Heart’s a Twitter
I’ve been swamped lately - book chapter editing while following the recent Wikipedia crises concerning identity hoax, deletion of articles and administrator wars.
But one tool that can still fill in the tiny minutes of free time is Twitter, a site that lets you display your mind-droppings to your friends and to the world. It’s actually a pretty simple idea. You know the “status message” you change on Skype, Google Talk or any instant messaging program, so you can say “Eating now” or “I got a new Nintendo Wii!”
Well imagine a whole site based around putting your current thoughts, gripes, links, accolades or goings-on for everyone to see. That’s Twitter. But not just that, you can link it to your cell phone and instant messaging programs. You can SMS in your current thoughts so everyone can see, or you can be notified by instant message when a friend drops a new brilliant idea.
It’s bizarre how cult-like the site has become. You can voyeuristically follow the lives of tech celebs like Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales, Steve Wozniak and pod-father Leo Laporte. It’s like each person having their own Times Square ticker. And while it wasn’t meant to be so, it’s also morphed into a mob-oriented instant messaging tool, with folks commenting on each others’ happening in a virtual commons.
An example of an exchange with Jimmy Wales as he travels the world meeting Wikipedians:
jwales Slightly waking up on night train to delhi from varanasi after astounding mud soaked jeep pushing adventures last night.
fuzheado Jimbo - You’re living the real India experience
Sometimes it can provide an insight into peoples’ lives as its happening. Perhaps too much insight. Joi Ito is now famously vegan, providing almost every lettuce leaf’s worth of detail on his Twitter feed.
bought some cow shit for the garden
Plowed garden and planted Broccoli, some Chinese leaf veggies and Soramame.
Eating fruit at my desk at Digital Garage
Steve Wozniak (loveable cofounder of Apple and Segway polo nut) has a dining philosophy a bit different than Joi:
Ice cream for dinner, fried fast food for lunch, Top Ramen for breakfast
Out for a walk… followed by hotdogs for dinner
Seeing Steve’s diet intertwined with Joi’s makes my stomach, well, twitter.
Singing up for Twitter is very simple and you can drive everything from just the Web page. And being fully Web 2.0, you can subscribe to your friends’ feeds by RSS, and there are a slew of clients out there to get your twitterlings up as fast as possible. But if it’s really Web 2.0, shouldn’t it be Twittr?
