Brajeshwar

Alright, Twitter has suddenly attained the status of a notoriously popular Application. After being fueled by SXSW, everybody else is talking about Twitter including those who don’t even have a blog. Talks in the Blogosphere have spit out stats that Twitter got 1 million messages sent recently. Finally after about a year of its launch, Twitter has won.

Of course, it is not everybody that loves Twitter, some seriously hate it.

Wait, I just got a Twitter from BBC News - Train services resume along a stretch of the West Coast Main Line in Cumbria after a fatal train crash. http://tinyurl.com/2jkv4c

Twitter

Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText have an in-depth article on Twitter, its statistics, etc. He describes Twitter as, “a mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS, on the web or IM.” “A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question - What are you doing?. A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.”

Ah! I got another Twitter from Digg - The Pirate Bay gives diploma to the King of Sweden - http://tinyurl.com/ypwgb3 - The Pirate Bay guys congratulates the King of Sweden for go.

At the time of writing this article, here are the Twitters that I follow (and perhaps you might be interested)

• Molly E. Holzschlag
• Eric Meyer
• Anil Dash
• Jason Calacanis
• Jeffery Zeldman
• Steve Rubel
• ArsTechnica
• BBC News
• CNN Breaking News
• Digg
• Emily Chang
• Ross Mayfield
• Defamer
• FlashGuru
• Jesse Warden
• Keith Peters (Adobe)
• Apollo (Adobe)
• Flex (Adobe)
• Mike Chambers (Adobe)
• Mike Downey (Adobe)

Another Twitter from BBC Business - Price cuts for British Gas customers, lowering their gas bills by 17% and electricity by 11%, come into force. http://tinyurl.com/2k2okk

So, when will we get the first Twitter Spam? Or will that affect just those who follow the public timeline. Ok, let me leave that innovative idea of a spam to the spammers, I ran out of ideas on that one.

Twitter your RSS Feeds

A Mac-Friend of mine, Paul Stamatiou have a good idea on how to Twitter on Steroid. Well, not really to that extend of irritation but that’s what I come up with - Twitter on Steroid. Here’s how. follow all the steps from Paul to get an RSS to Twitter using PHP. Now, get an array of all your RSS Feeds - your Blog(s), your Flickr Feed, your YouTube Videos - combine them into one (there are lots of services that does that). Finally, twitter this Mother RSS Feed. Paul have a cron job to do the RSS push, I’m sure we can work out a way to ping the app to Twitter whenever there is a publication from the Feed. That’s it and you might even have a non-stop twitter-ing; to the point that your followers might get irritated. Use it wisely.

Yet another Twitter (in fact lots in between)

• jesterxl: TWITTER, come on and raise up, take yer shirt off, twist it ’round yo head; spinnit like a hellah-coptah!!!
• Stammy: cutting my nails w/ el swiss army knife.. the nail clipper was all the way across the room.
• aral: wakes to a lovely, sunny morning in Dublin. Going to head out to consult with a client in about half an hour. Great bunch - can’t wait!

Twitter Powered

• GeoTwitter: Google Maps API + Twitter API
• Twadget: Windows Vista Sidebar gadget
• Chitter: MAC OS X plugin for iChat
• Twitterific: Mac OS X tool
• Twitgit: Mac OS X Dashboard Widget
• Prom Queen: turn all your followers into friends

Another Twit - bbcnews: West Indies legend Sir Garfield Sobers officially opens the Cricket World Cup on Sunday. http://tinyurl.com/2qz4sa

Some must-read articles about twitter

• A Twitter Top Ten
• Twitter Blog
• Can Twitter Save Lives?
• 5 Ways to Use Twitter for Good

Another Twit - digg_feeds: Dark energy, an invisible, undetectable force - http://tinyurl.com/yu2udc - Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize

TinyURL

TinyURL shortens your long url to a short redirect URL. TinyURL makes it extremely easy to use their service - on their website, browser toolbar - and an even easier API which makes Twitter so easy to have tiny URLs replacing long URLs that people twits. Twitter have made the best use of TinyURL and is perhaps its best companion.

For instance, in PHP, it can be simple as

// the url to be shortened
$theurl = "http://".$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
// the final result
$tiny_url =  file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" . $theurl);

And finally before I post this article, here is another twit - emilychang: checking out laughingsquid’s great photos

Hey; Why don’t you comment your Twitter profile URL? I would love to know What you’re Doing? You can follow me through my Twitter Profile. Technorati have spidered my Twitter Profile too (I guess, you should also claim your twitter profile).

UPDATES

2007 Mar 13 – I tested with the RSS to Twitter feed and the ping work successfully. Now, I don’t need a cron job unless I want to irritate people with my articles. I just have to ping my script. This will automatically post a link to my latest article (you can change this setting) on my Twitter Profile page (currently reflected in Public Timeline too) whenever I write a new article. Awesome! Ain’t it? I am working on security options like protecting the ping URL to just me (with login credentials) or a set of IPs.