I first saw Brea Grant on Friday Night Lights, playing the nerdy-and-punk-ish love interest for Landry Clarke for a few episodes. She has an amazing enthusiasm and energy that comes through the screen. It’s no wonder that she was chosen to play the new Heroes villian, Daphne.

Now, if she does a reasonably decent job on the show, which seems likely in my mind, she’s on the cusp of becoming moderately famous. Not paparazzi-follows-her-every-move famous, but still, pretty famous. Heroes was the number 1 show in demo for Mondays, after all. So, the question is will she stay on Twitter or blog quite as often once she becomes more famous?

Update: sigh, poor writing when writing quickly. My point is that folks like Brea Grant are growing up in an age when everyone has a Facebook page, uses things like Twitter or Pownce or whatever, and are generally very visibly connected to a lot of people. We all have a public face now that we present. I was using Brea Grant as an example, in large part because I was surprised at how accessible she is to fans. Thinking about it for a sec, I realized that she has an advantage in that she’s not ultra famous yet. It’s going to be interesting to see the current generation of young stars get famous, especially the ones that aren’t child stars first.

Just messing around with the TwitterTools plugin from Alex King.

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s best described via analogy:

• Facebook Users: It’s like Facebook status, but you don’t need to use Facebook and it works with your IM client and SMS.
• Bloggers: It’s a micro blogging platform where you can put in up to 140 characters of text or urls and push that to everyone that’s using Twitter.

It integrates with IM so you can update from your IM client instead of having to log in, fill out the form, etc. (though that’s pretty easy, too). If you’re an SMS junkie or have a Blackberry or iPhone, you can have it work with SMS, too. It’s a pretty handy tool if you have friends updating their Twitter accounts. Like most social services, networks effects do make the service more useful.

So, as of today, for the foreseeable future, FatMixx posts will also show up on my Twitter feed. Enjoy!

http://twitter.com/sujal

Just a quick note about everyone’s current Ruby on Rails darling, Twitter. I didn’t really get it until I hooked it up with my IM client. The value in Twitter is, after all, getting your friends to use it and then using it somewhat consistently. Well, when you hook it up to your IM client, all you need are one or two friends who are consistently updating their Twitter account. The moment you reach that low but critical threshold, peer pressure begins to force you to update it. Think of it as the network effects of Tweets.

Yes, I should go to bed.

(though, honestly, I doubt I’m the first to come up with that idea)

There are deceptively simple ideas that become interesting products. Twitter is one of those ideas. Essentially a status message web service, it’s a place where i can leave a quick update of what I’m up to right now. There are SMS, IM, and web-based interfaces plus a bunch of third-party apps that integrate this into the other places you leave status messages. (Think away messages in IM)

After hearing about it a bunch on the different blogs I read, I decided to give it a go. So far, so easy. We’ll see how long I use it, though I suspect that depends on how many of you end up following my feed.

If you want more on the service, this post from David Chartier gives you the positives, and Eric Meyer runs down what he thinks could make the service better.

Take a look, and if you’re interested in giving it a try, drop me a line, add me as a friend, or just leave a comment below.