I finally caved in and signed up to Twitter.
There are a number of factors at play here. Andy Piper and I have been talking about Twitter for weeks now, and he folded earlier today too. James Governor was using it last night, and and Jeff Barr was not only part of that discussion (and virtually involved in last night’s social event via Twitter) but also wrote eloquently about Twitter recently. Really though, blame Euan Semple, who is presenting with me at The Other Web 2.0 Conference in London this week. Yes, those of us not swanning around FOWA are getting the real work done over at STFBUW2ATNPC. Umm.. you know, not the official acronym or anything.
Anyway, Twitter is already fun. I see potential. Others do too, with discussion and ideas raging about everything from how Twitter could be used as a productivity tool to why you shouldn’t use it to manage your todo list, as well as the possibilities of Twitter being polluted by advertising or hijacked as a medium for fiction and ARGs (‘twitterjacking’).
Sadly, all of this interest in Twitter seems to be melting their tubes. I was Twittering away happily when I got home, only to find repeated timeouts later this evening. Quick, someone buy them and host them on something beefy.
Incidentally, all of this interest in Twitter means that Odeo (the other site from Evan Williams the other lovely people at Obvious, and the recently neglected runt of the litter) is actually now up for sale. Quick. Someone buy that so Twitter gets a much needed cash injection. :-)
Well it has been interesting so far. I’ll see how long my attention and interest lasts / how long before my irritation threshold is breached.
It did seem hugely unreliable last night. Oddly enough, shortly after your Plazes fest yesterday, that melted down too. Clearly the “Roo effect” is at work :-P
Haven’t we really been doing this for years via custom sametime status messages?
Without persistence, Darren.
i think its having trouble scaling
Another grand scheme to add to my continuous partial attention schedule.
Well, as I’m such a smarty pants, I did have a persisitence plugin in my network monitoring plugin. Though to be fair, I couldn’t actually ever work out what it was useful for. :-)
@Darren, yeah but it wasn’t a Cool Kid thing to do. A lot of apps in SF have certain cliques around them, and key members of those cliques have good blog traffic, leading to a slow, outward crawl. This is so predictable in the tech/blogger blogosphere.
But hey, it’s amusing anyway. :)