Last things first . . . twitter has all but killed my blog.  I see things on other blogs, I find interesting things online, I have personal things to share, all of which I post . . . but not on my blog . . . I post it on Twitter.  Takes 20, maybe 30 seconds to do it on twitter (via the Twhirl application that sits on my desktop), which is much faster then writing an entire blog post.  Part of it may be the fact that you’re very much limited on the maximum amount of characters in a twitter post, so it makes for faster blogging.

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It occurs to me that I haven’t told people that I use Twitter. 

I use Twitter.

“What’s Twitter ?” you ask with that innocent look on your face.

Twitter is like a mini blog that you fill in throughout your day.  It has a small maximum letter input, so you have to keep your posts to a few sentences.  Then people who ‘follow’ you can see your posts.

“What’s the big deal ?” you ask. 

Well you can subscribe to other peoples twitter feeds and see what they are doing during the day and it’s a nice way of keeping up with how your friends are doing.  It’s like micro blogging or something.  Mostly you just post things like “I just saw the most amazing thing at [enter web site here]” or “I’m about to go master some Audio to CD on BigBlue” or “Does anyone know of a good MP3 player that’s free ?”.  Then people who subscribe to your tweets, can reply.  Kind of like a very slow chat . . . only not a chat . . .

But you need to install a client like Twhirl, which is a stand alone application based on Adobes’ AIR that automatically allows you to post your tweets and checks for your friends tweets for you, and just lists them for you in a nice small window.  Otherwise, you have to use the twitter web site to do the posting and see your feed, which is a pain. Thanks to Pete Cullen for the point over to twhirl.  I even read about it in Collide magazine today, who gave it 4 of 5 stars. 

It’s easy to install twhirl (and uninstall if you don’t like it).  Head over to www.twhirl.org and download it.  It will need to install Adobe AIR if you don’t have it, but the whole thing is very small and very light on resources.  You sign up for an account on twitter.com, then set your twhirl up with your username and password, and it goes and gets your posts automatically. Look for me on twitter.com, DXEndar, and click ‘follow’ and then you’ll get updates on me through the day. 

How fun is that ?  That’s more fun then . . . well it’s just very fun  !