Twittering away!

If you have looked around my blog lately, you’d have noticed the ‘Aditya is…’ widget that I added to the right. I recently took it out, because I gave the updates a new purpose, but no points for guessing that it was powered by the latest fad on the Internet and what is being termed as ‘micro–blogging’ – Twitter. Twitter tries to answer the basic question … or actually, let’s ‘you’ answer the basic question, ‘What are you doing right now?’. But of course, used creatively, Twitter can be an amazing service which is accessible from something you carry around all the time. Your cell phone!

Staying connected

This is probably the best way to stay connected with a lot of people at the same time since mobile phones and IM. A single update to your Twitter, will fire off multiple messages to all those who follow you (on Twitter) with that update. I admit to not using Twitter to it’s ultimate potential. But that’s only because I cannot use it with my cell phone since the number to send a text message to is an international number for me (Twitter is based in UK). Regardless of this, I have tried to get my phone activated, but it hasn’t workedA mail to Twitter support also has reached to no particular end. This is something bad, since customer support should be the best thing about a site which has so many users..

But I have seen people updating from their phones, and I can imagine what a convenience it would be. The concept of constantly updating statuses was first introduced (to me) by Facebook. It has a nice module at the top right of the home page, which you can use to change your status. It gets reflected on all your friends’ mini–feeds. People have been using Twitter to keep friends and family updated on their latest trips and travels. The top bloggers (with the likes of names ending with Arrington and Malik on the bandwagon) used Twitter to keep their readers constantly updated throughout their run of SXSW '07.

Twitter isn’t a new thing however. There have been others like it, like Dodgeball. But for some reason, Twitter has really caught on like a wildfire on the Internet. With widgets and extensions getting into the play as well, staying connected was never so simple (and addictive!) :)

Bye bye to privacy

One thing that Twitter doesn’t have an option for is to remove people from your follower’s list. This can give a whole new meaning to the word ‘stalking’. That’s why, and this applies mostly to non–adults using this service, one should be careful when posting updates, and should use discretion while revealing current location, or what they’re doing. We’ve had enough of MySpace news about all this.

So, while this is an amazing service, it still has flaws. The lack of good customer support is one of them. Now, I want to see how far this actually goes to begin bringing people closer together, and trying to answer the basic question that you try to answer about your friends and family, ‘What are you doing right now?'!

Add me to your friends, and see what I’m upto the whole day :P
Happy twittering :)

Further

RIP Twitter (2007-2007)
Why is Twitter so slow
The post–its of blogging
Three innovative ways to use Twitter