SMS Updates to Blogger

I was very excited to learn a few days ago that Google’s Blogger would be accepting posts sent via SMS. I started using this feature for a new microblog and I’m happy to report that it works well and has encouraged me to tweet (?) more.

Nothing compares to the ease of sending in a text message. And nothing discourages me more than having my tweet eaten — and not just by Twitter. I had been sending tweets via ping.fm on my iPhone and not all were posted by Rejaw or Identi.ca. I haven’t monitored Plurk closely, but it seems to have managed to post all the tweets I sent their way; I just don’t dig their presentation.

Another plus is that Blogger does not have the downtime or lag of Twitter and Rejaw. I just hate seeing Twitter’s fail whale and wasting my time waiting for the page to load. Quite a number of the updates I texted in got posted several hours later when they were already irrelevant. With Google’s Blogger, the posting is almost instantaneous.

My greatest surprise with Blogger’s SMS service is that I could send a status update that was more than 160 characters and they’d post it in its entirety without truncation. I inadvertently found this out when I texted a verbose tweet about my latest fragrance purchase. Later when I got home, I checked and it was more than 180 characters!

One of my greatest frustrations with Twitter was how hard it was to search my own tweets and how I was not able to label or categorize them or edit or delete them from their search database (the irony). With Google’s search technology, that’s not a problem, and with Blogger’s archives, I can group my tweets by day or by week or by month and see at a glance a record of what I ate or how much I exercised.

Also, on Twitter, any stranger can do a nasty @ reply at you and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it — even if the perpetrator deleted his update, it would still remain in Twitter’s search database (again the irony!). On Blogger, if I eventually open up to comments (right now I don’t have time to manage it), I could always screen out the nasty comments.

I understand that Twitter has now evolved into a powerful social network from its humble beginnings as a self-indulgent reporting of the mundane things of what you’re doing. But for my own personal use, which is not for networking but just for announcing to the ether what I’m doing or thinking at the moment or the latest news I’ve heard, Blogger serves me just fine. Send an SMS with the word ‘REGISTER’ to BLOGGR (256447).
 
Easy way to type in my address (slash U) : http://sunnyinla.com/u