A bit ago I wrote that I was trying out Twitter and had started following a couple of folks that I knew about, knew of their reputation, and liked what they were on about in the world (Phil Windley and Dave Winer). That has turned out to be interesting. Both of them send little “tweets” fairly often. For instance, I know that Phil Windley gave a talk to the LDS Church’s computer department this morning on digital identity. Dave Winer has been working this morning on bugs in his TwitterGram application. Dave Winer sends lots of little tweets, most referencing interesting information he’s come across. Phil is not so prolific.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sending my tweets to Twitter. Essentially that has been sending this stuff to the big bit-bucket in the sky. The only person receiving them was me. However, I’ve been learning a lot about the system. I mostly send these updates from my Sprint PCS phone as an SMS message.

All well and good, until this morning when I got an email from Twitter that a particular person (who for now will remain unnamed) started following ME! I don’t know the person. I’ve checked out his profile on Twitter and verified that he’s an unknown person to me. He is also just starting to use Twitter and playing with it. All of a sudden, I had to stop and think about this. Someone is following what I’m sending to Twitter. I now have to start making some sense! I have to stop blathering! I need to say something important! Oh my. Then I re-thought and decided that I’m not going to change anything about what I do with Twitter. My follower can continue to follow me or not as he chooses. It is a bit of an upper, though, to know that someone whom I’ve never met and probably never will is getting my little tweets!

So, here’s how to join my following:

You can set up a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/ and then specify who you wish to follow. I’m known on Twitter as “rolandksmith”.

Or, using your cell phone, send a text message to 40404 stating: “follow rolandksmith” (I think this will work … but you may have to set up a Twitter account first).

The tweets will start rolling in….!!

Sometimes I’ll send a picture with some text. The picture process uses Dave Winer’s TwitterGram capability. That process is this:

1. I take a picture with my phone and then send it to my account in Flickr.

2. The Flickr account is set up to tag any pictures coming in on a specific email address with the tag “twitter”.

3. I’ve signed up with TwitterGram and told it to look at my Flickr account for any pictures with the tag “twitter”. Any photos it finds, it creates a “TinyURL” and sends the subject line of the picture (which in my case is always “You have new Picture Mail”) along with the TinyURL of the Flickr photo as a tweet to my Twitter account.

4. A few minutes later, the tweet shows up as an SMS message on my phone with the link to the picture. It also appears in all other channels that the tweets get sent out on to whomever is following me. Clicking on the link in the message brings up the Flickr picture along with the text that I sent to Flickr with the photo.

It’s an interesting process and pictures sometimes add a lot of context to a tweet.

Next is to add my own capability to this process. I’m working on a way to send video clips from my phone to my server and then automatically post a link to these clips as a tweet to Twitter. I can do it manually. Next is to build the application to do it automatically.