A little bird told me

A note just posted to the Elecraft reflector by Eric WA6HHQ says that Elecraft is now making "regular short announcements on Twitter." And so they are. You can now receive "tweets" to tell you that a new firmware update has been released. Well golly gosh.

I have long advocated that Elecraft create a read-only communications channel. It would solve the problem for reflector subscribers who complain about the volume of postings but can't unsubscribe because they don't want to miss new product announcements or new firmware updates. But what I had in mind was something low-tech like an "elecraft-announce" mailing list, not something that requires you to sign up for some flavour of the month social networking site.

Someone named Richard recently took me to task in a comment to my months-old posting about Twitter, saying that I was being unfair and Twitter was "more than just telling everyone what you are doing." I suppose this was the kind of thing he had in mind.

However, methods of keeping people informed with timely updates about important information existed long before someone invented Twitter. There is the humble mailing list, as I have just mentioned, RSS feeds, or even an Elecraft blog - now that's something a lot of people would subscribe to.

So I am still refusing to join Twitter. It's a solution to a problem that has already been solved - though of course the existing solutions are open standards, not in the least bit "cool" and don't present an opportunity for someone to make a lot of money. If I ever start "tweeting" you can send for the men in white coats.