loving the dot com

Recently I’ve noticed more and more posts and articles relating to this “new” Web 2.0 service called Twitter. It’s been around for almost a year now (it was born on March 2006 I think), but it mainly took off in the US and hasn’t really appealed to the UK market much yet. What is it anyway?

Put simply - Twitter is a social networking site which allows it’s members to post updates of what they’re currently doing to each other - in 140 characters or less (basically like an SMS). At first glance, most people are going to think “What the hell is the point in a service which just lets me tell my friends what I’m currently doing?.” Well, it’s a good argument. A fair amount of people will disregard the service and not care - there are a few people who are familar with something similar already though. If you’ve got an account on Facebook, chances are you’ve updated your status at least once. This is what Twitter does best, except streamlined and linked to your IM client and mobile phone.

The advantage of the service being linked to your mobile phone instantly makes it easy to post your own little messages, co-ordinate when you’re going out, or even submit micro blog posts, wherever you are - especially for those moments when you don’t have a piece of paper to hand, or just want to quickly rant about something.

As Twitter seems to be steadily growing still, I thought I’d give it a look. If you’ve been reading this page recently you might have noticed the “Twitter feed” column in the right sidebar. This little feed comes directly from my Twitter account and is updated every 30 minutes - thanks to Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress. As I’ve only been playing with it briefly there isn’t much going on in my feed. Maybe I’ll start updating it more frequently once I get suitably addicted to it.

Of course, being a Web 2.0 service, Twitter have published a handy API enabling people to plug all sorts of applications into their service (like the Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress). There are some quirky amusing ones, such as Twittervision, which gives you a real-time feed of the latest Twitter “tweets” from the public feed. It’s quite amusing for the first few minutes, but you can get bored of it fairly quickly.

Some of the other people to plug into the service include BBC News, who send headline updates to the site - great if you like to keep track of breaking news. They also have a load of other Twitter feeds you can keep track of.

I have to say though, the most useful thing I’ve found on the service so far is the Twitter Tube Tracker by Tom Morris - it lets me get an SMS update of any delays on the London Underground so I don’t have the joyous pleasure of arriving at the station and finding the line is suspended.

There are a whole load of other ‘Twitterized’ services to play with at the Twitter Fan Wiki. If you’ve got a Twitter account, do check out the fan wiki - you might find something you like. Why not add me to your friends too.