Eshin Direct

Not less than 24 hours after I decided to give Twitter a go, I find that the great Zen Habits too is experimenting with Twitter. It’s clear and official, great bloggers and minds do think alike. Ahem.

This, of course, was shown to me by Trader Eyal in effort to dissuade me from the evils of Facebook some time ago last year but I never really got it. Yet Twitter has an interesting video on its website that sort of explains where Twitter exists in between blogging, emails and regular contact with folks. It’s the stuff between – the little bits in the day that you feel you need to communicate, like say, eating a donut.

I’m still trying to see the value to it. Twitter asks the very valid question – what are you doing now? To which you respond and voila, the world is updated on your every move. But then, Facebook, too, is curious like that with its status updates and asks the very same question. But Twitter lets you update as much as you want because, well, your day is probably filled with millions of useless tidbits of information. Facebook has a limit apparently.

Twitter allows you to update the world on your minutiae through a web interface or through your mobile phone. So technically, you can be smoking away outside and choose that this is what you want to share with the world. Of course, you can do that through Facebook through a browser-enabled phone but Twitter lets you do this via SMS.

The world is updated through your own Twitter page. Or alternatively, you can embed Twitter on your blog as HTML/JavaScript and have it be the filler in the day between blog posts. Or, you can embed it on Netvibes as a module and use it as a feed to the banality of your friend’s lives. Or, wait for this, you can even have Twitter control Facebook and let it update your status every time you twitter (because using Facebook’s own “What are you doing now?” status updates might be too confusing).

So now, in the interests of being completely geeky, I have this complex setup going on. Through Twitter I can announce to you that “I’m thinking of shooting myself” on my Netvibes module plugin, which in turn will update my status on Facebook and the nifty Facebook module for Netvibes, and then, through the power of Grayskull, Facebook will update my widget on my blog to inform you that I do indeed want shoot myself. Of course, I could update my Facebook profile and low and behold, it does the same thing just without the Twitter stage.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh since you actually need to know people on Twitter to give it a little bit of excitement. But since the Gmail contact import function is broken, I’m limited to following Trader Eyal and my own status. In terms of social updates, Facebook provides less functionallity potentially to update people on the little things in life but then perhaps that is a good thing.

Tags: facebook, geekery, netvibes, Techie Rants, twitter, web