I've been toying with the idea of microblogging for a while now. I'm leaning into the direction of trying to start up microblogging simply because I don't always have time to do a full blog post on a particular topic, but when I'm limited to 140 characters it is much easier to quickly touch on something.

Typically I would just host it myself, like I used to do with my moblog. But Twitter gives a few advantages, a large community of users, plus it won't clutter my RSS feed with tiny little entries. Twitter of course has its disadvantages, uptime being one of them. Twitter also doesn't seem to be on a very fast release schedule, there are loads of features I would want to see added in, but little progress seems to be made.

Two obvious features would be a separate advanced/hidden field to include co-ordinates for latitude and longitude, and an ability to embed an image. There's ways around that such as using shortened URLs and 3rd party services like TwitPic and Live Maps. But in many cases that dramatically increases the amount of work that needs to be done, at least with the clients I've looked at, and fills your posts with ugly looking URLs.

Speaking of clients, if anybody has any recommendations for a good Windows Vista Gadget client, and a Windows Mobile client feel free to leave them below. I haven't touched any Gadget ones yet, but I've got Twitula, Tiny Twitter and ceTwit on my phone at the moment, I'm playing around with all of them. None of them seem to do what I want. I'd like an ability to automatically use TwitPic and include an image. Also I'd like the ability to grab data from a GPS receiver, or if no GPS hardware or GPS lock is available for it to fall back to determining your location by which phone towers are in the area, in many cases that would be accurate enough (usually to within a kilometre or two) and shorten it up and include the link in the entry.

Even technology permitting, there's still the issue of it having any real point to either the blog, or any of my followers on Twitter, which is probably a bigger issue than the technology weaknesses I'd like to see sorted, is there any real point to it? I don't want to start doing something unless I am confident it has a purpose and that I can continue through with it from then on. Feel free to leave any suggestions below (especially on mobile clients that do the above).