A quick FAQ on what Twitter is. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where all posts must be 140 characters or less. It basically lets you do quick posts that your friends and family can follow and respond to.

Twitter had allowed you to send in messages via your cell phone, but due to some problems it was down for a few weeks. The SMS feature has again been enabled and appears to be working. I don't currently use it but have seen others. So as of now you can use a third-party Twitter application, your cell phone, the website, or an instant messenger.

When talking to someone you use the @ symbol plus their nickname. The one thing to note is that the person will only see the message if they are "following" your rants, err, tweets (what a post on Twitter is called).

An example of a "tweet" would be: @daver nice blog post and I would respond @youperson thanks :)

Now that the Twitter 101 is over, let me get on to the quick review. I like Twitter, a lot. Yes, it has its issues, but with a big group of people I know on it, I don't mind some of them.

Twitter Pros

  • I have a large number of people I follow and a lot more I could. Other services have a few people. What's social if there's no one to talk to?
  • Was first. Back to the number of people using it: being first means having the user base. Who wants to update Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and four other apps with the same thing at the same time? Not me.
  • Integration of IM client, phone, third-party apps, and web site, plus the ability to use them in combination.
  • How simple it is. It's as easy as rant, hit enter, done.
  • The developers continue to add features and clean up the UI and appearance.
  • The concept. Many imitators are out there now: some do things better, some worse. It was the first, though, so it gets points for that.
  • Integration with Facebook. I don't currently use it, but a lot of people have Twitter on their Facebook profile.
  • Third-party apps that let you feed Twitter from a WordPress blog.
  • Third-party apps that let you feed your WordPress blog from your tweets.

Twitter Cons

  • The outages. How many times a day must I see the upside-down bird?
  • Missing tweets, or not seeing them show up. I think this is a "feature."
  • Groups, or the lack of them. Pownce allows groups, and when you follow a large number of people that can be very handy.
  • Conversations: hard to follow at times. If you have a conversation with someone, I'd like to see a thread: let me view the dialogue in one place.
  • Search. Let me search just my own tweets and/or those of my friends.
  • Link the direct messages. If you send me a DM and I respond, note that it's in response to that DM and link back to it.

After looking at it, my Cons list is more a list of things that bug me or features I want, but in the end they're cons one way or another. I'm trying to use Jott, Pownce, and Jaiku more, and I'll review them when I have enough good and bad to rant about.