Twitter is a great service. Simple to set up. Easy to use. It’s based on SMS messaging, which is dead simple. But it’s a printing press for bores who tell you they are eating lunch. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s one of the first SMS systems with an API which creative programmers can put to good use.

Mike Butcher is on point with his observation above. An SMS API is indeed good news for savvy developers with a presence focus. And if Europe had had the American system for SMS (i e e-mail to a phone number – free!), then it would have cost them considerably less as well. Perhaps that’s the price you pay for being blog flavour of the week.

But although the above is true, this is not the only interesting development with the emerging micro-blogging. Jyri Engeström, founder of the Twitter competitor Jaiku, held a good presentation on this subject at Reboot last year. The presence, both geographical and actual, enables a more precise form of interaction than before.

If I’m up in the middle of the night, sleepless, I can’t start phoning people to have a chat. They’re probably asleep, and wouldn’t appreciate my call. But if I could see who was also still up, I could phone them directly. This would put me in contact with someone that I hadn’t initially thought of calling. Thus, knowing ones presence creates new areas of interaction that previously never appeared. This needs to be watched very carefully.

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Other things on the agenda for today:
* Finish my slides for tomorrows (short) presentation at Citygate Forum
* Another meeting about Second Life – a lot of them lately
* Read key parts of State of the News Media 2007
* Go through Angalossys biz plan with Michelle
* Get well. I’m so sick of all this coughing.

tags bloggar.se: twitter, jaiku, presence, mikrobloggande, angalossy, citygate