Monday, November 3, 2008

Twitteriffic?

Eh, Maybe not.

If you do read this blog, there's a chance you've noticed the new Twitter sidebar widget. It says "Reluctantly". There's a lot of buzz around Twitter and that's got me on guard. Just like the iPhone (which I'm still trying to avoid), Twitter has to prove that it's really as good as everyone else thinks it is.

Every since I got into blogger and started trying to grind my writing skill I noticed there were certain little blurbs and short statements I wanted to blast into the ether of the intarwubs, but I really couldn't justify full blog posts for them. That's where I hoped Twitter would come in.

Unfortunately, I'm really not impressed. The Linux clients available are dismal, but there are some OK plugins for Firefox. When I went to add my little icon, the service told me it was "overloaded". Further, it said the cause of this was "Too many tweets." Somehow people actually USING the site had placed such a strain on their backend and/or bandwidth that user profiles couldn't be updated...but tweety activity on the main site continued unaffected. Huh? Whatever. Only it's done the same thing every subsequent attempt to get a picture up, and that's pretty annoying since the default icon is brown and lame. Also, with only about 140 characters per update...I'm not sure how the service could get that overwhelmed. That'd probably fit into a single packet.
That's another disappointment too, the character limit. I hit it with the FIRST post I tried to make, and took 3 minutes to edit and cut down...not really the amazing avenue for "mini-blogging" I had in mind. If I wanted to make updates that were this small, I'd just use Facebook's "status" feature. But everyone else seems pretty excited about Twitter so I'll continue the effort in good faith...but I'm still looking for the service I was hoping to find. Anyone got any recommendations or am I going to have to homebrew this one too?

...At least it's not completely "Web 2.0 Trendy", and called "Twttr."
--PXA

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Twitter became useful for me once I started using it with my iPod touch and my cell phone.

Sorry to say that... but its true.

I like twitter. It's good times.

Sloloem said...

@Dave
I can see that. It's kindof cool in Digsby, and I imagine having the sort of instant access to read and post provided by a web-enabled phone makes it really nice.
Did you just learn to deal wit the character limit or is there some cool hack around it?
I should be getting my new phone at the end of this month...not sure yet what it will be, but it will probably enhance my twittering experience.

Anonymous said...

@sloloem
I hated Digsby's interface actually. I used to use twhirl before my desktop died.. now I just tend to use my iPod with twitterific.

Char limit isn't hard. You have to look at twitter as a 'status' medium, or super mini communication medium. My tweets tend to be random thoughts as they cross my mind...

"Holy crap having draft beer is amazing" or "wow. women are confusing".

Others tend to use it as more of a communication mechanism..
"Don't forget to vote obama (url)"

There are URL shorteners that are popular as well.

Depends on how you want to use it. Follow some people (devmorgan is me) and you can start to get a feel for how people use it. Follow a few people. Don't post spam. It'll start to grow on you.. especially if you get a decent aggregator.

Anonymous said...

I just signed up for twitter, because of the buzz around it. I haven't formed an opinion yet.