Friday, June 06, 2008

Tweet me up!

Twitter Screen Capture

Some of you may not know that I actually post many times a day to one of my blogs. It's not this one, obviously, but rather my Twitter account. A while back I wrote here about Twitter when I first opened my account. After a period of ambivalence, I started to really embrace the service to the point that I now post around a half dozen times a day or so. I try to post each time something interesting happens, I have an interesting (to me) thought, or when I something new.


I have really enjoyed this because it allows me to maintain a public, short-attention-span diary of what I'm experiencing. Now, I'm not narcissistic enough to believe that anyone but me would even care about those sorts of minutia regarding my life. Rather, I just enjoy being able to document my life for my own purposes. Not that I go back and review it regularly, but it's interesting to write something (in 140-character chunks, no less) that I know may be around indefinitely.

What makes twitter really cool, however, is that it has such a simple API that many other applications, websites, and services can easily integrate Twitter into what they can offer. For instance, when I post a public video to Viddler, Viddler automatically posts a link to the video on my Twitter account. The same is true when I post a mobile photo to Flickr through the use of TwitterGram. One of the cooler integrations, however, is that I can set Facebook to use my latest Twitter post (or tweets, as they're known) as my current Facebook status. And because I can tweet from the web, numerous desktop clients, IM, and SMS, I can post anything from almost anywhere. There are also reply, direct message, and privacy functions, which theoretically could be used to expand the possibilities much further, but I haven't had a chance to fully explore these. One notable example, however, is one programmer's use of a private twitter account (and some fancy-schmancy curl scripts) to create an iPhone lo-jack system for finding a lost iPhone.

My purposes, however, are much simpler: I just want to keep track of what I'm doing! So along those lines, I thought I might start posting a Twitter Digest on this blog periodically. It's just a summary of all of my tweets during the previous 24-hour period. So here's the digest for yesterday, June 5, 2008. (BTW, if anyone out there reading this already has a twitter account, let me know and I'll follow you.)

  • Making the most of another no-show by Installing OpenPandora. Good use of my time, right?
  • The lengths that people go to avoid talking about the problem amazes me, especially when they COME to therapy to talk about their problems.
  • Came home for lunch today for no reason and feeling guilty for wasting the gas needed for the 7 minute drive.
  • @cdevroe Here you go. http://is.gd/rCl
  • Already had too many cancellations this week. The summer client dropoff has officially begun!
  • @ecc1977 Absolutely! A Facebook app for GFF would be a great idea. I'd use it.
  • Looking for a good twitter client for Windows to use at work. Methinks I'll give Twhirl a whirl.
  • I am really up too late. I need to go to bed. **anticipating my own worthlessness tomorrow**
  • After the LAST t-ball practice of the season, trying to pretend we can have a clean house with 2 small children.

1 comment:

Thomas and Larissa A. said...

It's a cool service, I've been trying to set up my T-mobile phone to connect to my Twitter account, but it's not working. Probably cause it's a prepaid plan, but international SMS isn't working either. We'll see, it's one of my weekend projects!