic and presentation logic and in so-doing alter the presentation logic more easily. That is the single most important benefit of content management. If you look at a content management system such as WordPress or Drupal it is easy to see that the presentation and business logic has been separated, hence the reason people are able to create themes for these content management systems and interchange them without losing the content. Content management systems present one caveat – the content is consistent but makes it difficult to implement uniquely designed pages without breaking the content management system.

1. David Ives – Developer and Platform Strategy Group for Microsoft in South Africa – Microsoft
2. Brad Abrams – Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services Team – Microsoft
3. Michael Koester – Designer Marketing Manager for Middle East and Africa and Central and Eastern Europe – Microsoft
4. Julian Harris – Conchango
5. David Pugh-Jones – Microsoft

The event was split into two tracks, a developer track and a designer track, but it generally focussed on Silverlight, and more specifically on two software packages, Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio, and even more specifically it introduced XAML as a common way for these packages to share content between them. XAML, Extensible Application Markup Language is an XML-like language that defines graphic elements in a human readable form that can be used in vector-imaging programs as well as Visual Studio 2008. This gives designers the flexibility to design interfaces without having to worry about programmers not being able to replicate their designs in a programming environment. Julian Harris demonstrated that you can export files from Adobe Illustrator into XAML format and import that XAML into Visual Studio 2008. XAML is also used in the Expression Studio range of products which includes amongst other two interesting products:

• Expression Blend
• Expression Design

Expression Blend is, almost like Adobe’s Flash Studio, which is an IDE that allows you to create WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight applications. WPF is a technology that allows developers (and designers) to create applications that give users a better user experience (UX). Contemporary windows applications generally use square (often mundane) windows, whereas WPF applications allow designers to implement creative graphics into the interface. Rounded corners and transparent backgrounds for instance are used, and because Expression Blend can read and understand XAML, none of a designer’s creative flair is lost. The developer no longer has any excuses to develop interfaces that do not exactly meet the designer’s design.