Twitter and the Kindle

I’ve been resisting Twitter because I thought the signal-to-noise ratio might be so bad it’d be unbearable. But with the NTEN (Non-profit Technical Network) conference about to take off in New Orleans next week and many NTENers planning to use Twitter as a backchannel for the conference, I decided I better get on board. Of course, now I’ve been completely seduced.

The seduction started almost immediately. I decided to follow one of the NTEN conference participants and immediately discovered a bunch of little gems in her tweets. Links to interesting sites; a new and interesting beta program just opening up; some news about another conference I couldn’t attend. Within minutes of starting to use it, Twitter had already paid off. It’d be incredibly easy to be swamped by Twitter, but a little discernment in who you follow makes all the difference.

I’ve been wondering how I’ll use Twitter at the conference. I’ll be lugging my laptop with me and I’ll have my cell phone, and Twitter is accessible using either of them. But I’ll need to ration my laptop use to preserve my battery (a conference with 1000 techheads in attendance - just imagine the competition for power outlets!) and I prefer not to receive tweets via SMS. So it dawned on me that I have another alternative: my Kindle. It’s comfortably portable, not very power hungry even with the wireless switched on, has a web browser built in and a keyboard for sending Twitter updates.

I’m not a great fan of the Kindle’s web browser, but that’s probably because I am yet to be convinced of the appeal of viewing any web site on a tiny screen. Still, one of the great virtues of Twitter is the tweets are short - 140 characters and that’s it. And there’s a Twitter mobile site, m.twitter.com, which winnows away all the excess fluff from the normal Twitter site and leaves you with a clean list of tweets and links. That seems like an ideal sort of site for Kindle-based viewing.

So I loaded up Kindle’s browser (you get to it by clicking Menu in the Home screen and then selecting Experimental -> Basic Web) and typed in m.twitter.com. After logging in - probably the hardest part of the whole deal - there was a lovely, clean list of my tweets and the tweets of people I’m following. I added my home page to the Kindle bookmarks, a bookmark for the “People You Follow” page, and jumped over to the NTEN conference group (08ntc) and bookmarked that, too. Then I sent a tweet using the keyboard - quick and sweet.

Accessing links on the Kindle entails scrolling to the text containing the links and clicking - you’re then offered a list of all the links in that piece of text and you can scroll and click the one you need. It’s a little clunky, but quick enough to use, especially with Twitter’s condensed style. In fact, Twitter is probably one of the best fits for Kindle’s dumbed-down browser.

So I’ll head off to the NTEN conference next week with the Kindle in hand. I’ll report back on the experience. By the way, you can find me here on Twitter.