Wanna make your mobile phone go nuts? Sign up for Twitter and get a lot of friends.
Twitter, which got a big boost in popularity and an award at the SXSW conference earlier this year, is a service that lets you describe what you're doing at that very moment in 140 characters or less -- which can make for a lot of SMS haiku. After you sign up with Twitter, you can post your abbreviated thoughts through your page on the Twitter site, by texting the Twitter number on your mobile phone, or even by instant message; AIM, Jabber and Google Talk are currently supported.
And, because Twitter is a social service, you can collect "friends" and have all of their posts (called "tweets") show up on your page, phone, or message window so you always know what all your pals are up to. You can choose to make your Twitter messages public to the world, or private to just your friends. When I first heard about Twitter a few months ago, I was sort of dubious about wanting to read a lot of pointless posts on my phone.
Yes, Twitter can be completely frivolous ("I'm waiting in line at the store to buy carrots"), but after using it for a while, I can see it has a lot of potential.
