Attention Conservation Notice: this is long explanatory post about Twitter. Skip to the end for the new if you already grok it.

I was a bit wary of writing about Twitter, because for the past week or so it’s been broken in several ways. But they say it should be all fixed now, so it’s safe to discuss.

For those two or three people that haven’t caught any of the buzz about Twitter it is microblogging + social-networking; it’s mission – to liberate those status messages you can set in your IM clients for the whole world to see. Answering the question: What Am I Doing Now? (in 140 Characters or less). Letting you share that with others and follow what they’re up to.

It blew up big time at last year’s SXSW, but has had quite a few scaling issues. Touch wood these are all gone now, with their move to bigger and better servers and such.

Quite possibly the best thing about it, is that encourages us keyboard jockeys to get out into RL and report back on the happenings there.

Because not only can you update from the Web, but via SMS too. And it’s the SMS that really makes it useful. It lets you stay connected to your ‘net buddies whilst you’re out and about, through any phone capable of sending and receiving text-messages.

Now, that’s Twitter proper. Vanilla, shall we say. But it’s also being extended in some interesting ways.

Firstly, there’s a slew of PC clients you can run: twhirl, twitteriffic, Tweetr, etc. Tweetr was the one I used to use a lot. It’s great because it just pops up a background window of people’s tweet’s as they come in. Which is a sterling example of Ambient Intimacy. Effortlessly you’re kept appraised of what those your following are up to.

Twibble is a great client for the Nokia N95 and other smart-phones. It integrates with the GPS unit so you can post not only what you’re doing, but where you’re doing it. (Except that for me it always seems to take about 5-10mins for it to get a GPS fix). With a handy GoogleMaps mashup you can show people where you’ve been and likewise see where those you’re following have been. You can even embed it on a page in your blog. (*cough* did some Boomer just mutter something about loss of Privacy? We’re post-Privacy you aging hippie mofu. Get.over.it!)

Now, late last year Dave Winer put out some ideas of ways Twitter could be extended:

Sometimes I want to answer Twitter’s question, “What are you doing?” with a picture, or a bit of audio. Some people want to send videos. It’s easy to imagine in the future that along with a Twit, I might also want to automatically send my location (obviously a preference), and maybe some other status information.

His solution: payloads. Much as RSS was extended from simple text to now deliver audio, video etc – and thus podcasts and vodcasts were born. Now as we’ve just seen, the location problem is already solved, so long as you’ve got an N95 or equivalent. But what about sending data?

Twitter haven’t done anything about this. (Yet?). However Phoreo have just released something along these lines, with Twittershare:

Share pictures, music, video, and other files with friends using Twitter.

You can share just about anything that’s 10mb or less. There’s nothing to sign up for – just a Twitter account. Direct messages, replies, and regular tweets are all fine.

So now you can answer the question: What Am I Doing? with a photo, audio or small video. Pretty neat? Well, almost. Because it’s only available on the Web.

What do we need? Twittershare (or Twitter even) to handle SMS’s with attachments. So we can report from the field with AV.

Which would be damn handy for this coming weekend, as I imagine I won’t be the only one heading out to watch Anonymous v Scientology I.

Plus, with for real Contact Lens HUDs in the works, we’re quite seriously looking at Clatter within a year or so. w00t!

PS – the one major Twitter extension I didn’t cover is Twitterfeed – in short, pipe an RSS Feed(s) through Twitter.

UPDATE! I contacted Twittershare, asking them if they’d be adding this feature. This was their reply:

I’d love to set something like this up, but
unfortunately building an MMS/Web gateway is quite expensive and we’d prefer
to keep Twittershare a free service.

We might at some point in the future create a way to post Twitter+data via
e-mail. This would add support for smartphones and other mobiles which are
able to send MMS to an e-mail address (such as the Motorola RAZR).

If you’d like to keep updated with features we’re adding, follow tShare on
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/tshare).

Email would work just as well for me. Here’s hoping it’s a feature they had soon.