MeFi Projects

Suffer from tweetgret? Tortured by typos? Get into online spats? Calm Twitter is here for you. A browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, it guides you through a deep breathing exercise before checking if you *really* want to send that tweet. Example GIF. [more inside]
posted by waninggibbon on May 31, 2018 - 2 comments

It's 2017 and Twitter's Arab Spring euphoria is long over. We've traded Gamergate for Pizzagate. Trump uses his account as a literal bully pulpit. Journalists receive death threats in 140 characters (well, now 280). Leslie Jones has been forced to perform double duty as a troll buster. And even Twitter co-founder Biz Stone struggles to get neo-Nazis booted. What's an ordinary user to do? Enter MuckTweet. [more inside]
posted by waninggibbon on Oct 8, 2017 - 0 comments

If Twitter were built today, it would be designed from the beginning with chat in mind. Screenshot [more inside]
posted by philosophistry on Jul 26, 2017 - 5 comments

Short comedy video series: Trent is a sort of Max Headroom for the social media era — but only sort of. He lives inside the matrix, telling you what's #TRENTing, in a brash style — mixing a Scandinavian accent with a Brooklyn attitude. In this episode, Trent weighs in on the Ghost in the Shell controversy, the Vice President's rule about dining alone with women, and your search history being up for sale. WARNING: "Mature" language. [more inside]
posted by edlundart on Apr 1, 2017 - 2 comments

Tameline organizes your Twitter feed by giving everybody only one row. Loud users no longer crowd out quiet users. Here's an example. [more inside]
posted by philosophistry on Apr 13, 2016 - 6 comments

Can you objectively measure dance? In this brief educational film, the Bureau of Non Verbal Communication shows you how to quantify your get-down and avoid common mistakes -- like having poor taste.
posted by fake on Mar 20, 2016 - 2 comments

For three weeks last November, Women, Action, and the Media accepted harassment reports that they escalated to Twitter, collecting data on the experience of harassment and the process of reporting it. Our team of academics have published a comprehensive report on what they found. [more inside]
posted by honest knave on May 14, 2015 - 2 comments

Since September 2014 I have contributed stories about Japan as Global Voices' Japan Editor. I report on what Japanese people are actually saying about the news on Twitter, in blogs, and on 2chan (somewhat similar to Reddit). Often I can find eyewitness accounts (in Japanese) to what's happening in the news, sometimes even scooping Western news outlets. It's all about presenting an authentic, slightly quirky take on current events in Japan.
posted by Nevin on Jan 6, 2015 - 0 comments

Augur is an iPhone app that displays random Twitter posts, and attempts to provide both advice and prophesy. Pulling from a growing list of keywords, the app ignores any Twitter posts containing links, images, #hashtags, or @mentions. It also parses out any first person mention (I, Me, Myself) and tries to present Twitter posts containing second personal conditionals (You will, You shall, etc). [more inside]
posted by avoision on Jun 25, 2014 - 6 comments

Chinese words like foot fetish, Islam, and march are or were blocked on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. For two months last year, I used a Ruby script to uncover about a thousand of these blocked words. I've posted some of them on a website I created with short little entries on why they are blocked. [more inside]
posted by jng on Mar 10, 2012 - 4 comments

My friend Cristin Norine is spending one month living in a gallery, alone, that's in plain sight on a busy street in Portland, Or. She can't leave or have visitors, and is only communicating to others via social media. [more inside]
posted by blazingunicorn on Nov 13, 2010 - 2 comments