I was recently peer pressured into the latest social network/application sweeping the intar-web: Twitter.

Just for background... or in case you don't already know

Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives.  Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away.  Curious people can make friends.  Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!

So What?

Yeah, that is exactly what I thought. It sounds a bit too Japanese Schoolgirl-ish to me, and I'm not the only one who thinks thought so. I was talking about my new obsession with Jon and he said that he felt exactly the same way when he first tried Twitter a few months ago. Needless to say, we're both Twits now!

Oh, and if you're wondering which peer finally pulled me into the Twitter fold, you can blame Phil. But in all honesty, I can't hold any ill feelings toward Phil as I've already convinced Simo to get on Twitter - it's an epidemic!

Twitter in action

Twitter offers a few Badges that you can put up on your blog/web site so your visitors can track your twitter stream. Here is a glimpse of my friends' stream.

Twitter clients

You can actually use anything from your cell phone (SMS messages), to your IM client, the web based UI on twitter.com, and several desktop clients. I'm currently trying out two different desktop clients: Twitteroo and TeleTwitter.

Twitteroo is a bit more mature and has some nice polish that makes using it a breeze. I know that Jon and Phil both use this client and they seem to like it.

TeleTwitter is a bit rough as it's a fairly new project... but it is open source! Also, the upcoming version has some cool features (like Text-to-Voice)... and if you're daring you can pull down the latest bits off the source code repository and build them yourself - as I'm doing. Thanks to Dan for pointing me toward TeleTwitter.