If like me, you have become addicted to Twitter, then you should check out the TwitterPod application for the Mac.

If you have been living in a cave, twitter is a web based server that allows people to “micro blog”. You can enter any text that will fit in a 140 character limit. Twitter updates (or tweets) can also be delivered to your cell phone if you so desire. People twitter about blog articles they have written, what they have had for breakfast or words of wisdom as long as it fits in 140 characters. Many podcasters and bloggers have started to use twitter because you can send updates to a set of people who follow you but follow the updates, potentially, of a completely different set of people. I (my podcast is the Amateur Traveler) twitter at chris2x.

The best twitter updates I received (or wrote) the day before I wrote this article (which orriginally appeared on MacCast.com:

acedtect Happy Arbitrary Roman-derived change of annual enumeration.
leolaporte Turkish coffee and a flight to Aswan where we meet the Sun Boat IV. Sarkozy and Blair are in town, snarling the traffic.
chris2x just a thought, when Clark Kent gets new frames, does anyone recognize him?
scottsimpson For the record, a certain part of my anatomy has also been compared to a baby’s arm: my arm.
hotdogsladies GoDaddy’s checkout is like a hallway of Marines trying to hit you with a sock full of pennies. “Ow! Quit it! Don’t need ‘WebSite Tonight!!’”
CaliLewis “When we honor the potato, we honor ourselves.” Just heard it on NPR.
Ihnatko The fonts I bought from Comicraft for $20.08 each (with one freebie plus a $16 discount…details in post): http://tinyurl.com/3d36aq

And if those literary gems make you more interested in Twitter than as a Mac user one program that I would recommend is TwitterPod which has a clean interface and growl notification. It also highlights the last post you read (you can read URLs posted in a pop out panel) so it makes it easy to tell what posts are new.

Let the tweats begin.

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I got back last Sunday from the PNME conference in Ontario, Californa. This is the biggest conference of the year for podcasters and it is a wonderful combination of smoozing, presentations, hobnobbing, and networking with other people who are also obsessed with podcasting. Tim and Emile Bourquin (The Podcast Brothers) did another wonderful job on the conference.

Some of my thoughts…
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Popularity: 18% [?]

I have been watching friends, famous people and famous friends on both Twitter and Jaiku recently. Both are micro-blogs that allow you to answer the question “what are you doing right now”. I rarely post myself as either:

a) what i am doing is boring even to me
b) I am working on something interesting at work but can’t talk about it

Most of what gets posted is the banality of every day life, but amidst the “I am going to bed” and “I am eating pizza” notifications I spotted these memorable quotes:

notstevenwright In school they told me “practice makes perfect.” Then they told me “nobody’s perfect.” So then I stopped practicing

GordonWSmythe Bush says we’ll leave Iraq if they ask us. In unrelated news, White House cuts off communication with Iraq.

hotdogsladies Talking to smart people throughout your day helps mitigate the corrosive effects of dealing with the unapologetically dim-witted remainder.

GordonWSmytheScientists discover the origins of deja-vu. Is it just me or have I heard this story before?

notstevenwright A friend of mine has a trophy wife, but apparently it wasn’t first place.

As well as these that offer an interesting insight into the human condition (and make you want to support those fundraisers that are trying to address it):

hotdogsladies I’m with scottsimpson; Facebook is a lot more fun if you imply you’ve had sex with every person on your friends list.

Veronica Some dude is standing outside my apartment Tasering his friends. He got one guy in the butt. Wow.

hotdogsladies Let’s make a deal: you keep saying “user-generated content” all you want, but I get to punch you in the throat every time you say it. Fair?

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I have been experimenting more recently with both Twitter and Jaiku which are both micro blogging solutions. If you aren’t familiar with these two solutions they are basically software that let you say what you are doing right now to a set of people who have expressed an interest in hearing about your daily goings on.

Twitter

Twitter is the first of these two systems and the more popular one. You can twitter from your cell phone via email or SMS or from a web browser. Among the 56 people that I currently follow a message may range from a recent blog post, a breaking news story to what they are having for dinner. Twitter is a one way conversation so some messages are of the form “@chris2x: I agree” which is a message being broadcast to all of the users followers but targeted to a comment made by the users chris2x. This is a bit silly and points out the need for comments. You can also get twitter messages through IM so this is a very timely system.

Jaiku

Jaiku has, in my opinion, a better interface than twitter with the addition of comments and the ability to have Jaiku monitor your blog, podcast, flickr, etc RSS feeds. So when you post something to your blog it automatically shows up on Jaiku. Since Twitter can produce an RSS feed some people update Jaiku by posting to twitter which is oddly circular.

Two deficiencies in Jaiku are that unlike Twitter you follow everyone who follows you. Twitters with large entourages have already learned on Twitter not to do that if you want any minute in your life without interruptions. It also lacks the IM updates that Twitter provides.

Popularity: 6% [?]

One of the latest rages on the web is twitter. Twitter lets people answer the question of what they are doing right now. I can see my daughter and her friends using this and there is certainly a buzz around this in tech circles that is probably similar to how crack hit the streets. Now there is a new site called Twittervision which is a google maps mashup of twitter that shows you who is twittering right now.

The problem that I have is that I don’t know these people. I don’t even know of these people. I don’t know that I care that a guy in Tennessee is texting at 80 mph or that someone in California has kidney stones. It reminds me of going to Karaoke night. Just because someone hands you a microphone does not mean you know how to sing.

Popularity: 6% [?]