We’ve been experimenting with Twitter (http://twitter.com) here at the office as a way of keeping track of what everyone on the team is doing at a given moment in time. Twitter is basically a very simple service that allows you to write a short, 140-character message that your various friends and contacts can then view. Currently we’re using it as a kind of passive progress-update: I may not always want to know what each of my coworkers are doing, but when the info is required, I now know where to look. (Depending on the situation, it’s cheaper than a phone call, and far less intrusive.)
I have to say that I’ve been really impressed thus far: you can update your status from any IM, any mobile phone, the website itself and/or a very cute MacOS application called Twitteriffic. I’ve only got 7 friends on my Twitter list at the moment, but we’ve been having a lot of fun broadcasting our current whereabouts and activities to the rest of the people on the team.
If any of you are interested to see what I’m currently up to (e.g., fixing highfiber bug #39295001) you can see my status at http://twitter.com/lbuenaventura as well as a historical view of all my previous status messages. (And if you want to try it out yourself, be sure to add me to your friends list, ok?)