Twitter is great service, simply put it asks you the question “what are you doing?”.

Essentially the service, (which is free) is a micro/macro-blogging service which gives you the user 140 characters in which to convey whatever it is you wish to convey to your audience, at the precise moment, albeit slightly asynchronously due to server lags, and phone networking processing etc. But kind of very immediate!

So if another user has chosen to “follow” your micro communications, which are usually macro in nature, containing a link, or a thought to something larger, they will receive an update in their own feed, from you, and anyone else they care to follow.

Say what?

Well you create a profile, with some basic bio information about yourself, or your business, or whatever you choose the profile to represent. You then fire in messages about what you are up to, from a webpage, or an instant messenger, or even more cool, from your cell phone!

So how do I use the service?

Well I have set up a few accounts, some of which are automated, and one, my personal, which is not.

My personal one, is usually very transparent thoughts, and does what it says on the can “what are you doing”? – so here I usually state exactly that.

Here are my Twitter accounts:

• Audio – this one is my personal account, you’ll get all sorts of random things from me here, this is very much about what it says on the can. “what I am doing”.
• MB – this one is automated and sends the followers (basically me) a tweet (nickname for the communication) each time a new press release has been published on malebits.com. I find this really useful to ensure releases are getting submitted, as it is not always me submitting them.
• AC – this one is automated once an hour, and this sends a tweet on whatever the latest content in that rss feed is. I happen to have an rss mash-up here, in that I have combined 3 rss feeds into one, so the feed is called “The Full Monty”. This could be an AC blog post, a forum post or the latest press release. This is very useful for me as I get auto notifications on any new content on audiocourses.com
• TPC – this one is also hourly automated, with a CRON job, and here again I get a tweet on any new content, such as a new pic or comment from The Phone Cam.

Porting it

I then take the rss feed of those accounts, and publish them in other places too, such as secondlife, or a myspace plugin, or facebook, so I can visualise that content in other places too, as can others.

So how could you use the service?

• Well what about if you were an educator and you wanted a neat, modern, student friendly way to keep your students in the loop? Why of course create a “group” account, in which you can pass out important (or non-important) information. The students could get instant updates, to their phone, or myspace plugin.
• Run a large popular forum? - set up your updates to get sent to a twitter account, giving your users another way of getting notifications.
• Work within a small team and need a quick way to get macro content to ALL the members quickly? You could send out a brief message with a url.

Can you think of any more ways to use the service, how do you currently use the service if you do so? Do you use it push ads, clever thoughts, self-publish, or just plain open off the top of your head thoughts?

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