I’ve been playing around creating a Facebook Application for WorkMugs that lets you run a drink decider with your Facebook friends to decide who makes the tea.  Creating the application has been more of a familiarisation exercise than anything else in readiness for creating an application for Skills Log.  Skills Log will make much more use of the Facebook functionality, but I thought I’d test the water with WorkMugs.

The first thing that struck me is the potential for integrating a distinct stand-alone website with Facebook. It is however a steep learning curve and the documentation isn’t that great, and from reading the forums it seems that some things on the platform can change with little or no notice - I noticed this myself when my javascript stopped working from one day to the next, the result of a tweak they seemed to have quietly made with how javascript is handled.  That said, the tools and platform are very impressive, now to start on the app for Skills Log…

Working in the Internet industry I’ve been aware of Twitter for a long time, but up until yesterday I didn’t understand the appeal; I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to write small snippets of messages. If someone has something to write about I reasoned there are a 101 tools out there to set up a blog in 5 minutes, and if they wanted to keep in touch with friends there’s Facebook where every man and his dog already has a profile.

On Sunday I fired a few emails off to blogs/publications that I thought might be interested in the quirkiness of our latest site, WorkMugs.com. One of said blogs belongs to Emma Jones who founded Enterprise Nation, a useful resource for home businesses (and based in my own town of Shrewsbury as it happens). On Monday Emma dropped me an email to say she liked both WorkMugs and My50, which was great, but she also said she’d twittered about both sites. Curious, I checked out both tweets and noticed a few of her followers had responded to her about WorkMugs. Searching on Twitter showed that a few people had then twittered about WorkMugs themselves as a consequence.

So now I get it! it’s the brevity and immediacy of the tool. It’s much easier for someone to fire off a quick message on Twitter as soon as they hear something of interest, particularly if they’re already signed in to Twitter when they hear about it, rather than going to the time and effort of writing a full blog entry.

Further still, I created an account and started following Emma. So for Emma, by quickly twittering about a couple of sites she’s passed on something interesting to those following her, and by responding to my initial email and participating in the wider online community, she’s gained a new follower (me) to expand her immediate community.

Following Emma’s lead I’m giving Twitter a whirl, my username is @crdunst if you want to follow me, I hope I can pass on the favour shown to us by Twittering about sites and services I find interesting.