twitter

We tried twitter out for a few days here at listingslab. It wasn't for us, though. Too intrusive, too blunt a tool. But there are certainly good resons to get involved in it if you're thinking about it. Read the article below, published and copyrighted to Andrew Skinner.

The witter about Twitter
www.AndrewSkinner.name

by ajskinner on May 12, 2007

There's a new free online service that's causing a storm amoung the early adopters. It's a messaging service called Twitter, an application created out of the ashes of the online Podcasting Directory - Odeo, by the newly formed Obvious Corp. Originally a side project of the Odeo team and built on the Ruby on Rails framework it is a web service that allows users to post information (called Tweets) to the web about what they are doing now. Users can then share that information with other interested parties (friends and followers) or just tell the world by joining the public timeline displayed on the Twitter homepage. In many ways it could be described as micro blogging as the messages are intended to be concise.

To facilitate just in time messaging, in addition to the web interface Twitter is also accessible through SMS and Instant Messenger services. Users can opt to be notified through either of these channels when new Tweets appear from the users they are following. Additionally users can also post new Tweets through these channels by sending Twitter an SMS message or by communicating with the Twitter IM robot.

Creating an account is easy, enter a few details and choose an Avatar picture and it's done. Having created an account on Twitter, the user is presented with their own homepage that they can customise with their own background and colour scheme that details their recent Tweets and the recent Tweets of those they are following. From their homepage they can also post new Tweets all displayed with a controlled amount of AJAX goodness. One of the weird quirks I have noticed across Twitter is that it encourages users to talk about themselves in the third person which, once noticed is quite disconcerting.

The real power of the Twitter system is the flexible API (Application Programming Interface) that Obvious have provided. This is allowing developers to extend the functionality of Twitter in new and innovative ways that the creators had not envisaged. The usual spat of blog plug-ins have emerged for displaying up to the minute information about what you're doing plus rich desktop applications like Twitterific for Mac OSX.

Many argue the actual value of the service Twitter provides but from a very simple concept comes a useful tool with a multitude of applications. Recently I have been using Twitter to broadcast information about new software builds to interested parties by including a call to the Twitter API in my automated build scripts.

On the downside the early success of Twitter has meant that historically, service has been patchy while Obvious struggle to scale the application to accommodate the onslaught of users. As a company they have been handling this well, with clear communication and swift progress aided by the open source Rails community. Whatever lies in store for Twitter one thing is clear - it's going to be an interesting one to watch.