What are you doing?
Many on the Internet want to keep track of what friends and acquaintances are doing, but for a increasing number of Internet users, the instant gratification of the web is bleeding into the "keep in touch" arena.
Micro blog site Twitter has been around for a while now. The free service allows users to post what they are doing simply by asking the question "what are you doing?". The user enters what their doing or a note to friends and clicks the update button. The world (or vastly huge twitter community) then knows what you are doing.
The service integrates with tons of other online applications, from jott.com to the ever-popular Facebook as well as other things.
Twitter users can send SMS messages to the service from their mobile device to update as well. (Standard text rates will apply).
You can also follow your friends on twitter, via the web interface or by adding notifications which send SMS tweets to your mobile phone when the status of someone you follow changes.
The twitter web interface is shown below:
Below the form on the twitter page, you will see a list of the latest updates posted by yourself and those you are following.
Because twitter is a free service and can be integrated with so many other online applications it has grown in popularity since its launch in March of 2006.
In addition to the web interface, you could use an SMS message to Short code 40404. The short code is an abbreviated phone number for use in text messaging.
Can I get in on all this action?
Yep. Twitter also supports developers who wish to create their own tools to post messages to the service. The developers at twitter have created an Application Programming Interface (API) which allows other applications to integrate with twitter and post to (or retrieve from) the micro blogging site.
Twitter has been around for a while and has been covered in some fashion by just about every tech blog, so I thought I might mention it here. Give it a try, you might be surprised how easy it is to tell the world what you are doing.
