Twitter. Twitter, twitter? Twitter!

I've been twittering like mad over the last few weeks. I've come to a conclusion about how the web is changing news. The 24 hour news cycle is on it's way out. I'm seeing echoes of stories that I saw days or weeks ago being posted and discussed on twitter with links to more discussions taking place on other blogs and such.

Twitter is a surprisingly great source of news. When you're following the right people and tracking the right words. First I should tell you how I use twitter, and how I would like to use twitter. I use twitter over IM to gtalk within the gmail web interface. I'm at work and we're not allowed to install programs without a big hassle, even things as innocuous as firefox. Gmail keeps twitter in a little pop-up Java script (probably AJAX) window in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. That's where the twitter fire hose resides, usually minimized and out of the way. I have a kind of notification light right there. If the box is orange then there's new tweets, if not then don't bother. I used to feel the compulsion to open it up each and every time it lit up but that has passed, for the most part, and now I can just look at what's happening whenever I feel like it.

Did you know that there's a bunch of commands for using twitter over SMS? Well there is, you can use follow, get, whois and several more commands to interact with twitter over SMS. Well, these commands work over IM too.

So back to how twitter is great for news. Using the track command you can monitor the public timeline, basically all of twitter, for certain key words. It's not smart and it simply does a regex over everything that's posted publicly but with the right keywords I've been able to find dozens of people worth following and I've gotten a huge amount of useful and interesting news links from those I follow. I've been to online meet ups and gotten relevant breaking news, thanks mostly to @breakingnewson.

If you want to follow me on twitter I'm @kodemage.

Regards,
-Benjamin