Cheers! Tears!! I’m here!

I'm still super-conflicted about Twitter, not least because its reliability is so flaky that it's often unusable. I've also taken to "unfollowing" (a nice 1984ish term), more people than I'm adding of late... mostly people who drown the system in minute-to-minute minutia. The latest was someone who was giving a blow-by-blow account of the DNC decision on the Michigan and Florida votes. He was apparently there and, I guess if you wanted a real-time account of the meeting it was fascinating... but not to me. Twitter really needs some sort of real-time filter/ranking system, so that tweets important to you at the time rise to the top.

In any case, one Twitterer I am following is the Mars Phoenix lander, which actually does exemplify how Twitter can be put to good use. We haven't gotten so far out that a spacecraft has taken to posting Tweets in its spare time. Instead, Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at JPL, had the great idea to create a Twitter account for Mars Phoenix, and lots of people like following it, over 12,750 to date. The full story behind Mars Phoenix's Twitter account can be found here.