Well I've finally succumbed to the peer pressure of it all and started using twitter. For a short while a few years ago I shared an office with super-hacker Blaine Cook who left Vancouver to become the chief architect of the twitter service. I have great respect for Blaine's skills and politics and I probably should have paid closer attention to what he thought was important.

In any event, I've only been using it for a couple of days now and today I received the message that Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hahn, is following me (on twitter). Turns out it's the staff organizing his American tour but it's still super-rad!

The service is meant to integrate well with SMS (text messaging on mobile phones) but I'm currently happily without a cell phone. (Pretty funny for a guy who consults on technology and includes mobile among his expertises but I'll save the whys of that for another post.)

Fortunately it also integrates really well with Firefox through a number of plugins: TwitterFox alerts you to the tweets of those you are following and lets you post from your browser, TwitterBar lets you post directly from Firefox's address bar, Twitter Search adds Twitter searching to your search bar, and TinyURL Creator allows Firefox right-clicks to generate the all-important shortened URLs that Twitter's micro-blogging format demands.