The Power of Twitter
I’ve seen a ton of chatter over the past few months about Twitter and the majority of it is of the WTF variety. Believe me, I was there too! For the longest time, I really didn’t see the point of getting updates as people go through their daily routines. But after much sitting a-top the fence, I jumped off and am now 484 updates strong. As much as it actually is neat following the lives of those that you may or may not know outside of the interslice, it has other advantages that just sort of… happen.
Last week a client of mine who runs a few large sites asked if there was a way to substitute WordPress email notifications for comments pending approval with a feed. A good idea, one that crossed my mind a couple times but I never pursued. A quick search returned some promising results, but no solution. But as you do with Twitter, I posted an update stating what I was up to. Soon after, Dean Robinson (who you might know for his WordPress theme, Redoable) posted an update of his own in reply to mine. A couple hours went by and Dean posted another update. And finally, by the end of the day, he released modMuch – a plugin that replaces comment moderation email notifications with a feed. 🙂
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, either. A few other instances of Twitter greatness that come to mind…
- I was looking for a Mac back-up solution for only selected folders and files. Jeff Smith emailed me an Automator script he had created to do just that.
- Coda 1.1 was released but for some reason I wasn’t able to hit the Panic website. Luke Dorny uploaded the update to his server and sent me a link.
- Jon Christopher complained about his Xbox 360 crashing on him to which I replied in an email explaining some reasons why it might have happened and how to prevent it.
Surprisingly, Twitter has actually become some what of a news service for me as well. In more cases than not, I hear about “breaking news” and the latest happenings on Twitter first. Something else I didn’t expect when I signed-up.
So, for something that seems completely useless at first glance, it can really come through for you.