I’ve found Twitter to be an amazingly useful web service. So useful, that I’ll dedicate a blog post to them. If you haven’t already read Anything Could Happen, do yourself a favour and get reading. Its an interview with Evan Williams, who founded both the ever popular Blogger, and now Twitter.
Tim Bray, brings up the general idea that succeeding in this world, is all about being first, no matter what. Its where the community is at, right? It doesn’t matter if there are better, competing services, its where the community has gathered, and who’s first. Time to Market or Time to Twitter?
Its probably true. Twitter has had its fair share of problems, mostly around scaling their application. Yet, people stick with Twitter, no matter what. The community of users have already got a vested interest (all previous “tweets”, favourites, a community of friends, et al) and there’s no point recreating it in Pownce or Jaiku. I’ve got accounts on those two other services, and I pretty much never, ever user them beyond the initial review period.
In other news, I found this tip to be useful:
curl -u username:password -d status="so, you can make twitter updates via the command line and curl?" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
Even comes back with about 19 lines of output, in XML, telling you that your update has been successful. Shows that you’ve updated from the web, in terms of status. Now, if only I had ubiquitous Internet access everywhere…
Technorati Tags: twitter, evan williams, command line, interview