There's been some murmurings about wanting a sitephone-type-service recently. I thought we could trial twitter for this - so I've set up a tvhgc account. The feed can be read here. The way I envisage it working is this:

- People at home log in to the account from their PC and add an update on where they're about to head, or on what they think of the day's conditions.

- People on hills use a twitter applet installed on their phones to add updates on real live conditions.

Twitter doesn't seem to support linking more than one phone to an account, so we can't update directly via text message, not with the current setup anyway. But most modern phones with net capacity have twitter programs available. For example, to send the most recent 3 updates on that site I used an app called PockeTwit which runs on Windows Mobile/PocketPC phones. There are others available for eg Nokias and iphones. A decent app will allow you to store the twitter login details making it very quick to add entries, and to take photos and link them directly to entries.

The username is tvhgc - search the google group archive for the word 'twitter' to find a message called "[TVHGC Members] twitter 'sitephone'" which gives the password.

Update - Avon have a system which collates messages from many accounts into one, which means people can update by text message. Since this seems to be getting more use, I'll be switching our twitter system over to work like this soon. Watch this space.