Nanoblogging with Twitter

The group SMS service Twitter launched last year. Essentially it's a message board you can update from your phone via SMS, or from the Web or your IM account (the IM function is new). Twitter updates are limited to 151 characters each, which makes sense for an SMS service, but it does put a limit on depth, to say the least. Twitter's Web entry window even says "What are you doing?" which also encourages short and content-light updates, such as "I'm putting on my hat."

This raises the obvious question: Who cares? But you can do a lot in a few words, and I was sitting next to a Twitter junkie at a bar last night who was singing the service's praises. She was using Twitter as a Dodgeball-like service, telling her pals what she was up to. Twitter could also be a good tool for live-blogging events or breaking news, or for group chats. It's a lot like IRC in that regard, but much, much easier to use. And the cross-platform (Web and phone) support is great.

I like this service as a publishing platform. I'm not so sure I like the idea of either subscribing to a person's every move or of constantly updating the service with my life's minutiae. (Fortunately, you can easily unsubscribe from a Twitter board that you're following on your phone, with a simple SMS command.) Nonetheless, I'm going to keep the Webware Twitter updated for the rest of today, as an experiment. Follow along in the widget if you have nothing better to do.