After reading Matt’s Twitter blog that he published a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write a follow-up piece about my own experiences with the increasingly popular micro-blogging cum social networking service of the moment.

What I found particularly interesting about Matt’s blog were some of the comments that readers had left. Whilst there aren’t many, what is evident from these comments is something that I’ve noticed on a much larger scale when chatting to friends, family and work associates about the new social networking phenomena – You either love it, or you hate it! More…

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Have you heard of Twitter? It’s the Internet phenomenon all the rage also  known as ‘micro-blogging’. Do you often have a question to ask, or just want to tell the world what you’re up to or what you’re thinking about? Or maybe there are people out there that you wonder about. What are they up to?
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Hello, it’s Carl from Technical Support.

It feels like it has been a long week, and many people are looking forwards to the weekends, but don’t forget that we are always here. More…

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Up until 14th August 2008, Twitter provided a free SMS alerts service for its users in the UK. From inside Twitter, you could register your mobile phone, and decide which of your friends you wanted to follow via SMS. The cost of providing this service for free was one that Twitter couldn’t continue to carry, and the service was withdrawn as a result.

Gradwell, who currently provide the Plusnet VoIP solution, have proved their worth once again as an innovation super-power by harnessing existing technologies to fill the void left by Twitter.

Gradwell are very pleased to announce the launch of Twittex – a simple prepay service that delivers Twitter updates from your friends to your mobile phone via SMS. twittex is currently available on all UK networks. SMS messages are charged at 5p each, excluding VAT.

Stuart Herbert (Gradwell Technical Manager) said:

“In the testing we’ve done of our competitors, one of the main ways we are different is in how timely our service delivers updates. The more active your Twitter friends are, the more actively we check your account, and we aim to check your account at least every five minutes.

We’ve also given our customers the ability to set an optional daily limit on the amount of SMS messages we deliver. This way, our customers can manage their costs and avoid nasty surprises!”

Gradwell use aql.com to deliver their SMS messages worldwide, a service which they think is set to expand on the back of their Twittex success. Word on the street says Gradwell also plan to deploy Twittex through a Facebook app and PhoneWall. Next on the agenda is the ability to decide which times of day you want to receive text messages.

To get started, create an account at twittex.com, add your mobile phone number and your twitter accounts, and some credit (£1, £5, £10 or £20), and you’re all set.

Sign up today and you can get your first 20 messages for free!

Want to know what else Gradwell are up to? Click here

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If you use Twitter much you’ve probably noticed that it’s pretty quick to react to breaking news, especially of the geek/tech variety but also increasingly sport and current affairs. The Twitter search engine, Summize (recently purchased by Twitter) has a neat feature called “Trending Topics” which shows a list of the most talked about terms on Twitter. It makes for interesting reading but it’s not very practical to check it all the time. So the other day I cobbled together a Twitter bot that checks these topics periodically and Tweets new ones. More…

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Every day in the PlusNet office somebody will post a “Have you seen this great website?” forum post, a “How cool is this?” message will go around or you’ll see a Twit from a friend claiming that this new site makes the whole Internet as we knew it redundant. I’m sure you’ve been there yourself. Yes, there are a million and one interesting/cool/impressive things floating around on the Internet, but how many of these sites do you personally need?

Do you have particular web-sites and web-tools that are so useful that they have actually become an integral part of your life, or as cool as something may be, is it really just time-wasting flotsam?

Personally, I really couldn’t do without the trusty old HSBC Internet banking website. I know it hasn’t really been upgraded for 6 or 7 years, but who cares? It tells me how much money I have (or otherwise) and I can pay my credit card bill without having to go through the pain of an automated phone system or posting a cheque in the mail.

I find that iGoogle is extremely useful; it aggregates the RSS feeds from all the news sites that I read, and provides me with rudimentary ToDo List functionality and access to all my bookmarks, on whichever of the 3 devices I access the web on.

Apart from that, what else is there that I really need? Yes, Facebook is useful when planning my social life and seeing what my friends are up to, Flickr is useful for sharing my photos with family and friends (and also a useful backup of many years worth of photos), and apart from that, cool does not seem to equal necessary. Twitter, Plaxo and Pownce don’t really do anything for me, do they you?

Google Grand Central may be of use when they open up the service to the UK, but for now I’ll stick with Skype on my laptop and Fring on my phone.

I don’t really watch a lot of TV due to being too busy with other things, so BBC iPlayer isn’t something that I need. I’ll wait for the day when TV stations decide to provide 1 minute summaries of their programming in the style of ZeroPunctuation – much more efficient…

So, I suppose that all sounds a bit like Mr Grumpy, but if I don’t need something then I’m not going to waste my time on it.

How about you the PlusNet Community Site reader, what web-sites and web-tool do you really rely on as part of your life?

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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