As noted a week or so ago, I've been playing with Twitter and trying to see if it's actually useful for someone who doesn't live via mobile-phone text messages OR feel the compulsive need to microblog. For me, at least, the answer was "not yet" -- since there was no way to prioritize different feeds, or effectively "mute" those that you don't want to hear from 24/7.
Today, though, Twitter fixed that -- you can now control on a feed-by-feed basis whether you receive updates. That instantly makes Twitter a more promising channel (platform? service? network of tubes?) for project-based collaboration, emergency alerts, and updates from various organizations and individuals who aren't necessarily your closest of friends.
Granted, it's not yet the flexibility that I was hoping for:
...a Twitter setting that let you adjust notification levels on a feed-by-feed basis. Then few friends' updates go to your phone, most other twitters go only to your GoogleTalk or AIM account, and a few are essentially on hold -- but still there as part of your account, ready to be re-activated the moment you need them.
But a per-feed on-off switch is a very good start.
I've been experimenting with Pownce as well, mainly because of the more-granular control it offers. (I still have a couple invites, so if you know me and share my need to burn time playing with buggy new technologies...) The control there is on the sender's side, however -- far better for individual collaboration, probably, but not much help for anyone hoping to build a broad audience/network of whomever is interested.
Suddenly, having set up that New America Twitter feed doesn't seem so ridiculous after all...
20 July 2007 - 10:14pm
Quick update -- the announcement that you can now access your Google calendar via Twitter (see http://twittercal.com/) is another solid step in the right direction.
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