Micro-blogging is now one of the most popular things to do on the phone, personal computer, and now on Xbox gaming console. With only a 140 characters to type, its plenty of room to type an “update status” but not enough to type an essay, which means this makes twitter an easy read. But is that all twitter can really do? Why is Twitter so important if it’s only about updating a person’s status? Facebook has videos, photos, applications, and the status feature…why Twitter?
As Twitter is becoming a custom to society, so is there API. TweetDeck, Tweetie, and DestroyTwitter are all applications and make “tweeting” a more pleasurable experience. Quickly go on a phone and send out a tweet or hop on the laptop to send out a quick status update on DestoryTwitter, without going directly to twitter.com. This is all so popular because of the convenience of twitter. Sure Facebook has an iPhone application, a mobile version of their website, and an extensive API but the interface just has so many options. Any person going on any of these extensions, will be spending about a minute looking at stuff and writing a status update. Twitter is simple, type, press post and it’s there. Read a tweet here and there; catch up on the people following… Twitter is not ever going to bring down Facebook because that website is mainly to connect a whole lives to the world verses Twitter is to connect real-time situations to the world. The nature of Twitter is “NOW”, the nature of Facebook is “What’s Up?”
The popularity of Twitter is so great, more and more developers are clinging to their API to connect it with their own business. A company might purposely leak some of their new product info so they use Twitter to fulfill that motive. An airline company might want to attract first time customers by offering extremely low “instant” tickets to help bridge a long term relationship with the customer. These are ideas that people are using on Twitter. For me though, I’m taking Twitter for a ride like no other.
Over the past 3 months, I have been conjuring ideas in how a massively used system can be used to communicate with other aspects of the Internet, like websites, video games, and news. Thinking to myself, all these are easily accessible at the comfort at my own home, why would I go through the trouble of doing such a thing? The answer is simply mobility. We’re in the world of “NOW”, impatient and thirsty of knowledge in the shortest amount of time. That’s how America is today. Kids all have mobile phones to communicate instead of calling from their home, a 15 minute delay on an airplane causes a mass crowd of “sighing”, and computers tend to be unnecessarily reset if it takes longer than 25 seconds to watch a YouTube video. These setbacks in life are not major, but they do become annoying when we should be in a life of demand with all this technology around us. It’s time to really take advantage of mobility applications and take it to it’s full extent. I plan on making several projects linking the aspect of mobility, to all corners of the web (without Safari).
Using Apache’s Cron Job and the concept of garbage collecting, I can create a website that obtains data and returns a result based on that data. For example using a browserless phone, I want to find out the weather tomorrow morning without going on weather.com because I’m on the train; I type in –FindWeather Tomorrow, within a minute I can receive a reply in how the weather will be the next day. Just enough time in between to check my tweets, text messages, and mail on my phone. Another concept is seeing who’s online in Facebook without going on Facebook. Like I stated before, going on Facebook directly will usually direct your full attention to there even if there’s nobody online. If I don’t want to waste my time loading for Facebook, I can just tweet my way in there to see who is online so if no one is online I won’t have to go onto Facebook. The situation there might seem trivial but its reality to most. If we can check up things without going through a “process”, the hassle of touching/clicking, or the interuption of “friend media”, gathering information from different corners all at the same time can be optimized. This is why I’m trying out this idea, to use Twitter to gather info all in a “any-format” display. These are just some of the ideas I’ll be testing in the upcoming months. I’ll keep a widget on my blog to show the progress of my new ideas.