Starting of today, twittering from 8hands is officially one of the common ways to send updates to your twitter page. As (we hope) you already know, you can sync your 8hands tagline to your Twitter account, so that every time you change it, twitter will automatically get your update and vice versa.

The new innovation is that now, twitter will also know to mark these updates as “Updated from 8hands” just like in the picture below. We are very proud and would like to thank the nice guys at Twitter for their cooperation!

Remember you can also choose to receive your twitter updates in the 8hands' latest section. To do so, just go to the “settings” section and tick the “show twitter updates in latest” box.

If you know what's hot around the net these days, then you definitely have a Twitter profile.

Because 8hands is here to handle your online social life and make it easier for you to control all your profiles at once, you can update your Twitter profile via the 8hands tagline.

This is actually easier than you think: After adding your Twitter profile into the 8hands locations, tick the "connect Twitter to 8hands tagline" box, now use your tagline (it's right under your screen name at the scorecard) to update your Twitter profile: Everything you'll write in the tagline will appear in your Twitter and vice versa!

Oh and while you're up there don't forget to add us as your Twitter friends: http://twitter.com/8hands

Not that this is likely to happen to us (having 8hands does give you a small advantage) but you can never know…

It happens to the best of us - you are browsing your favorite sites and then BOOM! An unexpected error message occurs with no apparent reason.

Instead of receiving some terrifying messages it is really fun to bump into some funny error messages.

Twitter made a catty series exactly for that scenario. And even though, generally, I'm not a big fan of cats, this one is just too adorable -

Following that - Gone with a ping is a small blog dedicated to BUGS! Yeah…lovely concept.

Check out what flickr, digg or YouTube have to say when their site is down.
Viva la Errors!

I'm sure most of you are familiar with that feeling of sitting at home and wondering what kind of crazy and amazing stuff are happening right now around the world.

Well, Twittervision is here to provide the answer! It's a real time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter and it's just too cool.

Whether it's the Qradio post about what tracks they are currently playing, or people posting about their last night experience, or news shouts from the BBC... all being updated in real time.

I must warn you though - It's extremely addictive. Personally I spent the last 2 hours staring at this little wonder (Kobi don't be mad :-) )

Though this site is not affiliated with Twitter it's another step in the little Twitter revolution, helping Twitter to become much more than just the newest buzzword.

Note from Oferico: Private alpha testers, you asked and we deliver. Keep your 8hands online 'cause we'll be releasing a hot update which includes Twitter support! Yay! You'll be able to post to Twitter directly from 8hands and you'll be able to see updates from friends in the History panel. If you're already a mature Twitterer and know how to handle Twitter floods you can even set Twitter events to appear in the "latest" section of 8hands. Enjoy!

Follow 8hands on Twitter

I was about to write a nice opening for my next "User spotlight" column which will focus on the Twitter community. I knew exactly how I'm gonna write about the simple, naive and not too sophisticated interface for this cool and beloved community, that mainly just want to know what its friends or other people are doing.

My perception has started to change just from the beginning, when I found a cool Twitteret user that I wanted to interview, and was amazed by the fact that I've got no option, what so ever, to contact her. No option for a comment or message sending. Also, the "about" section is very very limited and you can hardly learn anything about the people you meet in the site. Not exactly a good start for making new friends in a community, so I thought...

Luckily enough, Lynn Wallenstein (a co-founder of Powered By Geek company) had a link for her website, where I've managed to find an email address to contact her.

While reading Lynn's answers, I finally understood that for many users (though not all of them), Twitter functions more like a cool gadget for your Google Talk and less as an inner online social community "I like the Twitter web interface, but I primarily use it through gtalk/jabber as I want the updates pushed to me" says Wallenstein.

When I asked Wallenstein to name 3 things that make Twitter a good community she said "I don't think Twitter is a community. A community implies that ALL the people on Twitter are all always talking to each other. Twitter has many little communities that overlap. I happen to be involved in the more geek/web designer circle in that those are my friends, we seem to all be talking to each other. I am sure there are many similar circles for other areas/regions. Twitter is a tool that facilitates a community..."

When looking at the wikipedia definition you see that Twitter is "an Internet service that allows users to post one-line summaries of their current state, and to view the current state of other users. It fulfills a niche somewhere between blogs and customisable status texts or display names in instant messaging applications." So why not build a community in the web? I mean, wasn't that was the whole "web 2.0" idea?

"I wouldn't use Twitter 1/1000 of the time I do if I had to check a web page. The IM integration is defintly my favorite Twitter feature" And what about other communities, are you a member in any of the other social networks? "I am a member of like every social network in the world, but Twitter, if you want to call it a social network, is the one I most frequent. I am always on Twitter... 24/7. With it pushing to my IM client I just work and read the messages as they come in. For me it is like working in an office with a bunch of people and someone yells out "hey check out X""

So I understand that your real friends (in life) are part of the Twitter community as well. "Yes, many of my real life friends are on twitter as well as many people I am going to meet at meetups and conferences are as well." If you could, what would you change about Twitter? "Better API Plus I would love to see new features like XFN integration as well as some sort of friend recommendation (8 of your friends have this person as a friend, you should add them, etc) as it is sometimes hard to track what conversations are going on if you are missing people. I also think an improved direct message, such as @screenname would go directly to them" Best line you ever read on Twitter? "redjac: Just saw a guy on the street beat a rat to death."

Your favorite Twitter user? Changes depending on the conversation, but I think thus far my most "interesting" twitter friend is Christian Heilmann, partially because he posts so much, partially because his posts are usually in my field of interest and mostly because he is funny.

Now, I got to ask - Is it really that interesting to know what other people are doing at any given time? Definitely. It not only provides me a method of venting about whatever I am doing, but I pick up interesting bits of information from my friends. I have found a lot of cool things from twitter recommendations. And last one - What would you do if you had 8 hands? "One for the remote, three of typing, one to hold my coffee, one to thumb wrestle and two backup emergency hands incase of paper cuts." To summarize my Twitter little research I would say that users, especially the ones who use a lot of profiles in many of the social networks out there, won't spend much time in a community when you need to get and update your web page every time. I guess when it comes to profusion, communities must find a way to facilitate us, the users, and make it easier to keep us updated all the time with our online communities friends.