The in-crowd’s persistent chatter about twitter didn’t convince me to try it, but my sidekick dying and leaving me without a viable mobile messaging solution did. So I tried it.

I also found out I have unlimited SMS messaging on my phone, and suddenly twitter is very interesting. I’m using it more than I’d expected. Here’s a sampling of the poetic, deep thoughts you’ll find on twitter.com/parand:

Tweet tweet 07:42 PM April 08, 2007 from txt
Feast indeed. Fat and happy now. 09:30 PM April 07, 2007 from txt
Dinner at mom's. It's gonna be a feast. Which is good cause i'm starving. 07:42 PM April 07, 2007 from txt
Traffic! This sucks. 05:59 PM April 05, 2007 from txt

Nabokov, eat your heat out.

Here’s the thing: there’s no cost for me to post a message, and I don’t care who (if anyone) reads it. It’s a small chunk of thought (140 characters max). If I’m sitting in traffic with nothing to do, I might as well post something. There’s no mental effort either – a blog post takes a little bit of thought, while a twitter post takes almost none.

It potentially could be useful, for example for getting a lunch group together. If more of my friends used it I could post “I’m going to XXX for lunch at noon”, my friends would be notified, and I’d have a gathering with no effort.

But they don’t. Nobody seems very interested in it.

…

Getting back to the original topic: twitter has very nice, very simple APIs that allow you to do almost anything with it. This is very useful – a scalable, free, fairly reliable SMS gateway that can be accessed programatically via the Web. I’m already using this for various and sundry, but could see expanding it to do all kinds of other neat things.

To sum up: go sign up for twitter and play around with it. SMS gives you access to a bajillion handsets out there, and programmatic access makes it a fun area to play with. Also, we could have lunch.