Of Twitter

I’ve finally caught up with the rest of the world and made a Twitter account, “rest of the world” being relative, as not a single person I know has one. For the uninitiated, Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface. What this means is that you can syndicate 140-character updates on your life to all your friends who use the service; what’s more, you can do it on the go by sending a text message from your cell phone.

This is cool, but doesn’t have much practical application. I doubt that most users want to be updated on every facet of their friends’ lives (that you can update from your cell phone indicates that the service is meant to be used often). Furthermore, 140 characters isn’t really enough space to say much of anything—good for typing from your cell phone keypad, but bad for getting across a meaningful message. If the “status” feature of Facebook (which I have both used and seen used extensively) is any indication, the general signal-to-noise ratio will be fairly low.

I pick on Twitter, but this is the problem with micro-blogging in general: there isn’t really a situation in which you would need to let everyone know what you’re doing. Planning an event or an outing seems like it would be made easier, but text messaging or calling will accomplish the exact same task. You could use the service to let everyone know that you’re not at home, but is that really necessary?

All things considered, though, Twitter is pretty nifty for one reason: a public API. There’s a whole bunch of third-party apps using Twitter, some of which are really cool (a big list can be found here). On Slashdot today there was a link to an article from Botanicalls with instructions for a DIY project that monitors the moisture level in the soil of a potted plant and, when there’s not enough moisture, makes a Twitter post telling the owner to water the plant.