New Twitter service allows SMS based status updates for Guam Tweeters
Guam tweeters now have the ability to post status updates to their Twitter feed from their plain jane mobile phones via text message. Twitter.com offers their U.S. and U.K. based users support for sms integration with their twitter feeds. Unfortunately for everyone else in the world, the numbers provided don’t work from these parts.
Jason Salas and I had several discussions about how the Guam web community has been so slow to embrace twitter. We both agreed that part of twitter’s appeal in the US mainland is the mobile access convenience. Something that is not possible here in Guam unless you are graced with a smartphone, a la Blackberry, iPhone or Android. We decided that we wanted to see if that was a doable service and if it was something that we might be able to offer.
We have now been working on this new project, now called TwitterNeni for a little over a month now. I’ve been so engrossed in the development side of the project that I haven’t once taken a minute to write about this whole experience. The service is up and running and the official public beta was released on Monday, April 27, 2009. The launch has gone surprisingly well without so much as a hiccup along the way. I’ve got so much to talk about regarding my experience developing the application and the supporting infrastructure. But I’ll save that for a later post and I’ll just keep this post about the service itself.
If you’re curious about what Twitter is, check it out. It’s a “microblogging” platform. Participant members think of it just as bloggers do, but the brevity of the medium allows for much faster, more efficient means of communication and interaction. It’s really one of those things in which the experience cannot be explained but must be experienced to truly be understood. As you can see by the scarcity of my own blog posts, I am not one to take alot of time updating my blog. But I am constantly on Twitter, giving my 140 characters worth.
With the new service, Jason and I have created, now us Guam tweeters can do it while on the go, too.
