For those not in the know, twitter is a service that lets you send out short messages to all your friends. The messages can’t be more than 140 characters in length and ANYone that subscribes to your feed sees all of your messages.

Annoying? sometimes, it depends on how you use it. If you have it send all the tweets, twitter messages, to your cell phone as text messages it gets annoying fast. However, it DOES have its place and that place is also with text messages to your phone.

I first learned about twitter when a friend of mine was having a baby. He would send out all the updates and then the actual birth. All his friends and family were watching it, and I had it going to my cell phone via text. That was a good use of the service.

Another good use is when you are trying to coordinate an event with a group of people. Yes, other people will get the tweets as well, but it doesn’t really matter. they’ll just ignore them.

Other people use them as a mini-blog. Kinda like “I’m at the coffee shop, reading a book. Stop by to say hey” or “I’m STILL sitting in traffic.” The first example is good twitter usage. The second is bad twitter usage. If you can’t tell the difference, please stop reading now.

ANYway, my point is that its a pretty good service. You can get updates via Text messages, Instant Messages (Google Talk, its like AIM but better), going to their website, or various desktop applications.

My preference is a small desktop application that works like an RSS or email reader and has a single line field that you can post Tweeks with. That way i can see some of the interesting Tweets from my friends, but only when i take the time to look at the application. Very unobtrusive.

If anyone that reads this site uses twitter, post your name in the comments and i’ll be sure to start following you. My twitter name is mbond …

It would be interesting to see how twitter works via various circles of friends. Also I’d like to encourage people that aren’t using it to give it a try. I’d be interested to see how it works for people.