Twitter, Skype and Facebook

OK, so I've finally decided to see what all the Twitter fuss is about and sign-up for an account, I was a little dissapointed that my usual username was taken but I managed to come up with something else, but what's this my email address is already registered? Oh yes, I do actually recall registering many moons ago, shows how useful it has proved for me thus far.

I guess it is a little chicken and egg as without any of my friends using it it's not really going to take off for me personally. I read the blogs of quite a few people who do use it but I'm not sure if I'm really close enough friends with them to warrant knowing what they are up to at every moment of the day.

I do have to say though if all my friends were Twittering it could really become useful. I can imagine a situation when on a Sunday someone could Twiter, "thinking about going to the pub" and before you know it we're all at the pub. I suppose text messaging could do the same job but it's easier and perhaps more on the spot than actually sending a text out saying "Do you want to come to the pub" and because we'd all receive updates from each other it would be easier to arrange something.

So Twitter allows you to send updates through their website and also from your mobile and some IM clients but notebly not from Skype. But most of the day I'm signed in to Skype and it would be really handy to update Twitter through that. So I did a quick Google and found an article that describes a slightly mysterious method for doing just that. Gave it a try and it works perfectly I can now update Twitter through Skype.

But I have a Facebook account too and it would be good to also be able to push my Twitters through to my Facebook status as well. That's also possible, I added TwitterSync which is a Facebook application and hey presto I can update Skype to Twitter to Facebook! But what if I don't want to send all my Twitters to Facebook and fill up everyones news feed with my Twitter updates? Well, TwitterSync includes a regex function or filter so Twitters that start with a certain string e.g. "FB:" are the only ones that change my Facebook status. I'm just hoping the application developer is going to make it so that the regex prefix is removed before the status is posted to Facebook as it does look a little clumsy to have "FB:" at the start of my status updates.