I’ve done it. Again. Against my Luddite inclinations, I’ve joined yet another of the latest-greatest web social networking services. Twitter.
After hearing about it over and over and over and over, ad-nauseum, from every talking head on the TWIT network (This Week In Tech, no connection to Twitter) I was curious about Twitter.
My friend, Scott Leffler does a call-in radio show and recently started taking comments via IM, AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc. I was going to suggest Twitter to him, not as a substitute to those, but well, it sounded like something he’d find useful, but before I could, he announced that he had joined Twitter on his website.
I guess great minds think alike.
If you don’t know what Twitter is, or have never heard of it, it’s a bit different than most other social networks. It lets you go to your account and type in a short message about what you are currently doing. Nothing long, it’s limited to 130 characters. Anyone who wants to get your messages can add you to their list of people they watch. After a while, you’re getting little bits of news from all the people you watch and they are getting yours.
Then, to make it even more immediate and ubiquitous, you can both receive and send these messages from your cellphone or PDA. You can even send URLs to everyone, so you can send a link to say your latest cell phone photo that you just uploaded.
So I went on and joined it. I’ll see how I like it. I don’t know if it’s my cup of tea, but if you’re a Twitter user, you can find out how boring I am.
My Twitter page. I’ve also added a widget to the sidebar here with my latest update from Twitter.
Oh, goodie! Now I (and the rest of the world) can look at the whirling Twittervision globe and wait for Doc Wu to check in.
Twittervision? I hadn’t heard of that one, but it’s kind of cool.
I Googled it (The Google!) and the first thing I found that referred to it was a blog called ourobouros that was just full of articles on web gadgets like that. At the top was the Is Twitter Down? site that has been made popular by Twitter’s unreliability lately.
Oh, and I also have joined Facebook. Don’t ask why. I have no idea, but I did run into a few people I knew there, so it must work.
I don’t have the time (or energy, or busy, fascinating life) to constantly update all these things. so they will probably languish there until someone says “Why don’t you update your ….. page?”
There’s probably a widget out ther to update them all at once, but I can’t be bothered to look for it.