The Importance of Twitter
Dear Reader,
Ok, yes, I’m a twitterhead, thanks to the magic of programs like flock and Spaz I tweet daily now. However, Twitter, like any good web 2.0 application, is finding new uses like ioubeer and other innovative ideas. At DevZone we are starting to experiment with using twitter as a reply mechanism for our podcast PHP Abstract and I know others are starting to work in this area. Basically to me, twitter is an API to instantly contact, by whatever means they want, anyone who wants to share their attention with me.
Using PHP Abstract as an example, right now, to get people’s attention that we have posted a new episode on DevZone, I post on dzone.com, digg.com, and facebook.com. Now however, for the past 3 episodes, I’ve also been posting on the PHP Abstract twitter account. So if you want to know that there is a new episode, all you have to do is follow phpabstract. While that is cool, one of the problems we seem to be having is that people don’t listen to PHP Abstract siggint at their computer, while on the DevZone page. This means that people can’t easily reply to a podcast. However, now, thanks to twitter, starting next week (doesn’t work yet, don’t bother) people will be able to tweet @phpabstract and the comment will go back to DevZone and be posted. So we now have a two-way API to talk with our listeners.
I think that going forward we will see more and more uses come forward for twitter. it reminds me of the recent Cisco commercial where the producers of a movie want to contact everybody about a sequel. (oh yea, my heart skips a beat because the producer of a movie has figured out how to rehash all the jokes in the first movie and re-package it as “fresh” content) The producer enters the message into his phone and it calls one person, emails one and TXT messages one. Well, we don’t need Cisco or an expensive phone system to do that now, we’ve got twitter. I can enter a message into twitter, everyone who is interested in what I have to say can follow me and respond. Instant API into my attention sphere.
Now what would be cool is twitter groups…
Until next time,
(l)(k)(bunny)
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Tags: flock, PHP, php abstract, social networking, spaz, twitter, Web 2.0
December 4th, 2007 at 2:43 am
Twitter groups can be developed yourself, see http://kosso.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/how-i-created-a-twittergroup-for-gnomedex/
but with the Twitter tracking system, there is no need for that ;)
December 4th, 2007 at 4:02 am
Twitterhead huh? Me too. I just followed you on Twitter. One thing that has caused me to use it more is the Twidget dashboard widget that lets me post straight from the dashboard on my Macs. http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/email_messaging/twidgettwitterdashboardwidget.html
December 4th, 2007 at 8:19 am
@stefan,
Yes, Marcus Whitney did a similar thing at barCampNash. However, it would be nice if there were twitter supported groups. So that when sending a message, I could send it to a portion of my followers without having to send it to everyone.
@chris,
Yes, for a long time I used spaz and still like it. These days however, I use flock for my browser and it gives me everything I need.
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