Close on heals of Evan Williams starting Obvious Corp and buying out Odeo and Twitter assets, Twitter announced updates to it’s service. Twitter has made few much needed changes to its service which now make Twitter a more versatile application reaching out to a larger user base.
Twitter has changed the way users can register for the service. Users no longer need to give out their phone number to register at Twitter. These users, who are just trying out Twitter before they give out their phone numbers to Twitter, can still update Twitter from web, and send updates to other people’s mobile phones.
Twitter has also enabled use of Instant Messaging to interact with Twitter. Now users can take the Twitter lingo onto their IM, which they previously could only do over SMS. Twitter over IM currently supports Jabber protocol, which is a good news for Google Talk users. Jabber protocol is also supported by other IM clients including iChat on Mac and Trillian Pro on Windows. This feature saves few bucks on SMS charges for Blackberry users since Google offers GTalk client for Blackberry. So, Twitter fans who were looking to buy Blackberry Pearl, now have another reason do so quickly. To start using Twitter from your IM, you need to save your Gmail or Jabber address to your Twitter profile and activate the service by entering the verification key.
Another feature that has been added is the ability to search public Twitter updates with Google Blog Search. To search Twitter updates from Google Blog search you need to click “Advanced Blog Search.” and put “Twitter.com” in the “at this URL.” field.
I think the ability to send updates from IM is the one of the best features offered by Twitter. These updates were required to the service since Twitter is not without competition. Joopz another startup in this area is also making dedicated efforts to establish itself in the market. Also Dodgeball from Google offers similar functionality.
Links:
Twitter
StartupSquad at Wordpress 
February 21, 2007 at 4:38 pm |
[…] Another smart part of the service that will be released in the next version, is the integration with Twitter and Jaiku. When the feature goes live, once you connect to your Twitter account with Jargong your status message from Twitter will become your IM status and any changes to the IM status will be reflected onto Twitter. Definitely does cut down on status update at least for 1 application when you need to leave in hurry. From the technology perspective this particular feature is not difficult to implement, but having more such integrations with other social networking platforms can make mobile startups like Jargong stand apart. […]