Twitter integration

"Creating A Twitter Integration" is a quick and interesting read on integrating CMS notifications with Twitter.

It's a pretty simple and obvious example, but it shows there's a lot of potential around the concept. I've been messing about with a few applications based on Twitter lately, which may another reason why I found it to be an interesting read. The only downside of using Twitter in this manner is the blurring of the lines between "work" and "play".

This 37signals link about 'In/Out' is a sort of similar idea - and yet at the same time almost a shame that you couldn't extend an existing service to create this same functionality. Your staff have email,  your staff have twitter, your staff use Facebook - why force them to use another site? (Answer: They want to filter out work entirely after 5pm, or whatever time your culture deems acceptable). Regardless, In/Out looks very cool, and very useful for distributed teams - after doing a lot of work from home lately it's not hard to sell the value of anything which enables quick and informal collaboration and communication.

Jumping back to Twitter - it seems to work best when you've got a lot of fairly tech savvy friends who embrace it. A lot of people I know are either not tech savvy (and hence will never read this - Hi anyway!), or seem to have a thing against Twitter (thanks Web 2.0 hype machine). I've looked over the shoulders of a few people who were using it for it's intended purpose, and it's a very cool thing to see in action. At the other end of the spectrum, I had a period of following a fair few publishing type services (bbctech, popurls and the like) which quickly makes it feel like just another source of spam.

If you know me, and you're on Twitter, this would be your queue to start following me :)

 Print | Posted on Sunday, May 18, 2008 12:50 AM |