The new Twitter API functionality is going to cause a big stir, just as Steve at Tech Crunch is surmising. Check this out:
A popular feature with Twitter is a “direct” message that you send to just a single friend. The syntax is simple – you type “d [username] [your message].”
Until now, Twitter’s API hasn’t allowed you to access those direct messages though. With today’s API addition, you can now retrieve Twitter direct messages. What does that mean? A lot, quite frankly.
Users can now send a command (“direct message”) to a username which is just a name for a web service like weather.com. For example, there could be a Twitter username “weather”, which I could send a Twitter message of “d weather 14202″ by text, web, or IM. The Twitter username “weather” could get this command (er, Twitter “direct message”) via the API, run a process on a web server to retrieve the current weather forecast for 14202, and send that as a direct message back to me ( i.e. “d TechCrunch Currently: Partly Cloudy, 50F. Tomorrow’s Forecast: AM Clouds/PM Sun. High: 55 Low: 40″).
There are LOTS or cool things one can do with, basically, a free text message code. Time to think about this, the mobile blog reader is getting a little stale and its time to create something new maybe…
The only issue is that Twitter seems to have a broken wing and it about to be eaten by a dog. I preferred method (IM) hasn’t worked for 12+ hours now and its painful to try and load up the website