Here's Why

Twitter fun

I'm getting a lot out of running twitter thanks to Matthew Hall @aDb who put me on to the Sydney Twitter Underground Brigade STUB or @stub on twitter. They're a very interesting bunch of people, and they meet up in meat space very often. I'm using the very creative nick of @IanWoolf.

Twitter is a 140 character microblogging platform. The experience is a little like instant messaging, because people who follow your entries in the twitter window are able to reply to you and have a conversation. Unlike mailing lists you don't have to read every single message, and it doesn't clog your inbox. You can sample what is going on in your spare moments of rest or in the background. However unlike instant messaging, every tweet on twitter is a broadcast unless you flag it as a direct message. When you tweet a message on twitter, you don't just broadcast to every person who is following you, but also to the web at large. This means if someone is running a keyword search and you trigger a flag on their search, then they will notice you.

In my first week on twitter, I had just upgraded to Firefox 2.0.1.4 and it wasn't working. After spending most of a day trying to resurrect my customised profile, I complained on twitter. Straight away someone from Mozilla replied with a suggestion to fix things. I had a conversation and shortly restored my browser to working order. They had a constant search for all mentions of "firefox", so I just had to complain and the Gods of Mozilla heard my whine and came to my rescue.

I also have my twitter feed piped through to my facebook status timeline, so that my facebook friends also receive the messages I send. I'm currently following 79 people, a large number of whom I've met at STUB meetups or technical conferences such as PubCamp and BarCamp. Not all of these people follow me back. Such as @MarsPhoenix who tweets updates from Mars. In the same way I don't follow all of the people who follow me.

You can send and receive twitter updates on mobile phone as well as on computer, either by SMS, email, or internet. I just signed up for the beta version of a message by voice service as well, so if I get stuck in a lift again like I did the Wednesday before last, I will be able to broadcast my call for help to my twitter and facebook friends, and not have to rely on the indifferent service of the hotel staff or the lift company.

The social networking world is crazy with services in beta at the moment, all invitation-only while they get the bugs out, like gmail used to do.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here