DrOct and I played around with Twitter a little today. It’s a strange service. I didn’t quite understand it until using it some. The tagline on the site reads, “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?” You sign up (for free naturally) and you’re presented a big box asking, “What are you doing?” Type something in, you’ve got a post. Nothing new there. You can befriend other members. Nothing new there, either. The fun comes in the notification system. When you make a post, all your friends get it, via their choice of text message, Google Talk/Jabber chat, or RSS.
The question, of course, is, why would I want a constant stream of updates on what my friends are doing? Probably you wouldn’t, if your friends are just sitting at work. But if they’re playing an online game I could join in on, maybe I would. If they’re out hanging out somewhere, maybe I would. If they just saw Fabio on the street, I totally want to know. The key is that it’s really easy to update (you can do it by text, or in a chat window, or on Twitter’s site), and everyone who’s your friend gets a ping immediately. You can tell everyone something all at once.
In effect what you get is an always-on, available-anywhere chat room. If you’re at your computer, you can get your Twitter stream via chat. If you’re on the road, you can get it via SMS. How useful or fun it is I guess depends on how your friends use it. I can see over-use resulting in way too many text messages. Still, it might be fun for sharing instant anecdotes. I’m not totally sold on the service, but I’ll be playing around with it for the next bunch of days. I’m twitter.com/davextreme if you want to add me.