Blog by Paul Golding

No point in rehashing all the coverage of Chirp, as I have been tweeting live from the event - what else? You can read my stream, or scan the coverage on the #chirp stream (or the #chirpqa back channel).

Just a note here to convey my impressions of the event and to describe my hack.

During the warm-up music, they played Pearl Jam - some old school rock. To me, it summed up the whole event at an emotional level. I recall seeing Pearl Jam backing in their early days. It was their first London gig at the Brixton Academy. The "early days" is the sentiment here. It was one of those gigs that you could say (years later) - "I was there, at their first gig." It was during the early history of grunge about to go mainstream. (The pre-history was lost on UK-ers who couldn't attend the earlier gigs of the Sonic Youth era.)

Ditto the feeling for Chirp, the first ever Twitter developers event. It feels as though this is a special event at the beginning of history. What history is that? The transition of the web to the real-time web, or the "streaming web."

I've been a Twitter user (on and off) since it's earliest days on the radar. I picked it up via a friend who knew that I was working at the time on a site called Thumbcrowd, which was intended to be a text-message group-share service, Twitter-like. With no funding and not a chance, I ditched it.

I can only look with excitement and awe of what these guys are doing. The platform and the ecosystem around Twitter is, to use the fave adjective of the day "awesome." (Although the new verb of the day, which must surely adorn any "streaming web" biz plan is 'Curate.' I'll leave you to discover its meaning in this context.)

This is surely an ecosystem that is here to stay - and about to explode. It will evolve at a rate of knots. Some of the new API announcements from Twitter, like @anywhere and the User Streams are going to blow an even bigger hole in the net. Check out the new Twitter developer site for details.

The announcement, at last, of a business model, is also interesting. Lots of questions about promoted tweets and whether or not the concept of "tweet resonance" is the new secret sauce of search. Who knows? The Twitter execs certainly didn't seem to know. But it seems they're in no rush. Their ambitions are for 1 BILLION users. With that kind of ambition and the talent that they seem to possess, it's not an unlikely target.

Moving on to my hack...

It's a simple idea, but something I had been dying to try. 

I have a US number that I rent from Twilio. For the hack, I connected it to a backend that scans my tweets and uses them to control the call. I can DM a tweet to the Twitter account associated with the number and the content of the tweet will be used as the voice announcement upon answering (using text-to-speech).

If I append the hashtag #call, then it means that I'm available to take the call, in which case the announcement will play out, followed by "connect you..." and then a call forward to my mobile. If I'm not available (leave off the hashtag), then it forwards to a voicemail (to email) service (which also includes speech to text).

It seems like the obvious thing to do. After all, if Twitter is all about "my status," then that's what I want to use to control comms. It just seems more natural.

If I miss a call, I get a direct message to tell me the caller ID, so I could phone back if I wish. I had also been thinking to use this to initiate an immediate IM chat online (like one of those Livechat services), but that's for another time.

I'm around at day 2 for anyone who wants a demo.