Hello.

I'm heartbroken about the situation at Twitter. So many of my friends have been impacted by the changes, and I feel helpless beyond offering support and sharing job opportunities. Twitter played a huge role in my career journey, offering a place to connect with others and find my voice. It's how I made many friends and career connections, and I'm grateful for the community it fostered. I dislike the rapid changes happening now, and like many, I'm concerned about its future and how it will survive. While I haven't paid for the service, I feel a sense of debt to the platform and community for all it's given me.

I've rejoined Mastodon! Driven by the potential Twitter costs and wanting more control, I'm now self-hosting my instance for about the same price as a Twitter Blue subscription. I'll keep using Twitter for learning, but I'm excited about Mastodon's open, interoperable nature and its excellent PWA. Come find me on Mastodon!

I'm excited to announce the launch of FriendDeck, a new tool inspired by TweetDeck that enhances the FriendFeed experience. Built on Google App Engine and using jQuery, FriendDeck lets you create persistent searches to track topics in real-time, rather than just seeing your friends' posts. This is particularly helpful for monitoring developing events, as demonstrated by Neville Hobson's use of FriendDeck during the US Airways Hudson River landing. FriendDeck supports a simple query language for searching by keyword, user likes/comments/friends, URLs, domains, and FriendFeed rooms. It also allows posting to FriendFeed directly from the application. Each deck auto-refreshes every minute, and new features like inline commenting are coming soon. Check it out at www.frienddeck.com!

I've launched Twollo, a Google App Engine project that helps you find and automatically follow Twitter users who share your interests. Unlike MrTweet, which suggests popular accounts, Twollo focuses on connecting you with people based on shared interests. Just enter your interests, like "Google App Engine," and Twollo will automatically find and follow relevant users every hour. Recent updates include viewing and unfollowing Twollo-followed users, preventing re-follows, tracking reciprocal follows, setting follow limits per interest, language filtering, UserVoice feedback integration, and one-click profile removal. More details about Twollo and Google App Engine coming next week!

I've joined Twitter! Follow me @PaulKinlan - http://www.twitter.com/PaulKinlan