Have you ever wanted to say something on the web, but it wasn’t long enough to blog so you held back? If that happens a lot, you may want to check out Twitter.

www.twitter.com

“Twitter late night is kind of a swinging place, full of insomniacs, the caffeinated, and Australians. I dig it.” – Leo Laporte

I’ve tried integrating it with Firefox using Twitbin but later just switched to the Flock browser to enjoy it’s built in Twitter support, and I have a mobile version open on my phone.

getfirefox.com
flock.com

But what is Twitter? It’s a website where you go to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.

Twitter allows you to “follow” people and get “followers”.

twitdir.com show the top 100 most followed people.

twitdir.com

Friends and followers are different. Friends have to be invited. Followers just show up. Fortunately there is a privacy feature that allows you to expose your tweets only to those you give permission to, which basically turns followers into friends.

So far I only have one real world friend that uses it. And the people who follow me, I also follow.

You learn what people are into or just checking out. Some posts are entertaining. Some people are fun to listen to. Other posts serve as recommendations. You find that some people are into certain foods or restaurants. Makes you wonder if you may like that as well. It’s a great way to get out of a rut. It encourages you to try new things.

Some of the common things often shared are links to cool web sites.

Have you ever sent a long URL in an email, and it broke, and the person who received it clicked it and only half the URL went to the browser. Then they reply to you and say “hey that link you sent doesn’t go anywhere”. If you have that problem you may want to check out tinyurl.com and snipurl.com. It’s very easy to go to those sites. You don’t need a login. Enter your long URL in the text field and it will give you a very short URL that you can copy and paste into your message.

tinyurl.com
snipurl.com

Besides following people I already know, I also found a bunch of people to follow by searching by city name. I was interested in seeing what the locals were into. It’s fun reading a stranger’s tweets as they talk about places you know about. After I did that I realized others were finding me the same way.

By the end of my recent vacation, where I only had my cell phone to connect to the internet, I was convinced that mobile web apps are something I need to take more seriously, and figure out how to develop them. Probably not much to it in the case of the iPhone, as it supports any web page already. You could probably just make a tiny version of the big version and redirect iphone browsers to it. I’m sure there’s a future podcast coming on that topic.

For Twitter I found a few iphone targeted web apps. One is called “JustUpdate”. It doesn’t show other people’s entries but it’s great at doing exactly what it’s called – just updating. It would remember my login for days and was great at quickly posting updates from anywhere. There is a link to that site in the show notes. You can also find it at apple.com/webapps.

http://m.ac.nz/justupdate/about.html
apple.com/webapps

The other handy mobile twitter web app was PocketTweets. This one is nice looking and somewhat full-featured. In addition to sending updates, I used it to view and reply to friends. It also has a star for favoriting entries. Check it out at pockettweets.com. It is also at apple.com/webapps.

pockettweets.com

Then there’s Hahlo 3. It’s ranked highly and recently updated. It seems to be the winner in terms of features. You can update, view friends updates, see your profile, and even customize it with from a Settings menu. It also has a feature that allows you to search all tweets, thanks to summize.com. Check it out at hahlo.com.

summize.com
hahlo.com

The last one I’ll mention is twitterforiphone.com. It was ranked high and looks nice. Unfortunately it was too slow for my taste when I tried it, so I’ll probably be sticking with the others. May not be their fault. Twitter seems to be working out some performance issues as they scale up.

twitterforiphone.com

Even without those web apps the full size Twitter site is pretty lightweight.

Guess enough people are running around with web enabled cell phones that these services find the mobile web investment worthwhile. I’ve heard that some people text on the their phones more than they email. That is a trend worth noting.

Twitter is growing in popularity. Part of the growth is because of the hype it’s gotten on the Podcasts. Hosts are addicted to talking about it. They try not to talk about it, but can’t help themselves. I’m thinking specifically about Leo Laporte’s TWIT podcast, which drove Twitter into my head week after week.

It also probably grew because of the political race. The candidates are using Twitter to publicize their events to the web community.

What a publicity platform. That is, if you can get enough followers. I follow internet celebrities. They tweet throughout the day and have thousands of followers. At last count I have 13, to put this into perspective. For me it’s just fun. For them there is a business crossover. With thousands of followers, it’s value to a business is obvious. If you have that many people listening to you, every link you post will get hundreds of hits instantly.

A podcast could announce it’s new episodes, a politician could publish his public agenda, or a news person could provide up to the second coverage of an event.

According to compete.com, in April, Twitter had over a million users and had grown 30% that month.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com/?metric=uv

Twitter isn’t just a US thing. Twitter’s own blog says that in February, only 40% of their traffic was from the US. The next largest groups are Japan, Spain and the UK.

http://blog.twitter.com/search/label/stats

Maybe you want to integrate Twitter into your web site or develop a web app using their API. Just click the “API” link at the bottom of the homepage and off you go. There is also a link to the documentation in the show notes.

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/web/api-documentation

The API gives you access to lots of neat stuff including methods to access statuses, direct messages, friendship, favorites, notifications, and blocking.

If you have Curl installed there are examples of how to use it to play around with the API. Responses can be formatted in a few specified ways including XML, RSS, Atom and JSON. The show notes have a JSON example for getting friend updates.

curl -u email:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.json

Just open a command prompt and type “curl -u” followed by your account email “:” password followed by the twitter “friends_timeline” URL with the extension of the format you want. In the case of my example, the URL ends in “.json” because I want a JSON response. If you’ve ever touched a command line, or even if you haven’t, it’s pretty simple.

So in conclusion, Twitter is a fun distraction that gives you insight into other’s people’s minute by minute thoughts. Thoughts that in an of themselves are not much to write about, or even blog about, but you can be happy twittering about.