{"id":187,"date":"2008-01-13T10:45:26","date_gmt":"2008-01-13T17:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=187"},"modified":"2008-01-13T10:45:26","modified_gmt":"2008-01-13T17:45:26","slug":"twittering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2008\/01\/twittering\/","title":{"rendered":"Twittering"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve started experimenting with Twitter<\/a> – for those who don’t know this is a ‘micro-blogging<\/a>‘ tool which essentially asks you to answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less.
\nAlthough initially this may seem like a trivial or pointless exercise, there is something intriguing and immediate about the format. It allows you to share minutiae which can give insight without being overly intrusive. <\/p>\n

To give a personal example (which I used to try to persuade my Mum that Twitter wasn’t a complete waste of space), my brother and his family live in the US – how nice would it be for my parents to get updates about the activities of their grandchildren like ‘B riding a bike for the first time’, ‘Zs first day at school’ etc.? <\/p>\n

Twitter can be updated from the web, IM clients, by SMS, and via a number of applications built to help Twitter (e.g. Twitterrific<\/a>, Twitteroo<\/a>). There is an API<\/a> if you want to develop your own applications.
\nYou should be able to see my ‘Twitters’ in the lefthand column of this blog (those reading from a feed will need to click through of course).
\nTwitter only really comes into its own once you are ‘following’ people – that is, you get their Twitter updates (again, lots of options how you get these, I’m currently using Flock’s<\/a> People sidebar), and hopefully have people following you. In this way you can form a community with others – you can also limit who can follow your Twits if you want. You can ‘reply’ to other people’s Twitters by putting @username in your Twitter, and this can lead to something approximating to a Twitter conversation (worth noting that this goes against the ‘10 commandments of Twitter<\/a>‘ – although I prefer the ‘Are you a Twitter Twit or a Twerp<\/a>‘ approach to this issue.)<\/p>\n

Those of you who are Facebook users may see the parallel between Twitter and the Facebook ‘status’ – which serves not a dissimilar service. So, I (along with others) wanted to update both my Twitter and Facebook status simultaneously. The most straightforward is to install the Twitter app<\/a> in Facebook (remembering to click the ‘Want Twitter to update your Facebook status?’ link which is large and obvious, but I inexpicably missed it when I first installed the app). Once this is installed, when you Twitter, each Twitter will automatically appear as your Facebook status, prepended with ‘is twittering:’. <\/p>\n

However, the way I first came across was to allow the RSS feed of your Facebook status to update your Twitter using Twitterfeed<\/a>, a web app which allows you to update Twitter via any RSS feed. This works in the other direction, meaning that when you update your Facebook status, it updates your Twitter – and Twitterfeed allows you define any pre-pended text to your Twitter per RSS feed. <\/p>\n

What I actually wanted was to allow Twitter to update Facebook AND Facebook to update Twitter. So I setup both the above methods. Unfortunately overnight I discovered a problem, which was that because the Twitter app in Facebook pre-pends the status with ‘Is twittering:’ I found that the following happened: <\/p>\n