Lost In Madison

After doing some testing I think I am going to make my move to using Twitter as my new form of instant messenger. Now most of you that are familiar with Twitter will think “It’s not an instant messenger!”, but I am going to show you how I use it to make it more like one.

If you don’t know what Twitter is yet or want to know more about it you should really watch this short video by CommonCraft. Twitter in Plain English

So what do you need to make this work?
1: A Twitter account
2: Twhirl software for your computer (Free and works on Windows or Mac, created with Adobe Air)
3: A phone that can do SMS messages and/or a BlackBerry or iPhone with the Twitter app (I am sure there are other phones with this app available to them but these two are the most common)

How I make this work.
1: Desktop Based
I use the Twhirl software and keep it open like an instant messenger. As new tweets come in from people I am following I get a notification. I can then reply if I want. Here are the features of Twhirl.

runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts
displays notifications for new messages
shorten long URLs (using digg.com, bit.ly, snurl, twurl or is.gd)
cross-post your updates to Jaiku and many other sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more via Ping.fm
post images to TwitPic
search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan, and follow topics in near-real time with saved searches
automatically find tweets mentioning your @username
record a video on Seesmic, and share it on twitter immediately
get your seesmic updates in real-time using XMPP
English spell checking

I also use the web based version of Twitter to do account specific things when needed, but that is not very often.

2: Phone Based
In my Twitter account I have turned on device updates to my cell phone, and once I have found my friends that I want to follow I turn on device updates to my phone for that specific person. Now when someone I am following puts out a tweet I get an SMS on my phone.

If you have a BlackBerry or iPhone there are Twitter apps that take the need for SMS out of the equation. Currently even though I have an iPhone I still use the SMS feature because the Twitter app will not notify me of new tweets. This is an issue with the software version of the iPhone and I believe that it will be addressed once the new 3.0 software is released this summer. After that I will no longer need the SMS feature turned on once the Twitter app is updated.

If you don’t have a phone that has a Twitter app available to it you can just use the SMS feature. Basically you can do everything you could normally do via SMS. Here is a complete list of SMS functions and how to use them with Twitter.

End Result
The ability to use Twitter via desktop and phone currently gives me a solution for messaging my friends while either near my computer, near someone else’s computer, or via my phone 24/7. I can send out a text that everyone can reply to, a direct reply to someone else, or a direct (private) message to someone. I can also post tweets, or responses at my leisure. I don’t have to respond right that second or I can, depends on how important the conversation really is to me at the time.

Extra Tidbits
After doing some more research on SMS I ran across this article from Lifehacker on a host of other things you can do via SMS. I found all of them pretty interesting, I think you might also.