Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Update 20070410: I have to admit, providing an API (or rather protocol) like Twitter, Skype etc have done, is always a good thing to create added value for users and delegate the workload: If the service becomes popular there's always a lot of developers that want to make free add-on tools for such a service.

Update: After reading through others posts it's obvious that the principles can be utilized for other than transient presence info. Rather you can multicast any kind of short messages, and without the cost of SMS. That's nothing new: There are lots of services providing 'SMS' over HTTP, that normally also provide a chat log etc. I'll sign up and see if I can make sense of it :).


I'm new to Twitter, so the following probably sounds a bit lame, but when I read the following at the Twitter home page "...answering one simple question: What are you doing?" I just wonder why anyone would use this service. Why would you tell anybody else what you are doing, when you are doing it, unless you have absolutely nothing else to do (which in itself is a contradiction). It's to me a useless distortion of the presence concept used for IM. It's actually not even presence, as it's not a live representation of whether you are available, busy etc.

To me it's therefor even more peculiar that there are so many tools available for accessing Twitter information 'All Twitter tools and mashups in one place', which includes a few mobile applications. You can send messages from a mobile phone via SMS, but also from a PC. Messages are therefor limited to 140 characters.

In a sense it's like a micro-blog service: It's easier than ever to post information noise. Sorry guys, but I don't understand the purpose of this service, even for leisure use.

I'm sure Twitter will be acquired for a gazillion dollars anyway, due to all registered users, and I'm also sure there will be books published based on Twitter "diaries".

Oddly though there's no advertizing or any other revenue stream involved, so is this another one of those Web 2.0 "complete lack of business model" services? E.g. the revenue from the SMSs is absorbed by the operators, not Twitter.

It's one of the simplest community services you can set up, so expect a lot of copy cats. There's e.g. Jaiku.

See also:

RIP Twitter (2007-2007)

Twitter: All Trivia, All The Time

RIP Twitter?

RIP twitter? Tarot cards 2.0

RIP Twitter - A Rebuttal

Is this the new Tamagotchi or does it have a life after the hype 'honey moon'?