Twitter Uses
Yeah, I’ve blogged about Twitter a lot but there’s good reasons for it: 1) I keep running into people that have never heard of it 2) I talk to people everyday who ‘don’t get it’ and 3) I know there are some very good uses for a semi-ubiquitous transport medium like twitter – I mean, it’s a free SMS (text messaging), web and IM platform that, with some simple work can be extended to be an email platform and utilize rss. On top of that, there are some really interesting possibilities with the api platform that’s available. All of that can be combined with a totally seperate webpage to make some REALLY cool apps. There’s one idea in particular that I want to talk about that can be extended endlessly.
This architecture came out of a desire to build a system that would let people holding events easily communicate both the existence of the event and reminders about their events. Specifically, I want to build a way to easily distribute information about the Utah Bloggers Conference and about Geek Dinners in the area. But I also wanted an easy way for people to have ad-hoc meetups. One component of this is to have aptly named users accounts on twitter for people to follow. Given that, I have registered a few user names in twitter, namely utahTech, utahMeetups, utahEvents, utahBloggers and utahGeekDinners. I plan to eventually build the same architecture for them all, let me explain how this works by using UtahEvents as an example.
The architecture works like this: Build a website where approved people can enter upcoming events into a database, including specifying reminder times and all info about the event – including links to the event homepage. Using rss2twitter, the original announcement will be released on the rss feed that is being pushed to twitter. Later, reminders will be sent through rss to twitter. Anyone interested can then ‘follow’ the UtahEvents twitter account and receive notifications through the medium of their choice – the twitter website, text messages or IM. Additionally, if you wanted to receive those notifications via email, you could use a service like rssJam to receive updates to the UtahEvents rss feed through Email. You could also use a Tumblr page to aggregate multiple rss feeds into one reading area.
By doing this, multiple people will be able to submit event notifications through the website and instantly notify anyone paying attention to (they’ve indicated they’re interested in knowing) the UtahEvents notifications. This provides 5 easy ways to get notifications of events going on around Utah. With UtahMeetups, the same thing can be done on a much broader level, more people could be authorized to post into the UtahMeetups account. The same can easily be done for all the other names I mentioned.
With the twitter api, you could also set the site up to listen for people to post direct messages (d UtahMeetups) and turn the direct message around and post it into the rss2twitter feed. by doing this, people could update UtahMeetups from their phone via text message, or any of the other transport mediums, and it would be blasted out to anyone listening to the UtahMeetups account. This creates a scenario where you could update multiple people on their phones from your phone – and THAT is really cool!
I’ve been talking to a couple people about building this, I’m hoping it can be done quickly and soon. We’ll see.
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Phil801,
Hey, great ideas. I’ve been thinking the Twitter delivery mechanism will evolve into something beyond “I’m going to lunch”. As you suggest, using accounts specific to a topic or group of people. It moves beyond one person, to a group, and I think this will have a larger impact than the current one user one subscriber model.
There’s a next level to the use of twitter platform. I don’t think it’s a fad. I’ve been trying to come up with ways where its useful beyond the current implementation; sounds like you have too.