I've signed up with a micro-blogging service called Twitter. It's kind of hard to describe -- people post a message to twitter up to 140 characters long, which then gets "pushed" out to people who are "following" your twitter account/feed/whatever. Messages go out over email, cellphone SMS, instant messaging, and can be tracked via RSS. The character limit originates from this being a SMS service originally, with the purpose of pushing out information rather than you having to seek it out.

Push technology is not new. There used to be a service called Pointcast which was a program you ran on your computer, where you selected different categories of news that interested you, and then you left it running. When you got up in the morning, it would have downloaded entire webpages that matched your interest. No web surfing or constant Internet connection necessary. Once updated, all the text and images were stored locally. It croaked but was a very slick example of push technology. Also think of pagers.

My twitter account is here: http://twitter.com/pwtenny. New blog posts and bloggy-type stuff will get pushed out on this account, and that'll probably change over time as I learn how this thing works. From what I gather, there are many different uses and expectations from Twitter, and I find it endlessly sweet that I can post Twitter updates just by sending an instant message to them.

Geek city baby.

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