SuperSatellite ||

As a webmaster, I generally find it part of my responsibility to keep up on new things that come out, in case they might have a value to us here in some way, be it functional, monetary, or just ohh shiny factor.  One I have generally resisted was Twitter.  The concept is very simple, and one that as a normal course I find to be unproductive.  Twitter is a microblogging system, a site that allows you to make quick posts of 140 characters or less quickly to keep people up on what’s going on with you.

The concept is an extension of a Facebook or MySpace status.  But it keeps track of your “tweets” and allows you to follow and combine those with tweets of your friends.  The problem I have had with this is that at what point are you spending so much time maintaining blogs and profiles that the “social” web has destroyed your “social” life.  Not that you have one, of course, but I do.  It rocks.  I’m out at a club right now, dancing and drinking a martini.  There isn’t much more to it than that for the most part.  Like any social site, you follow friends, and post for people to read.  They can RSS your tweets, or whatever they want with the Twitter API (Application Program Interface).

So why my change in heart?  I’m doing an experiment.  In an attempt to simplify my surfing habits, I’m trying to consolidate a bunch of feeds to my NetVibes page.  Why visit ten different sites when I can just read their feeds, and go to the page when I want more info?  NetVibes supports a number of widgets, one being a Twitter widget.  I figured that being as I will go to that page as a central contact point for a lot of my web vices, there was no harm adding the widget, thereby making it so that I don’t go out of my way if I use Twitter.  So far, that’s working okay.  I also added a Wordpress plugin here that allows you to see my tweets at the right in the sidebar.

What I give them credit for doing well is that if you want to use it, there’s a ton of ways.  They have a simple, open API that a lot of kind folks have already put to work.  So, I have a NetVibes widget for it.  You can also use a Facebook application with it.  There’s the Wordpress plugins.  You can even send messages from a cell phone over a text message when you’re on the run.  No need to even visit their site, since most any of these can show you your tweet feeds, and allow you to add your own tweets.

So far, I don’t have many people I know on it, so if you are, drop me a line one place or the other.  My page is http://www.twitter.com/fienen.  I’ll be interested in how useful it is once I have more people on it.  I get the impression that it might become more mess than it is worse, but I can’t know without trying.  At least they had the foresight to not call it Twittr, or something equally stupid and Web 2.0-y.