Mac ReTweet

I was exceedingly sceptical of Twitter when I first heard about it. Twitter, as most people know these days, is like texting on the 'net.

You have a limited number of characters (140) to play with, which keeps you exceedingly succinct, and people 'follow' you. That means that their 'tweets' appear on your page. You have to set up a free account to use it.

The common joke is "why would I want to read about (or write about) what you had for breakfast? And of course, your twittering could become mere wittering if you weren't careful. If I chose to write about what I had for breakfast, it would be exceedingly boring: muesli. Müesli. Müesli. Müesli. Müesli. Müesli ... you get the picture. (Have no fear, I sometimes make scrambled eggs on a weekend. Live dangerously, I say.)

But thanks to the always wise words of IT cool person extraordinaire Dorothy Burt, I signed up (it's free) and dipped in my toes. I'm no maven, but I definitely appreciate the service. It's great.

But while you may feel compelled to tweet regularly and garner your own followers, this is far from necessary. The most exciting thing about Twitter is following others who may mean something to you personally, or for your business, or just because you're interested. I found heaps of cool Apple links that serve me news and information even faster that the RSS feeds.

And you know how it is: you're working away and you get bored or need a momentary distraction. This can help you get you back on task (well, it certainly works for me). Twitter is perfect for that. A quick dive in, and oh wow, a cool iPhone app to check out.

A NZ history page worth looking at (NZHistorydotnet), an announcement by EA Games (AppleMacGeek), a review of Bento for iPhone posted (MacTheTwit) and a trove of Celtic coins discussed on a British history site (CelticSteward) happily fill my disassociated moments.

On the Twitter site, you can search for topics (Apple Mac, iPhone etc) or for people who 'tweet' for me, just look for macnzMark.

Apart from being a great way to get instant Mac news, Twitter was created on Macs by Mac fans. The Twitter software engineers use Mac systems running the most recent version of Mac OS X, as Twitter was built using software tools like Ruby on Rails, provided as part of Mac OS X.

The downtown San Francisco company's HQ has common areas are equipped with Mac minis and iMacs.

The Twitter people like Macs because they're simple and efficient, like the Twitter communication ethos, and because they have low power consumption (they're Greenies). The Twitter design teams run site testing by flipping between Safari and Firefox, and if they want to test on Windows, they just fire up Windows via VMware on their Macs.

Of course, this doesn't mean you have to be a Mac user to use Twitter. You don't. It's browser-based. And it certainly does not mean you have to follow Apple news. You can follow anything you're interested in.

As its usage rate explodes, you can almost guarantee your favourite train spotty (or not) topic is there, and if it's not ... do it yourself. Why not?

Another cool thing is that, more and more, companies and PR agencies are using it to get news out fast. For example, I had to sign an NDA about FileMaker's new Bento for iPhone app, and wasn't allowed to talk about it until a certain date.

This was all blown out of the water by Apple releasing it into the iTunes Store the day before, a rather strange situation I was alerted to by ... Twitter, of course. It's instant.

Actually, I don't even have to boot a web page to use Twitter, I just have a strip of the Tweets I follow appearing down the side of my monitor, set to launch whenever my MacBook Pro boots up.

That's because I use a third party Mac app called Tweetie, made by atebits, to follow my selected personalities. Tweetie is free if you don't mind a few ads appearing every now and again - shell out US$19.95 and it's ad-free and licensed.

There's a version for iPhone too. It also lets me instantly post my own comments or reply to comments that deserve one. A nice feature is the ability to instantly shorten URLs to help stay inside the 140 character limit.

Whether you're into manga, movies, monsters, motherhood or mayhem, why don't you check Twitter out?




- Mark Webster mac.nz