Twittering

Ok, so after hearing about twitter for a while, I decided to try it out.  As I’m not normally particularly interested in communicating with anyone, the idea of broadcasting my comings and goings to the world at large seemed a little odd.  I did however go ahead and set up an account (@ordmillar), and all of a sudden there I was, tweeting away!

What makes it really interesting (apart from the people) is the twitter api.  Pretty much everything is exposed, so apps can do just about anything that a user could do through the web site.  I’ve been trying out some of the clients made with the api, but so far none of them has really impressed me.  The closest to what I want is one called Alert Thingy, which is nice in that it will show notices from twitter, facebook, flikr, RSS feeds and more.  It has worked well, execpt for one unexplained crash.  The flickr feed isn’t great – it sends a notice whenever anyone posts a picture, but doesn’t show any sort of preview so I am forced to visit the site if I want to see if I am interested in it.

With so many platforms out there, and so many social networking sites I can see that there is a need for the “grand unification tool”.  Almost like the grand unification theory of physics, execpt that the universe won’t end if we get it wrong.