Putting Twitter to work

Over the last few weeks I've been experimenting with twitter, or more accurately using twitter to experiment with microblogging.

So far so geek.

Now i have a real world application for it -providing live system status updates. One thing we lack at work is an effective way of getting information that there is a system problem out to people. Basically we email notifications to people.

However is we can apply sufficiently rigourous filters to the output from various montoring sysstems such as nagios we can effectively provide an input feed into a micro blogging service. This then produces an RSS output feed which people can then refactor in various ways elsewhere on campus.

And of course we can inject human generated alerts into the service and use our own tiny url service to pass urls of more detailed technical posts on a separate blog when we have a real problem,

Also, we could glue the feeds together, much as I have with this blog in a webpage where people can check and see if there is a problem, or indeed what's happening in the background - good when you have researchers in different timezones wanting to know what's going on, and it gives a fairly live dynamic environment.

All pretty good for a couple of hours creative buggereing about to get my head round Twitter ...