New use for Twitter

Sunday, May 06, 2007 by Dave Winer.

A few days ago I wrote that Twitter is a very nice low-tech notification system. I had an application in mind, and put a first step on my to-do list.  

The content in this channel will be of interest to at most 10 people, geekish users of the OPML Editor, but the concept should be interesting to members of coding communities.  

I added a hook in my code check-in system. It already had a provision for me to add a comment to each partial release, derived from the outline at the head of every script that maintains a reverse chronology of the changes to the part. In a sense every bit of code is a weblog. I've been doing it this way since the start of UserLand in the early 90s. Here's a screen shot of a bit of code I started yesterday. And one that was started in 1998.  

The new bit is that as I release a change, the system posts a note to a Twitter channel called dwcodeupdates, that you can subscribe to, if you care. Like everything with Twitter, no big deal if you miss something, but it does give you an idea of what I'm doing right now, in a different dimension.  

As usual with Twitter, the thing that's important are the people.