https://www.imified.com/settings/widgets.cfm
Twitter and Imified are two web based services that I heard about somewhere, signed up to (they are free, as in beer, after all), and then wondered what all the fuss was about.
Just to explain: twitter allows you to make blog-style posts from e.g. your phone, but only up to 80 chars. A kind of haiku blogging, I guess. I find it very slow to text and so although I do occasionally post from my phone (usually on a train when I am bored with reading), but it didn't, as they say, change my life. Imified is a most peculiar service. It is basically what we used to call a CLI to the web. For those youngsters reading this, a CLI is a command-line interface. That is the sort of way that Real Men (TM) interact with computers.[ref1], like DOS of a shell in Unix.
Anyway, the way imified works is that you add imified as a chat buddy on the instant messaging system of your choice. Mine is (inter alia) Google Talk, so I'm a mate of imified@imfied.com. He's (almost) always online, but his line in banter is extremely limited. What I eventually discovered is that to make the system remotely useful it is necessary to do two things: (i) install a useful widget - twitter in this case, (ii) create a short cut through the menu system. The need to create shortcuts didn't dawn on me until today. The problem is that the menu system is clunky, and the imified servers are *really* slow. So there is a huge different between being able to type "/tweet finally worked out how to use the imified shortcut system" and navigating through even one level of menu structure.
There is a lot of stuff about how to use imified on the imified blog [ref2] but the problem is that if you're like me, you just install the app and then start using it, regarding a need to actually read instructions as humiliating admission of defeat.
The weird thing about both Twitter and Imified is the absence of any sane business model. These are useful little web gizmos, but I cannot imagine paying much to use them. I might be persuaded to part with, say, 0.1p to post something, but it would have to be the kind of micro payment that has successfully resisted development of the whole history of the commercial web. Same goes for imified - a tiny payment would be tolerable, but it would have to be use based. Frankly I'd be very reluctant to sign up for 10p a month, because I know that something else would come along to displace imified in my affections, but I'd completely forget to cancel the paypal standing order. I can't imagine either have scope to monetize users via advertising (especially imified where you don't even see a web page). Somebody somewhere is funding these things with no obvious commercial potential. I suppose the same could be said for Netscape once.
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