Twitter.com

Okay, what the heck is Twitter? And why is it all the buzz?

Well, it's kinda like "blogging lite". You get 140 characters to type in a message, and it gets posted on your twitter page. Kinda like blogging, kinda like IM. Kinda fun. And speaking of IM, if you set it up, you can post from IM (i.e. your Jabber client, or from GTalk) as well.

My first take on Twitter was "how worthless is this?", but I have to admit it's grown on me. There are some things that I want to blog about (like this), but other things, (like my morning ride), that's too short to blog about, but that I'd like to post about somewhere (even if, as with blogging, my mom and I are the only ones who will read it). At 140 chars, I have to stay short and sweet, which has its own appeal. And apparently, for those of you who have friends, it's a fun way to keep in touch, if they're on Twitter as well.

And other sites are popping up around Twitter. One, twittervision, is particularly compelling. Twittervision shows a map of the earth, and displays a new tweet every few seconds. This doesn't sound like much, but it's pretty neat, at least to a map geek like me.

Anyway, I'm giving it a whirl.

Freecycle

Not sure at this point where I found this, but go check out Freecycle. It's a group of local mailing lists around the U.S. (and apparently elsewhere in the world) for people to list things that they're giving away. You watch the list, and ask for things you'd like, or post things you'd like to offer.

So far, we've given away several things that were usable, but not worth the effort to try to sell, e.g. a very old but working laser printer, an old bed frame, a washer/dryer that we were replacing, several guinea pigs (with cages), and soon an old bike. We've also gotten a couple of things as well, e.g. some astronomy books, and a gas grill. The grill needed some cleanup and a new burner, but it was in better shape than the one we gave away when we last moved due to lack of space in the truck, so we're happy.

But Freecycle is quite the interesting place. In our case, the list covers our county; I'm guessing other lists might cover more or less area. Our list sees maybe 100 messages a day, which implies that there are plenty of people locally watching it as well as posting to it.

Worth checking out, or even better, giving something to.