Where’s PhoneBoy?

For those of you who don't visit my website and only read it via RSS, I've now added a perhaps voyeristic feature to my site: a status message from twitter. Twitter is an SMS-based service where you can update a group of people with a single text message or a short message from the web. The message is then sent to your buddies over SMS and is available to be queried over the web. People can "subscribe" your presence and you can "subscribe" to other people's presence. You receive the updates over SMS. 

I'm sure the carriers absolutely love Twitter because it drives the use of text messaging. Too bad more people I know don't use it.

While they haven't released an API for it yet, they have made available two kinds of badges: one using Flash, the other using Javascript. The Javascript-based method was released this past week and is what I am using on phoneboy.com right now. The badge gives you my latest status from Twitter so you can get an idea of what I'm doing right now. And all I have to do to update it is send a brief text message.