A point I covered in earlier posts about Twitter which I would like to revisit is that of Twitter’s usefulness being less about letting people know ‘What I’m doing now’ (which, as readers of this blog may remember, I don’t find that useful) and more about it as the nexus point between various gateways.

Reviewing what I said in one of the earlier posts :

Something I haven’t heard much in the current conversations about Twitter and that I think is important is that one of the key strategic strengths of the service is infrastructural – the link between IM and mobile network messaging and the web is a useful one which many applications will build upon. I think one of the players in the industry, whether Twitter or Jaiku or a new player to come (and regardless, likely to be acquired by one of the big companies) will benefit from owning a reliable set of gateways maintaining these links.

Being a platform is hard work

As anyone using the service would have noticed – its hard work maintaining gateways and services and in general ’being the platform’ or nexus point for a variety of different consumers.

Some proof of this; another company, IMified who are in a very similar business to Twitter, recently plugged Twitter into their own service whilst the Twitter IM bots were out of action to allow users of Twitter to keep on Twittering :

Over the weekend we added Twitter as a new IMified service. We definitely feel their pain trying to keep an IM bot up and running. We’ve had our own issues in case you haven’t noticed ; )

And this cheekiness :

It appears the Twitter IM bots are still down, but have no fear, we just added support for notification updates to go along with the release of status updating last week. What can I say, we’re opportunists!

But being a platform can also pay off…

One of the coolest bits of functionality that’s actually useful that Twitter has afforded another service I use, RememberTheMilk, is the ability to use the SMS and IM gateways to post tasks to my task lists. This saves me money and time when I am out and about and I think of something I need to do/remember.

A ‘QuickAdd via SMS’ option to Google Calendar should be a straight-forward (and bloody useful!) addition  if utilizing the Twitter platform. I am sure a variety of other services leveraging SMS/IM will appear (Google/Yahoo/MSN Search?) benefiting from the effort the Twitter people have undertaken to ensure the infrastructure they provide stays accessible (and I am not saying they are there yet…).

If I make bold (and possibly long) assertion; assuming people continue to find use for these short message/short instruction services and the Twitter team can keep it all hanging together, ironing out the kinks and interruptions, we will see them become the platform of choice for short-message-in/short-message-out type services and in the acquisition path of a multi-national telco!

I have long found Outlook a pain-in-the-butt to use and a few years ago switched back to Thunderbird (I had been a user of the Netscape Mail client in a former life…).

I find Thunderbird is much lighter and quicker at filtering mail than Outlook. There are better clients but all seem to have their own quirks which have kept me from adopting them.

The main difficulty with replacing Outlook with Thunderbird is that it lacked a good calendaring option. Incompatibility with the other Outlook stalwarts in my office meant I was forever having to ‘View Source’ on email bodies to see when a meeting was to be held so I could go and manually enter it into Google Calendar (my primary calendar which I share with my team). Fortunately I found the Lightning plugin to add a calendar to Thunderbird but I was still manually updating meetings in Google Calendar.

Now I have just come across this excellent tutorial on setting up what might be the holy-grail of calendar setups and want to share it with all Thunderbird users and frustrated Outlook users. Here is the short version of the tutorial for experienced Thunderbird users :

1. Install Thunderbird 2, RC1
2. Install the Lightning plugin so Thunderbird can read Outlook meeting requests and place a calendar in the Thunderbird interface.
3. Install the Google Calendar provider to allow Lightning to add two-way synching with Google Calendar.
4. Add the XML address for your primary Google Calendar (Found under “Calendar Settings >> Calendar Address”).

And you are done – test it by setting a meeting in the calendar within Thunderbird. You should see the meeting appear in your Google Calendar shortly (I had to manually refresh). More information at each the sites I have linked to.