Library clips

Twitter is really increasing in popularity, and people are starting to add so many friends that their phone is a full-time vibrator.

Basically Twitter is social network micro-blogging, and best of all is its accessibility, you can keep in touch in different ways.

As you know you can access Twitter from the web, IM, SMS, RSS, or desktop application (eg. Twitteroo).

For on the go, try the mobile-web version, Twapper…also see Bitty (mobile or just the normal version).

I don’t use the mobile-web, so I’m not sure the diffference in cost compared to granular SMS’s.

The question at the moment is how do you save Twitter money with all that SMS’g.

First of all I’m in Australia so I don’t know if I can use SMS with Twitter, I’m sure they’d hook me up, but this may be a first barrier.

Solutions

A solution to universal access and reducing costs is to pay your mobile provider a monthly flat fee to use IM on your phone, I use “3“, they charge $5 a month for MSN or Yahoo!, no GoogleTalk.

The rest of the solutions are on just keeping updated, ie. focused on receiving, not posting to Twitter.

You could also subscribe to Twitter feeds and convert them to IM, using ZapTXT or Rasasa, but if you have IM on your phone, why not use Twitter the usual way.

I can also receive free unlimited emails on my phone, so from my account I could get the Twitter feed for all the people I follow, and subscribe to it in the RSS to email service, FeedBlitz. I will only get one daily digest email, this way I catch up with what everyone is doing only once, not as it happens, which may not be good enough for some…but at least your phone will only buzz once a day. Or perhaps you could use FeedBlitz for your less Favourite friends and still follow your favourite friends the usual way, the idea here is attention management.
That reminds me, I remember Chris Saad saying Touchstone is ideal for Twitter updates in respect to attention.

NOTE: If you are not registered with Twitter, you can grab feeds from your favourite Twitter people and subscribe to all of them in FeedBlitz for a daily digest (you don’t have to splice them into one feed before subscribing in FeedBlitz, as FeedBlitz sends a daily digest).

As for posting by email, this is not yet available…unless your a techie.

MORE THAN JUST TEXTING

My mobile phone voicemail also reads out my email content, this is like listening to “what are you doing now?”

This go me thinking about other media we could use with Twitter.

Audio SMS

What about an audio based Twitter service, ie. use the record function on your phone and send it as an SMS…contenders are evoca, and Pheeder.

Evoca is more based on leave a voicemail by ringing a phone number, in turn this is uploaded to your site.

On my phone (Sony Ericsson k610i) when I send a message it asks: text, picture, voicemail, email.
When I choose voicemail, it records a message and then I look up contacts and send the message.
When the recipient gets the text and opens the message, it takes 10 seconds to download.

So the recpient doesn’t have to ring in to listen to their voicemails, they are still get audio via SMS (or is it MMS).

I really think this could take off, listening to people telling you what they are doing…with audio you get more context; inflections and tone of someone’s voice.

Hmmm, see FunkyCall.

Photo MMS

Then we have nowthen, which is similar to Twitter but with images, basically MMS instead of SMS.

Mixed Media MMS

And finally Yodio which brings all mobile media together in the one message. I think you can MMS a clip (text, photo, video, audio) from your mobile phone…a kind of mobile social network mixed media story micro-blogging.

RSS to Twitter

Tech.meme (among others) is using the API to re-syndicate their RSS feed, so Twitters can keep up-to-date outside of their RSS Reader. It would be great to do this so people can keep update to date with your latest blog posts while they are on the go…you could do this with a similar service to Twitter called Jaiku, but then Twitter has the community.

For now you have to use a hack, RSS to Twitter.

Timelines

Twitter timelines

Multi-author/Groups

confess 2.0…this is a web form for people to Twitter posts to the one account.

I’d also like to see groups, where everyone has their own account, where posts appear in 3 places: main page, personal page, and a group page…all of these could be enabled/disabled, and private/public.

Communal Twittering has an example where you post from your own space but it appears in a communal space, this is basically an open group, eg. MACWORLD.
Also see this post where you join the group.

More

Slacker Manager has a comprehensive review of Twitter, also listing my post on Twitter Tips and Tricks.

Keep up with the Twitter Fan wiki.

Related posts

A list of SMS groups and services and mobile social networks
Twitter Fans
Twitter : SMS blogging
nowthen : similar to Twitter but with photo’s
Tumblr : no frills micro blogging

[ADDED 15/03/07: Twitter comments or conversations]

[ADDED 16/03/07: Twittermaps mashup]