Dealtagger: "Let all your friends know what your shopping for with our new Twitter integration, simply fill in the details in your settings."

We are currently investigating what caused today's unscheduled down-time of Twitter.com, Odeo.com, and other sites that share a network at a colocation facility in San Francisco. Twitter is back in action now and we're reasonably sure it had nothing to do with yesterday's planned down-time for upgrades.

MyChores: "MyChores now supports Twitter integration! If you have a Twitter account you can choose to have MyChores update Twitter when you complete tasks."

Ruby Twitter Gem: "This twitter library does more than just wrap the twitter api. It also uses it! You can post updates to your twitter and check in on your friends all from your fav terminal app."

Twadget — The Twitter Vista Sidebar Gadget: "Targetting that valuable Twitter-usin' Windows-Vista-installin' cross-over demographic."

This afternoon we had a planned outage between 4-5pm PST to make Twitter faster. (Actually, between 4-5:17pm PST. we went over by 17 minutes and Home sidebar. So yeah, Twitter should be pretty peppy now.

Frank Manno of download Ben's here but he wants you to know that it's a tad buggy.

Drew McLellan has created a Drew says, "It's terribly inefficient at the moment, because the Twitter json feeds have no option to limit the data in any way. Each refresh pulls back all your data from the last 24 hours." Nevertheless, this is very cool and I've got it on my screen right now!

The title of this post is an example of a six-word memoir by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. Can you write your memoir in exactly six words? Here are two more examples of six-word masterpieces:

"Longed for him. Got him. Shit." - Margaret Atwood
"For sale: baby shoes, never used." - Ernest Hemingway

Our friends over at SMITH Magazine think everyone has a story and they want you to write yours in six words. If you use Twitter to do it, you will be entered to win a free The Six-Word Memoir Contest Presented by SMITH Magazine and Twitter.

Wow, some folks set up a Twitter Fan Wiki to share ideas and whatnot. Neat!

Phoneboy is an Vox are paying attention to stuff like this and they'll work it in if they can.

This is awesome. Tantek Çelik, computer scientist and Chief Technologist at take a screenshot and write down specific problems and recommendations for how to make our Twitter sign up process better. We've changed today's plans to focus specfically on his highlighted issues. Hopefully this is free advice and we're not going to get a consulting invoice in the mail ;). Thanks Tantek!

1. Victoria built a site for Twitter addicts called ThirdPersons.com. They're taking suggestions for features.

Howard thought he'd give Twitter a try and had a strange, world-flattening experience.

So, let's look at this flat world thingy again: I send an instant message, it updates Twitter, someone in Myanmar reads this and posts it, Google indexes the post and alerts me my name was used, I blog about it here.

That's just nutty!

Now you can tell Twitter to remind you to update. Believe it or not, this feature was requested enough that Jack whipped it up in today's release.

If you want Twitter to automatically nudge you if you haven't updated in 24 hours, go to Settings > Notifications and check the Nudge me box. Twitter will send a text to your phone or message to your IM account.

I've noticed there that folks have been wondering aloud whether or not they might be bothering others when they update their Twitter. It's nice to know there are Twitter users out there with such delicate empathy for their texting brethren.

It's a fair concern to be sure. That's why we've built features to alleviate this type of worry. For one thing, people who receive your updates have requested them. In fact, they desire to read your updates and may even nudge you to do so on a more frequent basis.

Also, besides choosing how to receive the updates they have requested (via Web, Phone, or IM), folks can select what we call "Sleep Time" in their Twitter Settings--the texting equivalent of those iconic Do Not Disturb signs hotels provide visitors.

So if you're worried about bothering your friends with the little thoughts, feelings, and other captions from the moments of your daily life I urge you to relax and give in to the joy of Twittering. Your friends and followers want those updates and if they change their mind, we've got them covered.

In case you thought we were resting on our laurels, we present to you the following recent additions to help.twitter.com if you happen to have some pressing questions.

We thought it would be a good idea to share the simple Ruby library that makes the implementation of Jabber functionality really easy. Check out the code and docs at Blaine's blog. Thanks Blaine!

(Updated) Did you spot the link to your Direct Messages? That's where messages sent directly to you from another Twitter user get archived on the web.

In the event you have IM or phone notifications turned off, you can still view your messages and see who's been getting in touch with you directly.

Hey Gmail users: Did you know you can stick the Twitter Public Timeline in the "web clips" area of your Gmail? (Or any public Twitter user's timeline).
bottom of this page) and then go to Settings > Web Clips in Gmail and add the RSS feed url. Incidentally, you can do this with any RSS feed.

If you've never seen it, de-construct and creator of The Visual Dictionary has now created Visual Twitter which mashes these word images with Twitter updates from the Public Timeline.

We added a few ways for you you to change the design of your Twitter to fit more with your personal style.
We also added a new setting called "sleep time" that lets you turn off phone notifications during certain hours (say, while you are asleep). Come on by and update your Twitter.

NaNoWriMo progress. Is anyone else?