@Lindsey: this definitely falls in the neat-o category, sorry about that. “Write what you know” - ok, I know about tech. “Write what makes you angry!” (Po Bronson), well, maybe the next post. Just a few politics-free digital pork-puffs for the afternoon. Oh, and pretty pictures!

Ah, the tag cloud. Only mostly useless, it does tell me I talk to Big Mike Lewis and of course, KristiCW.

Speaking of mostly useless, that’s what Twitter is when it’s not working. I do love their cool pix about it, though:

I really like Twitter for microblogging - quick posts that show up in my blog. It’s also great for keeping up with friends and family - enhancing real-world relationships - and I can do it from my phone. It can increase blog traffic by referring this now-additional community to your blog. Since I’ve fallen to number two in search results for my name, I better get on top of that. Update: that search put me over the top! Thank goodness.

I also like the constraints - constraints are good for you. I may try my hand at short poems on Twitter (Pwoettry?), that might be fun.

There’s been a lot of chat about Twitter and its value, the flames of which have been fanned recently by its white-hot growth in popularity. I’ve heard from lots of bigwigs asking whether they should try it; the answer is usually, “it’s hard to explain - yeah, try it. You can use it in more than one way”.

On top of all this comes frequent downtime from too much traffic. It was, at its heart, a one-day experiment in keeping people updated via SMS; it’s morphed into a community and messaging system. Lots of armchair developers are weighing in with their ideas on how to “scale”, but the fact is that this ”problem space” hasn’t really been explored before. It’s a unique beast, with many new challenges.

While the outages are disappointing, I think I’ll stick around. These technical issues will be solved with time. Whether Twitter can come up with a revenue model that works - ensuring their survival - is another chapter that hasn’t been written yet.

Posted in Tools, Toys, and Geekery