Playing on Twitter

I've been playing on Twitter an awful lot lately. I've run into some people in the area who I don't think that I ever would have in other circumstances. The ability to follow people and message them is incredibly easy. I'm finding it very rewarding to be able to post any old thought or happening online. The shortness of the messages, (140 characters) make it very quick. The omnipresence of the tool is also a great feature. You can connect to it with your mobile phone through mobile web or text messaging, there are also apps for all the smart phones. You can connect to it on your computer using their web interface or you can connect with a third party application like twhirl (my personal favorite)

There is a bit of a friend curve. It is more fun the more people you follow and talk to. So if you want to try it out you can follow one of the top twitterati they give you a good idea of what you can do with Twitter but don't forget that they are Celebrities and most likely will not have time to talk to you. Some of these are followed by thousands of people. To get the most out of Twitter you will want to enlist your friends or you can just search for people in your area.

I'll probably be posting about the developments that I come across this service. So stay tuned.

Yahoo! Mobile Platform

I have to admit that I've always had a soft spot for Yahoo. I use their e-mail service for my personal e-mail, I use flickr for photo sharing, and del.icio.us for keeping and sharing bookmarks, and Upcoming to post events online. They have a mobile service that lets you do web searches, check e-mail, maps and more.

They have launched a 3rd party platform for developers that allows you to add widgets to their mobile service. You can do something as simple just attach a RSS feed or you can write an XML based application. You do have to use their simplified markup language called Blueprint. It seems pretty straight forward. I'm kind of tempted to write something for it. Unfortunately I don't have a mobile data plan so I wouldn't be able to test it but I seems easy enough you could probably throw something together in a matter of a couple of hours. MySpace is launching a widget that will allow you to post and see your friends moods, browse photos, and send messages.

One of the benefits of this is that Yahoo wrote the platform which works on many different types of cell phones so you don't have to write your application for every different type of phone.
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