Do you twitter yet?

Twitter - blogging via SMS

Ok, for those of you that are not Twitter addicts yet, let's start with the basics. First, twitter-ing is blogging in short bursts of text (less than 140 characters), usually with SMS from your cellphone but it can be done in your browser. Very neat you say (I heard you), but why should you take a closer look at Twitter? From a personal standpoint, if you are blog addicted you can update your blog site (facebook, myspace, etc.) every 5 minutes all day long if you like, and there are twitter widgets you can embed into your blog; and your so-called "friends" can subscribe to your twitter blog and they'll be sent an SMS update of all your musings to their cellphone. If you are 15, this probably sounds cool.

There are other more productive uses of Twitter. First, I use it as a task management and reminder system. I can text reminders, to do lists, beginning and ending mileage tracking, call-back reminders and the like to my RememberTheMilk.com and Xpenser.com accounts via the Twitter direct message function, and then I can check them once I get back to my laptop and use the information accordingly. My latest Twitter toys are twittercal.com that connects Twitter to my google calendar and Jott.com's jotlinks that allows me to use voice messages translated by Jott into text to update my Twitter list. I'll do another post on Jott later.

There have been some complaints about Twitter over the past year as it has grown in popularity and they have run into issues with scalability of their Ruby-on-Rails application. It was reported yesterday on Techrunch that they were abandoning Rails for it's lack of scalability. Other options for this type of service are Jaiku (now owned by google) and Pownce just to name a few.

Check out the following link to see how other users are exploiting Twitter:

Twitter Mashups