… and Sandy reminds me about Twitter.
Twitter is a peculiarly simple thing. If you ignore the technology, it’s basically micro-blogging. That is, it lets you publish a short piece of text, which gets a timestamp, and is broadcast for anyone to see. And that’s pretty much it. An individual entry is known as a “Tweet”.
They’ve provided various ways to update — email, instant messaging, Web, mobile phone — and while you can view tweets on the Web, if you sign up for the service you can ‘follow’ other members, to receive their tweets in various ways.
I’m not sure what the point of all this is. It’s similar in a way to Facebook status messages, which are vaguely entertaining and no more. (In fact there is a Facebook application which allows you to update that status through Twitter).
It does provide an API for developers, which is how the aforementioned Sandy can communicate with me via Twitter (using Twitter’s auxiliary ‘direct message’ feature), which is really just a way for Sandy to get instant message functionality by proxy. Once you start thinking like this, I suppose the world’s your oyster. It’s not a great leap, for example, to imagine my TiVo having a Twitter account, so I could tell it “record Doctor Who tonight”. Currently, setting the TiVo from a mobile phone is quite a painstaking fight with a slow mobile Web browser. Yet most of these fit the direct message model more than Twitter’s core broadcast model.
Can you think of a great use for Twitter?
If you join, add me: ‘ukslim’