This past podcast I went on a rant about using web technologies to their fullest, particularly Twitter.  Twitter is one of those new things that everyone is jumping on board but hasn’t figured out how to make useful.  On the content side of things, I have been able to make it useful by hooking it up to feed headlines instantly to King Sejong’s followers.  Yet I hadn’t found it useful on the client side.  I found it inconvenient to go to the Twitter site and read all this stuff and try to figure out how to make it work.

So I looked for a client-side program.  Researched a bit and settled on Twhirl.  It’s a standalone program that you can have running in the background and works a lot like instant messaging software.  Unlike IM, though, you don’t have to worry about people pestering you (there always is that one person who always wants to talk while you work).

Like email notifications, when you get a tweet, it just pops up on the lower right hand of the screen and goes away.  You can configure whether or not you want it to make an alert sound.  I keep it in the background, and when I reach a break in working, I just pull it up and quickly scan what else is going on.  Depending on who you follow, it’s a great tool for information junkies like me.

It makes responding to folks a lot easier, too.  I know, I know.  The geeks just yelled at the screen.  “All you have to do is time @ plus the person’s user name.”

But I tend to misspell user names, and I’m L-A-Z-Y.

So, if you haven’t already, do the following: