This evening I got an email telling me about Lazyscope a new immersive twitter desktop client. I downloaded the beta release and gave it a go and have to say I like the way that you get a preview of the urls that peeps include in their tweets and in the right-hand column you can actually read the site. There’s also an option allowing you to subscribe to a site if it has an RSS feed. The pop up notifications also include the url preview and you can see at a glance whether the link might be of interest without having to click and wait to for your browser to load.
I posted a few tweets about Lazyscope and thought I’d take a screenshot and tweet this and then remembered reading on ReadWriteWeb yesterday about new Twitter guidelines. One section of the article looked at how you could now refer to tweets without needing to consult your lawyer. It seems that we’re not supposed to use screenshots of other people’s tweets unless we have their permission. Checking the guidelines on the Twitter help centre confirms this. I then tweeted this and a couple of people tweeted back saying they hadn’t heard about this before and that it seemed a bit silly. As I haven’t asked them if I can display their tweets I can’t show you them here.
In some respects it’s nice that someone might ask you for permission to take a screenshot of one of your tweets, but is this Twitter guideline a bit over the top? Tweets are in the public domain, they are also googleable so does someone really need to to ask my permission to take a shot of my tweet. Many of us working in education frequently take screenshots of applications and websites to use in educational resources and we also make screencasts showing people how to use various tools including Twitter. Does this now mean that if we want to make a screencast for our students or colleagues that we need to get permission form everyone that’s tweeted into our Twitter stream whilst we were recording!!!
So what do you think?
As for Lazyscope it’s worth giving it a try. Here’s a screenshot, which is a bit cropped and only shows one of my tweets, but hopefully it will give you an idea of how you can view links in tweets.
e-LiME 