Twitter ~ observations, clones and applications

While doing some research on Web 2.0 applications I came across a series of articles focused upon the social networking app Twitter. It is like a mini-blogging app. It allows you to deliver micro-chunks of data to users who have subscribed to your Twitter account. It allows you to post a maximum of 140 characters.

For those of you new to Twitter you might like to catch up with this Wikipedia article. A review of Twitter with an emphasis upon its possible uses and application can be read at the Infocult site. One can view the location of "Twitterers" live via this visual interface.

Educators are considering ways to use Twitter in teaching and learning settings. David Lee King puts forward some ideas here. Christopher D. Sessums has written a nice article and provided a set of useful links with his look at Twitter in education. David Warlick has posted some ideas as well. Alan Lew's post is rich with some good ideas for educators. Finally Educause has published an article Seven Things You Should Know About Twitter that is well worth downloading as a pdf and reading.

There are a significant number of web based apps similar to Twitter and they can be explored via this link. One of the more significant of these apps is Jaiku. It is quite a powerful tool however I have found it slow to update the published feed. This article compares and contrasts Twitter and Jaiku. Two of the more interesting clones of Twitter include Yappd and MoodMill.