Twitter

Well, I decided to finally try out Twitter, so I created an account (twitter.com/Nukem945). So far, I can't really think of any cool uses for the web service, other than using it as a more versatile "away message" with RSS support. I could see if being very useful as a public live blogging tool for relaying bits of news very quickly (it refreshes about every 2 minutes), like at a keynote or trade show.

As for using it on a daily basis, it's really only useful to the people who might be checking in on you. It's really more like a undirected, public instant message that your friends can see. I suppose if you subscribed to a bunch of people's twitter RSS feeds and fed them into an RSS reader like Google Reader, then you could receive updates from your contacts without using email at all. The problem with this is that it's almost too much work to set up and email is already standard-practice for most people.

I guess I'll have to play around with it some more and see if it is indeed useful, or if it's just another flashy web app that becomes lost in the infinite sea of web apps.

I actually did a bit more looking around, and apparently, there's a lot more text message and AIM integration invovled. I'm not really into either of these, but there's potential there, I guess. Like many things on the internet, it's only as good as the community of users who use it.