Adding Twitter to the blog
Twitter is a free social networking service which works with small messages. You might use it as a very brief blog, or to develop a webapp with considering the cool tie-in with SMS messages.
Getting a message out is pretty easy - you can do it from GTalk or Jabber, log into twitter.com, or the really cool one - send a SMS message to the Twitter number. So many providers give an allocation of free text messages (an Orange pay as you go SIM pack on my desk has 300 free texts a month) that you can update several times a day and not pay for it.
Curiosity got the best of me, so I signed up, made a test update and then placed some code in the sidebar here. I took the JavaScript badge offered on the site and crowbarred it into the existing XHTML code for the sidebar, and updates are shown under the flickr thumbnails on the right.
I’m really excited by this - and it’s got me thinking about all the possibilities. You can subscribe and follow me on Twitter itself, via RSS and if I make an update you get an SMS message. And if that wasn’t enough, you can make yourself appear popular by following an often updated Sky News and getting a lot of text messages.
You can follow me on Twitter, read this excellent introduction, find out if (and why) you should care, or consider the alternatives like Jaiku which looks very cool too.
Update 15:33 - I’ve been thinking about different ways to use Twitter to send SMS notifications on all sorts of sites. Users obviously have to be signed up to Twitter and following you, but these look pretty interesting. WordPress plugin to send a status update when you create or edit a post - Twitter Updater. If you’re using another blog, or maybe want to send any RSS feed (like Podcasts, press releases, updates to an event, etc) you can do so with twitterfeed.
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