Twitter

You may have recently read the story about the UC Berkeley student who accelerated his release from an Egyptian prison using Twitter. What is Twitter?

I first heard of Twitter last year at a Sun Java Developer's Conference during a speech by CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Twitter is a site that allows you to make 140 character text status/blog updates. You can update through their site, using AIM, through text messages, or third part applications (Mac users may be interested in Twitterific). If you use Facebook, you can have your twitter updates become your Facebook status messages as well. You can also "direct message" a Twitter friend for personal communications.

I use Twitter to notify followers of when I make updates to blog entries. These posts also get added to the public twitter timeline, which could possibly introduce new people to the blog. For those who are obsessed with making AIM away messages, this is a way to be able to conveniently update your "away message" throughout the day from wherever you are.