Investigating the real-time web
Admittedly, I have been keeping away from Twitter and its kind for a while now but the current run of cold weather in the Britain and Ireland has alerted me to its usefulness and I have given the thing a go. With public transport operator website heaving over the last week, the advantages of microblogging became more than apparent, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Centrebus, National Rail Enquiries and the U.K. Met Office. The pithy nature of any messages saves the effort needed to compile a longer blog post and to read it afterwards. This aspect makes it invaluable for those times when all that needs to be communicated is short and sweet. Anything that cuts down on the information tide that hits all of us every day cam only be a good thing.
Along with Twitter, there is a whole suite of tools available for various bits and pieces. First off, there’s integration with WordPress courtesy of plugins like Alex King’s Twitter Tools. After that, there are numerous web applications for taming the beast. Though I only can say that I scratched the surface of what’s available, I have come accross HootSuite and Twitterfeed. The former is a console for managing more than one Twitter account at once while also offering the facility to do the same for Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress.com and others too. Twitterfeed may be more limited in scope with offering to turn RSS feeds into tweets but it has its place too. HootSuite might have something similar for WordPress but Twitterfeed is a good more universal in its sweep. Naturally, there’s more out there than these two but I am not trying to be exhaustive here. If I make use of any other such services, I even might get inspired to mention them on here.
