My vision of twitter

The first time I heard about twitter and the buzz around it, my first reaction was why? What is the interest of saying what I’m doing? To know what others are doing? Furthermore I live in France and with my contract I cannot send free SMS to the English twitter’s server!

what decided me?

I wanted to know why so much people like twitter. Then I created an account and verified twitter can send me SMS for free. This way I can send SMS to my wife for free. Yeah a free service I didn’t have before!

notification system

I wanted to be able to have some reminder on my cell phone. Of course it already do it, but I’d hate to write it on the cell phone. I wanted to write it with my keyboard on my computer.

twitter can send me SMS for free, then I’d want an organisation mecanism twitter compliant. My choice goes to iwantsandy. I’ve configured twitter to work with my cell phone and also my IM (google talk).

Now I can order to Sandy via my IM desktop client.

Movement :

1. click on my IM client
2. click on the twitter@twitter.com user
3. write something like : “d s r do something at 6:30pm” where “d s r” stand for :

• d : direct message to
• s : sandy
• r : remind me to

Ok, now I’m happy

Third step (try out)

In two first step, I wanted to used twitter just for “me”. After that, I tried to look at some interesting people to follow. And I founded many of my favorite blogger.
Then I can be up to date exactly as I would be using RSS.

From now I can use twitter as in IM sending direct message to someone, and it can receive it directly to it’s cell phone.
I can use twitter like a forum sending it public replies.
I can use twitter to follow interresting people like RSS.
I can follow people given me interresting links like into a bookmark finder à la SumbleUpon.

What I don’t do for now is stay in touch with friends. As I’ve don’t have many friends working a lot on a computer. My french friends will not send SMS to update their twitter status because it will cost money. Some should update via the web. But most won’t want to lose such a time.

Conclusion (my perception of twitter)

I see twitter like a really adaptable “framework” to communicate with other. You can be a receptor only, an “emitor” only, could use it as an IM, as a forum, as a RSS, as a better filter to search the web.

That was the good sides of twitter.

Bad side : the interface of twitter does not take into account all these usages. Particularly, if you want to follow a blogger only to be alerted when his blog as a new entry, you don’t necessarily want to follow all his replies.

Then, there is some lack of visual features into the twitter’s web interface.

This is why I should think about a new interface. Particularly a desktop one (for mac).