Darryl King’s blog ireckon

Recently I added the TXT ability to my twitter account, following the badgering and raving of a colleague who loves the way it works.

Being a gadget man myself, I just had to, particularly as we both discussed how the simplicity of the tool could be used in numerous business / personal angles, which I am sure many twitter devotees could attest to.

For the uninitiated - twitter is, as they put it:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

From Wikipedia:

is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, as well as a United Kingdom number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.

In simple terms it is the equivalent of SMS online….except of course you can use it via SMS.

The most interesting recent example of its use recently was during the Chinese earthquake ( BBC article: The Age: article China Herald: article) and people throughout China micro blogging the experience in a way that ‘left traditional media for dead’.

Well not dead but certainly lifted the lid on how they could do better to release instant news feeds to the web audiences and utilise the style and medium more suitable to the younger audiences.

Everyone knows why reality TV is so successful with the younger generations, because it appeals to their methods of engagement. How many 50+ people do you know who will rapidly vote or message using text? Yet how many 18+ people do you know who wouldn’t? And this is the audience not buying or subscribing to mainstream press. (hmmm worth thinking about)

Twitter was interesting when it first came out just by the nature of the microblogging style, but it is growing in its usage quickly, as do other cool web ‘apps’ that find a user group (see Web Success- is it by design or accidental?), and i must admit to being a sucker for easy to use integrated web tools.

The way the SMS integration is being used excites me!

Being involved with web development and internet usage I am always looking for how these tools can be used personally or professionally to add value to users and their internet experiences, and already integrated API functionality and twitter style news feed tools are running through my head, but as we all know sometimes you just don’t reinvent the wheel.

I am now already hooked on BreakingNewsOn Twitters breaking news page / feature and want to see how this can be regionalised - made more personal for me so I can control the stream of news to be more suitable to me. Twitter is not the only microblogging tool in the world, but given the commentary it is now receiving is likely to follow a path similar to Youtube in being top of mind now for people wanting to explore this issue.

In reality the purpose of Twitter is not to be considered a news source or not, it was put together to create a tool for users of a like mind, now it could be the tool helps to draw in like minds. See this Venturebeat article for an interesting view on whether Twitter is or cares about being ‘mainstream’.

Twitter will of course have to keep adapting to its users now it has a large fan base and cope with the masses of users being drawn to it by the press coverage. This is another site that has first found / created a need and then will develop into a business / application hopefully of great commercial success.

I want to see how quickly ‘mainstream’ comes to twitter, versus twitter going mainstream!

You can find me on Twitter not sure if we need to separate an ireckon one from my personal one, might leave that to evolve on its own.

More in depth explanation of how to use it:

http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter