Twitter

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In early March, I discovered Twitter by reading this post on Jamie’s blog. I immediately signed up for an account. Even though Jamie’s blog claimed that he didn’t see an immediate application for it, I did.

Lois and I follow the lives of our godchildren via their away messages. 🙂 That’s useful, but not ideal. First, since both have laptops as their only computers, if they leave them on 24×7 in order to keep us old-folk up-to-date, they are abusing the computers. If they log off, we are blind…

Twitter solves that problem in a number of ways. Not only doesn’t their computer have to be on, they don’t even need to own a computer! You can update Twitter, and get updates, entirely through SMS on your phone. Now, you can also use a phone web browser with a stripped down web interface. For me, the fact that you can receive (and send) updates via IM was the nicest touch, especially that they supported Jabber, my preferred IM client/server. Also, you see the history of all the messages, which is nicer than “missing” an away message state change.

So, it’s already late May, what took me two months to write about Twitter? After a day or two of liking it, I hit a bunch of technical problems. Jamie thought that it was just wild growth on their part, with the inevitable hiccups that come with that. Perhaps, but they didn’t respond to support tickets either, and then closed them out without a response or a fix. Not nice.

Anyway, I still find it to be highly quirky in terms of availability or stability, but there’s something about it that I still like, so I’m likely to continue using it for a bit… I still haven’t introduced my godchildren to it, because I don’t want to waste their time if Twitter is going to implode on itself…