Twitter

Yes, I am now sending tweets. Not sure why but it appears to be addicting.

Twitter is another social network but is far more focused in its goals. It just asks "What are you doing" and with frequent updates you end up with a general idea of what your friends are doing.

Perhaps this is just too much information and no one really cares but I think that is what it is all about. Why does and now much will they be able to pay?

With a simple beginning there are now addons to the twitter service like a search of all the things that people are doing and, my personal favorite mashup, TwitterVision which merges the posts with the geo locations of the poster and swoops you around the world from language to language and irrelevant activity to irrelevant activity.

But don't count this thing out yet. Check out my personal twitter vision. There are many times that we need to keep track of things. Oh, did we think this was limited to people? When are you going to get that new watch that will tweet so you never loose it. Should FedEx make their packages tweet? It's just a 140 character piece of text but twitter vision encodes ":L[position]" into it as a really simple way to track things.

FexEx, of course, built their own package tracking system back in the days when web services were new and SOA was a Canadian SO. If the task was started again today would they have chosen to leverage existing web services.

Each web service we build we examine granularity as an architectural problem. Perhaps the success of twitter indicates we should stop examining and just think smaller.

Who knows perhaps your next watch will make a request for the time somewhere.