I’ve finally signed up to twitter now I realise that it’s not SMS-only (because what fool pays for that?) and I can update via IM. It seems cute.

The IM bot didn’t recognise my Jabber address (or at least I didn’t receive anything at that address), although it did pick up my Gmail account. The bot always appears offline to me though, which means that it doesn’t show up in my contact list until I turn on “show offline contacts”, which is very annoying, and means I’ll probably forget all about it.

I’m also quite surprised that there aren’t already a host of plugins which pick up your IM status and post that to Twitter (or vice versa). A single point of entry for desktop status makes sense to me.

I see that there is a script which checks your iChat status and posts that off to Twitter every five minutes, but that’s not quite as integrated as I was hoping for.

Overall, I do like the notion of Twitter, at least in some sense, although, like Phil Gyford I was reasonably surprised that I’d have to set up yet another social network. I did some work on this last year, I’ll see if I can do anything more practical about it. There’s an obvious application for creating your FOAF file and using a service’s API for auto-creating a social network.