You might have noticed a new widget on the right titled ‘My Tweets’. For the web-savvy this of course shows my recent Twitter messages. For the un-initiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging service. Basically, imagine writing an sms or text from your cell phone, then sending it not to just one person, but to anyone who you decide can ‘follow’ you. That’s twitter in a nutshell. It’s literally like an sms, you can only send out ‘Tweets’ of about 140 characters.
It’s a great way to let people know what’s up, to draw awareness to your ideas or products, and generally put yourself out there on the web
Nothing muxh Facebook can’t to actually. With one exception. Twitter is simple, clean and easily integrateable. It provides a good API, a huge number of methods to read your Tweets, and an equally varied way of sending Tweets.
I never was great on telling everyone my day’s trials and tribulations, but twitter does present an advantage to this blog. It allows me to send my ideas, and display them on my blog, at any time. How many of you writers have said ‘oh that’s a good one to write about!’, only not to have pen and paper then forgetting all about it?? And how many of you don’t carry pen and paper but carry your cell phone around?
So what if I can record, send and display my ideas and topics I want to write about directly from my cell?
With a combo of sms, twitter and some wonderful WordPress plugins, it’s a piece of cake. When doing some research I cam across this good article describing the 10 best tools for twitter and WordPress. For my purposes the Wicket-Twitter plugin suited all my needs, though I might implement the Twitter Tools plugin in the future since it also looks quite interesting.
Using Wicket-Twitter, it was a simple enough setup, just activating the plugin and entering your twitter username, and it started displaying my Tweets. Then, following the instructions from here (the twitter official site) it’s quite easy to setup Twitter to accept Tweets over SMS.
In my case, I have an unlimited data and sms plan with 3, so I prefer using the i’net to make updates unless there’s not very good 3G coverage
Anyways, so there it is setup, and ready to recieve and display my ideas and topics as ‘My Tweets’. You’ll hopefully see lots of Tweets starting with ‘idea:…’
David Vassallo's Blog 