Fivelimes.com is a cool new web site for finding, reviewing, and sharing eco-friendly and socially responsible products and services that are making this world a better place. They announced the launch of their new site with a tiny little Twitter post. It's like MySpace for people who like to buy eco-friendly products and seems like a good way to find good new stuff. I'm signed up!

You already know that you can interact with Twitter at our web site or by texting from your mobile phone but now you can use IM to do everything that you can do over SMS. This is good when you're working on your computer and you don't want to visit Twitter.com or start sending and receiving SMS. IM is always there and easy but it's a little less demanding of your attention.
Please consider the IM feature in Beta for now because we are only supporting the open source IM system called Jabber--it's the same one that Google uses for the Gtalk feature in their free email service, Gmail. So if you have a Gmail account then you already have a Jabber account.

Setting Up Your Twitter IM
1. Sign in to Twitter.com
2. Go to Settings > IM
3. Enter your full Gmail address (or Jabber address)
4. Click "Save"

Twitter will send you an IM with a link--click that link and you're all set. You will be able to send commands like GET BIZ to twitter@twitter.com and instantly receive my latest update. All the commands are here. Jabber also works with iChat on Mac and Trillian Pro on Windows. Learn more about Jabber here.

Today we added more to the Twitter API so Flash developers can build fun applications like Celly. What can the Twitter Actionscript 3 API do? I'm glad you asked!

• authenticate a user
• set authenticated user's status
• set authenticated user's mobile notifications on/off
• return a list of friends and their statuses
• return a public user or a friend of an authenticated user's timeline
• return authenticated user's friends' timeline
• return public timeline

The only dependency is the Adobe core library but otherwise we're providing the source code, documents, and an example as one download. You can download it from our API page.

Now you can create a free Twitter account without giving us a phone number. Previously we were asking for a phone number up front but user testing showed that some folks wanted to sign up and kick the tires first.

So if you haven't joined Twitter yet, head on over and sign up with just an email address. You won't be able to take advantage of all the fun mobile texting features of Twitter until you decide to input your number in Settings but you can still do lots of stuff.

With Web-only Twitter You Can Still:
• Update your Twitter timeline on the web
• Place a Twitter Badge on your MySpace or blog
• Let friends receive your web updates via their mobiles
• Send direct texts from the web to individual friends
• Upload your profile pic and link to your home page
• Invite friends by email or phone number

Even though we did a lot of behind the scenes type stuff, that's today's major update. Come on over and try out Twitter if you haven't already.

Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency spotted Celly and thought it was "the cutest and most social thing to come out of Web 2.0." So what did he do? He built Celly 0.1, a tiny little Mac application that puts Celly on your computer's desktop.


When you have an API and Independent Open Source Ambassadors at Large are out there, these things are bound to happen. Here's Chris's post about building Celly 0.1 and you can download it for your Mac here.

In case your not subscribed to receive Twitter email from us from time to time, here's the text of an email I sent out earlier today.

There have been some updates in the world of Twitter that we wanted to let you know about. Some of them are geeky, some of them are funny, and at least one of them is straight-up useful. If you haven't been around in a while, come visit Twitter and see what your friends are doing.

RSS Feeds for Public Timelines

File this one in the geeky category if you like but now you can follow your favorite public Twitter folks in your favorite RSS reader application. By the way, if you're not sure what that is, give Google Reader a try -- it's free and works great (https://google.com/reader). The Twitter Public Timeline has a feed to but that can get overwhelming. Also, there's Atom feeds too in case you're wondering.

Permalinks or Post Pages

Now every time you make a Twitter update whether it's while you're out and about with your mobile phone or on the web at our site that update gets saved in your timeline and gets to live on it's very own page. To see the page, click on the blue links after your updates that say about when you made the update.

We made these pages so bloggers and link collectors can point to a specific post in time. Sometimes posts are really funny or memorable. There's this one post by courtneyp about a hash brown patty stuck in a bus window that had me cracking up I'm not sure why but it just struck me as oddly funny.

There have also been wedding engagements, car crashes (nobody hurt!), and oddly lots of Twitter users going on parachuting adventures. Sometimes you want to revisit or remember these moments and these pages really do the trick.

The Twitter API

Now for the really geeky update -- we have released an Application Program Interface for developers. This means we've exposed some of the inner workings of Twitter so engineers who want to creatively extend our functionality can do so. We were happilly surprised at how quickly some really neat projects emerged.

Mo.ist
Celly
Twittermap
iChat

That's about it for now. We're busy on some big improvements and feature updates but those will have to wait until next time.

I was surfing the Twitter timeline a little while ago and this made me laugh. If it weren't for spam we wouldn't be able to post funny ironic Twitters of this particular sort. So there's that.

Buzz was snubbed by Jobs and he Twittered it. If the computing legend had held the doors for Buzz, what would he have Twittered? I would have said "OMG I'm in an elevator with Steve Jobs." Clever, huh?

Mobitopia.com is a web site featuring lots of other web sites built in such a way that they look great and work great on internet enabled phones. The site also lets you sign up and store all your favorite mobile links in one place sort of like Yahoo's Del.icio.us but just for mobile devices. It's a really great idea.


Anyway, the guy who runs the site is doing something cool with Twitter. If you make Mobitopia a Twitter friend, you will get a "mobile link of the day" texted to you so you can check it out. If you've got a Treo or some type of phone like that, there are links in in the SMS text that you can click with your stylus.

Wiffiti is the fun new project from the Boston-based technology company LocoModa. It enables you to send your txt messages to screens in public locations. Wiffiti, if you haven't guessed, is from the words wireless and graffiti.

The screen pictured here is from T's Pub in Boston, MA and there are other screens in Chicago, Knoxville, Seattle, Boulder, and Baltimore. To check out one of the screens, visit the viewer page.

It would be possible to whip up a visualization like this for the Twitter public timeline. We've got a few other things to get to first but if anyone wants to give it a shot with our Twitter API, go right ahead!