28 April 2009

astronaut twitter

i have a indifferent/hate relationship with twitter.  while it has suffered from the inability to handle scaling back when it first was launched to its infrequent outages to date, there is a bit more stability, and i don’t hate it as much as i once had.  in fact, i’ve been using it about as much as facebook in terms of posting my activities rather than updating my fb status.

my geeked interest in space/nasa has been hightened lately by the past several shuttle launches (and nasa tv) which provides great coverage of the launches, landings, and missions including activity on the international space station.  no news agency has better footage of the inner workings of nasa.

computer world - astronaut twitter

now, news from space can be feed directly to anyone subscribing to mike massimino’s twitter account.  in this computerworld article,astro_mike will be sharing his activities while on mission for hubble maintenance/upgrades.  he only has 64 tweets under his belt yet over 140,000 followers.  that’s a heck of a lot.  this twitter experiment/experience will be nice added coverage to the nasa tv coverage.  it also means that if you can’t stream the video, you can at least keep up with the mini-messages from time to time.

astro_mike - twitter

as gmoney, one of my colleagues, joked, we’ll see a tweet along the lines of, “it’s full of stars!”