Twitter is one of those services that people either seem to love or 'don't know what it's for'. Rather like the camera phone when it first came out. The combination of the instant message feel with the attributes of a blog could be potentially very useful. In terms of usability there is both the immediacy of SMS and IM combined with a history or diary quality of a blog. The Twitter service has small messages which are small enough to send as SMS, use as with a Java Applet on a mobile device, widgets, Facebook, Second Life, or any number of other ways. Maybe Twitter could bridge communities as well as technologies?
Other aspects of Twitter that could be interesting are; that the service is lightweight enough to hopefully not deter people from contribution, maybe in a similar way to SMS; and that Twitter may offer the beginnings of another way to blend learning between SL and a VLE.
Where are we at the moment with the plug-in?
We've created two portlets; one that shows the updates for a particular Twitterer and another that allows you to post your tweets to the Twitter service. Testing has been going on all week in our version of Moodle, both with a test course and also with a clone of the course that we want to use. If you're interested in participation then please contact me.
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