Of Twitter and Good Books

You may have noticed an additional 'function' of the blog in recent days. There now is a twitter updates section located directly to the right of these blog posts. Twitter is a great little service that was developed by the same guy who originally created Blogger before it was bought by Google. Twitter's entire existance is reliant upon answering one question and one question only, "What are you doing?". The skeptic in me ignored this service when it first launched, but after hearing more and more reviews, I decided to give it a try.

Users can update their twitter accounts via the web, email, or by phone through text messaging. Every user can have a 'network' of friends who can choose to 'follow' them throughout the day. When you follow a user on Twitter, you are messaged via whatever medium you choose (web, email, phone) when one of your friends makes an update.

There are several design firms who are currently using twitter extensively in the workflow. This is useful from a corporate standpoint when you employ cell phones as the messaging agent. Rather then sending out a mass email to your creative team, you can update your twitter account and have text messages automatically deploy to anyone set to follow you, letting them know you're heading out of the office. I'm using twitter to provide on-the-fly updates on this blog using a nodule that was developed for blogger by the development team of twitter. So now, you can be caught up with all of the non-important, trivial details of my life when they happen... yes, I can hear those screams of excitement ("Oh, this is what we've wanted for so long... to be bored by more details of your impeccably nerdy life!").

I also received two books recently which I'm pretty excited about digging into. Vicente over at Xaris Studio suggested "CSS: The Missing Manual" to me as an excellent resource to help defeat my CSS shortcomings. My mom, who is a faithful reader of this blog (hooray for supportive parents), read Vicente's comment and picked up the book for me as a gift- awww thanks mom (see Vinny- I didn't even have to steal it!). I also received a book entitled "Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability" from our in-house web marketing guru, Kevin, at Food for the Hungry. Looks like this print designer may have to dust off his web stigma and charge back into the world of online development.