Flight engineer Soichi Noguchi, a.k.a. @Astro_Soichi have been posting some nice twitpic from the view he’s been seeing over there. He is not the first astronaut to have tweeted from space, according to Mashable, first live tweet from space come from Astronaut Mike Massimino, a.k.a. @Astro_Mike.

Check out the photos :-

Singapore. Where is Mar Lion?

Port-Au-Prince, as of Feb 3. Three weeks after the earthquake.

Next time Malaysia is sending an astronaut to space he or she better has a Twitter account, which is why I seriously think they should seriously consider me, J Shamsul a.k.a @jibone to be the next astronaut, seriously.

Plot wise there is nothing much to say, big giant robot accompanied by a squadron of spacecraft starts to appear around Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. The robots then starts firing their weapons blowing up buildings up. Panic and chaos erupts in the city among the citizens. Military planes were called in but then the robots fuses together and self-detonates engulfing the city in a fireball. No explanation was given for the attack.

Fade Alvarez didn’t wow us on the story line, simply because there is really none to begin with. However the visual effects are impressive for something that cost $300. You can easily mistaken it for a feature length Cloverfield like movie trailer.

But what impress us more is the buzz it creates. Alvarez uploaded the short film on Youtube. The film’s reputation then spread by word of mouth over the Internet. It gets widespread media coverage after then. Alvarez’s inbox was full of emails from Hollywood studios.

Best part, as a result of the popularity of this little short sci-fi flick, Sam Raimi signed him up to Ghost House Pictures with a $30 million deal to develop and direct a film, any film, doesn’t necessary has to be Panic Attack. Yes it’s the Sam Raimi, The Evil Dead Sam Raimi.

If you have the talent and passion, social media and web tools like Youtube could get you notice. If your stuff is good, nowadays it has legs and spreads fast. Of cause this is not the only story about how someone was discovered on Youtube.

Check out the embaded Youtube video: -

I remember those days when part of my daily online routine was browsing Digg.com. I use website like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon for latest trends on the Web. Finding out what everybody is laughing at, what’s the latest online video people are watching, discovering the latest web meme.

Digg and Reddit shares the same formula. On Digg and Reddit, users submit stories and other users vote on stories they like. Item that has high votes are promoted to the front page. In a way this filters out all the crap and only the worthwhile crap are seen on the front page. The Internet is full of crap so this is good.

These days however, I find myself visiting Digg and Reddit less and less. I use to visits these sites multiple times in a day, now it’s a few times in a month, sometime almost never.

With Twitter, I don’t have to rely on Digg or Reddit for knowing what’s the trend. Most of the time I’ll be looking on my Twitter feed and clicking on links to discover interesting stories, breaking news or funny viral videos.

In Twitter, you choose the people you follow, they are either your friend you’ve known for a long time or someone you find interesting on the web. This itself acts as filters. You only read tweets from people you want to read tweets from.

I would check out links posted by someone I follow on Twitter because if that person, who I find interesting enough for me to follow on Twitter, finds that the link is interesting enough for them to post it on Twitter, therefore the link should somehow be interesting enough for me. See the logic there?

If there is a breaking news, it spreads on Twitter like a wild forest fire on a dry season. Twitter, with enough interesting followers is like having your own personal assistants that finds stuff on the web for you. At least that is how I feel.

So how does Digg and Reddit keep up then? By being on Twitter of cause. Reddit has its official Twitter feed that syndicates top links on Reddit onto Twitter for anybody who follows Reddit’s Twitter account.

Digg also does the same thing. They created Twitter account for each categories posting top links that got voted up. You can choose which categories to follow.

Twitter has become too big that these once giant social news websites like Digg and Reddit has to caved in and made themselves available on Twitter. I would love to see the actual metrics for Digg and Reddit, wonder if Twitter getting big these days does effect Digg and Reddit’s pageviews.

There is also Tweetmeme, that does what Digg does only instead of counting votes it counts re-tweets. This is something I’ll cover in an another post.