The day has come that I write a post about http://twitter.com. I’ve been using this service for a long time and it can’t, nor should be ignored. Many have written before about this microblogging platform that allows you to virtually group-text your followers so it will be a challenge to be anywhere near original in this post. Heck, I’ll try.

Twitter can be considered a large waste of time and bandwidth by some, but many gladly waste there time there as you can measure on http://tweetwasters.com. As it turns out, it’s a challenge to grow your crowd of followers and than be modest about that. I have just over 530 followers as I’m writing this down. That’s not enough by far, so don’t hesitate to start following me on http://twitter.com/wkossen. (sorry for the blatent advertisement of myself..)  

But why…. Why should you follow anyone on Twitter, why follow me? Why follow the bigshot tweeple (twittering people) like Guy Kawasaki or Chris Brogan? (sorry for all of you bigshots that I didn’t name (shame?) in this post…) Well, it’s fun. that’s why. It could be educational as well, depending on your interests. It could prevent boredom, and you could discover new things, new people and new sites to visit. You even could discover the ‘hot-stuff’ people are tweeting about on http://twitscoop.com. And is you want you can actually contribute as well. Twitter has an open API that you can use to create new services or applications around Twitter. So all this has been a nice introduction leading up to the presentation of my first contribution, the Wikipedia Random Article Tweetbot http://twitter.com/wikipediabot. 

What’s that? Well, it’s a automatic twittering program on my server that sends out tweets to it’s followers. Those tweets are just random http://en.wikipedia.org articles in http://tinyurl.com form with their titles. It does so once an hour 24/7 and (if the server stays up) 365 days a year. @wikipediabot is at your service!

Note that this is my very first attempt at something like this and I’m not the most experienced developer in the world (I used to code basic one day…) so there will be room for improvement on this. Just comment here what you would like improved or send me a reply on twitter.

I hope you liked this post, don’t hesitate to comment.