Step 1: do a search for ‘@yourname’ on summize, then copy the link for the feed. If you’re lazy, that link looks like this: http://summize.com/search.rss?q=%40your_username_here.

Step 2: use pingie, a free rss to sms converter. Put in the feed link you got in Step 1, your phone number, and your email. Confirm pingie service via the SMS they send you. You can also do this at Yahoo Alerts rss to sms

Step 3: Profit!

Update: after running this way for a couple days I disovered that pingie has completely failed to deliver any updates to my phone (maybe because of Helio/Sprint), while the Yahoo solution has delivered duplicates with extreme delay. Making both solutions an epic fail. Still looking for a solid rss to sms solution that does what it says it does.

In the dawn of time–before blogging, before social networking, when under construction pages ruled the web, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat was an amazing place where you could talk to anyone about anything. Of course cybersex and software piracy were the dominant topics, but in this primordial soup were the beginnings of true Internet communities. IRC channels offered people a way to socialize around a particular topic, even if this was taken rather loosely. Often plagued by trolls and script kiddies, channel operators would act as police, kicking out the unwelcome elements to make life better for everyone else. On IRC, it was not uncommon to share cool links, talk about new ideas, get help from the most knowledgeable people, or just goof around and waste time.

Looking back on those days now, I took a guess that the userbase of IRC must have been in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. It seemed like the whole world was online. Of course, the Internet being so new then, I should have realized that I was one of just a couple million people online, and just a tiny sliver of those new netizens had enough know-how to run an IRC client. IRC was an echo chamber of geeks, nerds, and wizards. As it turns out, one of the larger networks (EFNet) boasted a userbase of only 50,000 people by the year 2000.

By that time, I was already off of IRC, visiting only occasionally to tap specific user groups for help. Devastated by DDOS attacks, political squabbles, and the skyrocketing popularity of the Web, IRC servers began to go the way of the dinosaur. While IRC channels still survive today, their tiny userbase is eclipsed by the many forms of socializing happening predominantly on the web.

Enter twitter. Because you choose who you follow on twitter, you create a channel for yourself that doesn’t contain any of the trolls, bots, spammers, and script kiddies that plagued IRC. You can even create custom ‘channels’ by subscribing to keyword feeds on services like summize and tweetscan.

Having only 140 characters to express yourself forces you to write creatively and concisely, leading to a higher quality of content than most other forms of communication. It’s limiting, but it’s also liberating. There’s also a sense of responsibility that comes with having followers. While IRC was a room where anyone could shout random nonsense, knowing that my update will be delivered to hundreds of people who follow me, I now feel responsible to produce something worthwhile and valuable to retain my followers and gain new ones. And followers are the name of the game. Whether it’s building a network that can get you out of jail or simply having people to poll or bounce new ideas off of, creating social capital is increasingly important in today’s Internet-driven society.

So twitter is my new IRC. I’ve been hanging out on twitter more and more. I’ve got a desktop client (twhirl) fetching the latest tweets from people I’m following, and I’m actively participating in conversations. Because twitter is still a very small early adopter minority, the quality of thoughts and ideas expressed can be very high, if you can figure out who to follow (this is where things like summize, hashtags and twellow can be useful). And even though twitter adoption is still a tiny minority of the Internet population, it’s growing rapidly and is already much bigger than IRC. It’s going to be interesting to watch the twitter community transform as it gains mainstream adoption.

Want to join the conversation? follow @skwp on twitter

Twitter’s very nature attracts chatterboxes, connectors, social sneezers. Twitter has become a social network of influentials precisely because these people understand the value of being heard, and conversely the value of being up to date with the latest trends.

It’s just a natural extension of blogging. The same people who derided blogs for being a waste of time (after all, who wants to hear about your whiny thoughts) are once again entirely missing the value of this tool. Everything I wrote about why you should be blogging applies to twitter, except with a higher sense of immediacy.

If your company is not twittering about product releases, you’re missing out. If you’re not using twitter to engage your userbase directly in conversation, you’re missing out. If you’re not using twitter to complain about bad customer service, you’re missing out. And if you’re captured in an egyptian jail and you don’t have twitter you’re missing out.

By now it should be clear, twitter is not just a place to tell people about what you ate for breakfast, but a very significant tool for businesses and individuals looking to build social capital and engage in the most direct form of marketing currently available on the web.

So coming back to the revenue issue…clearly twitter is a very valuable service for companies like Southwest, Zappos, and Woot. They are making money from twittering by attracting new business. So why shouldn’t twitter share a piece of the pie? Facebook’s dismal CPM rates and the research findings that suggest that most ad clickers are middle aged women imply that ad revenue on twitter will likely be largely irrelevant. But I bet Southwest, Zappos, and Woot would be more than happy to pay for a premium service. Twitter should come to these companies with a log of outbound clicks and show them all the business they’re driving. I bet that’s worth something. Hmm….

Of course, only Enterprise Java scales, and we know this because the word Enterprise is right there in the name. Of course, the only platform you should consider is .NET because it has built in caching and hundreds of thousands of college graduates know it. Of course, you need to use PHP because Facebook is written in PHP and Facebook scales. The fallacy of these arguments should be painfully obvious, yet people are shouting these things as if they were gospel truth.

I’d like to offer here, the scalability manifesto. Please repeat these items aloud to yourself every time you want to say something about language X or framework Y not scaling.

The Scalability Manifesto

1. Scalability means the ability to handle increasing load by increasing resources.
2. Scalability does not mean being ‘fast’.
3. Choice of language does not guarantee scalability.
4. Hardware costs decrease exponentially, developer salaries do not.
5. Only you can make your system scale.

Trading performance for development time is generally not a good idea. It’s likely that by the time your application reaches serious traffic levels (if ever), hardware will cost half of what it did when you started. Now does spending twice as much dev time with a lower level language seem justified? Now this is not always the case, but my bet is if you do the math and realize your team of 4 Ruby hackers is doing what a team of 10 Java programmers used to do, you might conclude that linear performance gains due to language choice are not as relevant as hiring smart people who can get work done quickly, and design scalable systems.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that includes scalability.

1. Use twitter for lightweight status updates (instead of emailing team@) – example: i am upgrading our hosting account, or I am refactoring something

2. Use twitter to ask a question when you don’t know who should answer it – example: has anyone touched my code? has anyone talked to Bob about Task X?

3. Do not use twitter as a chatroom. Pretend it’s a reply-all email, if you wouldn’t do it there, take it offline and talk to the person directly.

4. Tweet once or twice a day to let the team know what you’re working on. It helps keep the ball rolling and identify roadblocks without relying on once-a-week meetings.

5. If going on vacation or extended leave, you can turn off twitter updates and use the rss feed to pull a once a day list of everything that happened. Using the guidelines above the tweets for the day should be a list of about 10 items so it’s easy to digest.

6. (ok I lied about only having five) Use a twitter client or twitter gtalk bot to keep updated. The website is ridiculously slow.

7. If you’re on the road and it’s easier to reply to a twitter than to private message someone, use the direct messaging feature “d [username] message” to keep things private but use twitter as a preferred routing mechanism.

How are you using twitter in your workplace?