Parisista

twitter was playing hide and seek with the l33t users of twitterland. Like Jack, I thought of having my own little fun with the outage. The above is a snapshot of the last 24 hour remote monitoring on twitter’s home page. The actual outage was much more; a lot of twitter features were not available for a longer duration.

During the times when I was getting bored, I started playing around with twitter. The idea is simple — communicate with the world in 140 characters or less, either through SMS, IM or plain web. These short messages get broadcasted to people who are either “following” a person or “tracking” words. The notifications can be displayed through the same mechanism viz. SMS, IM, web. These 140 character messages are nothing but 4 broad categories of (a) what people like (b) what they want/intend (c) what they are thinking (d) ideas about stuff.

The most interesting aspect of twitter is it’s public timeline, where it shows real-time messages from people across the globe. This is where it gets interesting. You can track for example “wild fire” or “california” or a particular movie. Like blogs, there is immense amount of publicly available information which can be chopped for further use.

I also see several other future possibilities of applications on top of twitter for creating communities, commerce, and interactions. This may turn twitter into a platform rather than an application in itself. I like to call it TLI (Transport Layer for Ideas (or intutions, intentions or infatuations).

Out of the boredom and coding in between boring Hindi movies, I created twitterarc — a simple application which wraps Ajax on top of the twitter public timeline. There are a lot of cool things which are possible.