When I first heard about twitter.com, a service that lets people publish messages of up to 140 characters at a time and subscribe to other twitterers' message feeds, I wasn't too excited. My second "tweet," as its users call individual messages (and my last message for four months after posting it) was "I don't twitter. I barely have time to follow my friends' blogs. I just signed up to grab the name bobdc in case I ever do want to use it." If I don't have time to stay caught up on blogs, why would I care who's on their second cup of coffee or has too many meetings today?
After I realized that Twitter is a new class of publishing platform, and that serious publishers ranging from The BBC to The Onion are taking advantage of it, I paid closer attention. Its founders view Twitter as a platform, and not simply as a web site for entering and reading these messages, so they've provided an API to make it easy to build your own software to send and receive Twitter messages. As I'll demonstrate, you don't even need to do any programming to take advantage of it, because free utilities let you make Twitter API calls from your Windows or Linux command line.
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