Twittering Away the Time
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.
Twitter gurus have set up newsfeeds from the BBC and The New York Times, and there's a service update page for the BART in San Francisco. Just add 'em as Twitter friends and you get updates on the news as well as which restaurant you're supposed to go meet your buddies at later tonight.
Because of the mobile-phone aspect, Twitter can be used as a blogging tool for people don't even have Internet access, as Soyapi Mumba points out in a great post on his own blog about technology in Malawi. You can get a general idea of Twitter's international appeal at the TwitterVision site, which graphically displays the tweets and location of random Twitter users on a world map.
I'm sure there are companies who would love to start spamming you through Twitter as well, but thankfully, that hasn't happened yet. Yet.
One thing to keep in mind if you do take the Twitter plunge -- you can get a lot of messages and if you've opted to have them sent to your phone. And unless you have a phone plan with unlimited text messaging, you could be getting charged 10 or 15 cents per tweet, depending on your carrier's pricing. Also: be prepared to dump your phone's text-message In box pretty regularly, because that thing will fill up fast. After all, you don't want a cranky, overstuffed gadget to come between you and your friends.
