Shaun R. Haber

Twitter allows you to broadcast ’status messages’ about yourself to a group of friends and followers. It’s an ancient idea (technically speaking, think AIM away messages), but it’s recently taken off in a big way.

I personally don’t find it all that useful. My phone pings me enough times throughout the day from all the emails I get. I don’t need to add SMS to the mix, especially when most of the messages are trite and meaningless.

On a side note, I think Twitter would be a killer app if it could generate ad-hoc social groups based on contextual and/or geographical awareness. I would love to send or receive “serendipitous” messages to/from buddies (or strangers) if we were looking to partake in a social event (hit a bar, catch a movie, hang out, etc.), or if we were unknowingly in close proximity to each other. I worked on a project like this a few years ago at UCSD, and unfortunately it never amounted to much given it was primarily a proof-of-concept research project. However, it seems that no one else has really tackled this issue, so maybe it’s worth resurrecting?

That being said, I feel Twitter is at best a self-serving vehicle for people to leave egocentric status messages, and nothing more. It basically reminds me of Facebook’s status feature. They both accomplish the same thing, just through different mediums. Twitter publishes externally to SMS and blog widgets, and Facebook publishes internally to user profiles and mini-feeds.

Self-serving? Egocentric? That sounds fun!

When I’m on the road and want to publish a message about myself, I’d like to use both services. Why deprive one community of my personal where-abouts and such (even when nobody gives a shit anyway)?

There are a few ways to do accomplish this:

1. Update status on Twitter and propagate message to Facebook
2. Update status on Facebook and propagate message to Twitter
3. Have a “wrapper” application send messages to both Twitter and Facebook in parallel

Options 1 and 3 are ruled out because you can only update your Facebook status through their website. However, option 2 is possible by using Facebook Mobile and Twitterbook.

Facebook Mobile allows you to browse Facebook on your phone, providing pretty much the same functionality as a conventional web browser. Most importantly, you can update your status from anywhere, as long as you have a data connection.

With Twitterbook, you need access to a web-facing server to host the twitterbook.php script. (Mine is at srhaber.com/twitterbook.php).

On your mobile phone, create a bookmark for both Facebook Mobile and your Twitterboook install. Anytime you update your Facebook status, browse your phone to the twitterbook script to propagate the message to Twitter.

Browsing to two webpages sucks, I know, but… it saves you from otherwise sending an SMS message (Twitter only).

Note: This trick obviously works on computers as well, but it’s more fun when your mobile.