Inside View from Ireland: Twitter Meets Podcasting

June 23, 2007

Twitter Meets Podcasting

REGULAR LISTENERS to our tech podcasts from Ireland will know that three different companies have been talking in Limerick OpenCoffee about ways to produce valid interruption actions. One sure-fired way to interrupt people in Europe is to ring them on their mobile phones since cell phones are recognised as the pre-eminent interruption device. Now Dave Winer has hand-rolled twittergrams, audio enclosures for Twitter messages. I've sent several audio files via Twitter already but Dave Winer extends that model in his development of a back-end web service that harvests audio files pointed to by the AT sign in a twitter message. This is an evolving service and way alpha in capability. However, if bolted onto a voice alert system alongside a capability that allowed you to talk your tweets, services like Twitter or Jaiku would be on every phone that had MMS capability. I'm going to talk about what I mean after we finish hanging two tricky sheets of wallpaper first. Although it's not obvious from what I've said below and what's been mentioned about twittergrams on Twitter, this technology could give anyone with a mobile phone the ability to publish their voice on the internet using just their mobile phone. It would take one press of a button to start recording and another press of a mobile phone key to send it to a preset web service. I've played with this and know that when Twitter goes audible to the masses, it's easier to use than the calendar on your mobile phone.