Twitter Can’t Be Beaten!

When Greg Grunberg of Heroes fame announced this morning that he was starting an online coupon business with friends he met on Twitter, I got a little jealous. The service targets the iPhone but I have a Blackberry through Verizon Wireless. Since when did the Blackberry become the bastard child of mobile devices? Answer: when the iPhone was released, I suppose.

I’d love an iPhone… but my contract with Verizon and the cost of the phone itself is prohibitive. It’s not as though I can’t afford it, it’s that I can’t see coughing up that kind of cash for a luxury item while still telling my wife that a house cleaning service, for example, is an unnecessary expense. So, the Blackberry is mine and I have put my iPhone dreams to rest (at least for two years).

This rant is not about iPhone versus Blackberry, however. No, that’s for another time. Instead, I want to talk about Twitter! Greg Grunberg is set to go on the Bonnie Hunt show, presumably to talk about Heroes, but he also plans to announce Yowza, his coupon venture for the iPhone. When I learned that the iPhone was the only compatible device, I twittered my desire to include a Blackberry app, and volunteered my programming services to one of the partners, @RickMacMerc. He responded by pointing me to @august, the application developer. So literally within minutes of hearing about the new service on Twitter, the same Twitter stream responded to my query and helped me make contact with the developer who programmed the serviec. Pretty cool!

Follow me at twitter.com/mchandler