Twitterpeek makes Adam’s brain hurt..Awwww

Adam Frucci has a problem. He says the TwitterPeek is so dumb it makes his brain hurt. I might suggest, Adam, that if your brain is hurting maybe it's not the TwitterPeek that's dumb. Just saying. His recent Gizmodo rant starts out with why the hell would spend $200 on this? He then neglects to do some very simple math. He asserts that you would be nuts to spend $200 on TwitterPeek when you could just use a smart phone. As a proud owner of TwitterPeek, I'll be more than happy to help Adam do some basic math since my iPhone recently became an iBrick when the battery stopped holding a charge. That smart phone cost me $399 to purchase and approximately $106 a month for the two year contract. Even if we substitute the new price for a iPhone of $99.00, the total still comes out to be $2643 for the life of the contract.

Now feature for feature no one is going to argue that the TwitterPeek competes with the iPhone. For someone who purchases the iPhone to twitter with and just to twitter with is certainly overkill. Even if you just add unlimited texting to a regular cell phone it will run you, with AT&T, $240 a year. A regular cell phone has less features than the TwitterPeek. You're not able to download your followers. You can't easily do a search for @ mentions. And since you're under a two year contract, the total out of pocket is going to be $480. That's double what the TwitterPeek cost as a one time expense for the life of the unit. Besides that the batteries user replaceable and the extra battery only cost $9.95 at the Peek boutique. So the question " why would you want to carry a single function device that is compact, cool looking, works anywhere without purchasing Internet access, connects to the social site ranked 13th in the United States of America, and cost half to one 10th as much as the other options?" Seems a little bit easier to answer.

Let me give you an example of use for the TwitterPeek that I've found in the peek forums that I think is a good example of an application of this device. A mom is concerned about giving her daughter a cell phone to text to her friends with. Text messages can be deleted. It's hard to know who she's talking to and a cell phone has ways they can run up a bill they can be a real burden if not kept in control. This mom can give her child a TwitterPeek for a one time $200 investment and because the child's tweets are public and who she tweets to is public Mom can monitor and protect her child. Also now her child can communicate with all her friends as easily as texting. If she buys this device for child in seventh grade and the child manages to take care of it until the 12 grade, even with throwing in three replacement batteries (yeah you can replace the battery). She's spent $230 vs. $1440 for the near equivalent of unlimited texting. That'll pay for her textbooks her freshman year.

One of the ways that I plan to use it, is to keep his sitting by my computer while I work so that if I get a tweet, I’ll get notified. I don’t have to stop working and switch over to my browser. The TwitterPeek will chirp and I’ll know I have tweets. I just grab up the TwitterPeek and read and reply. This way I avoid running a program in the background that pops up constantly like TweetDeck which I use to monitor tweet and FB. By staying in the program that I'm working in and using the mono functional TwitterPeek, I avoid all temptations to get distracted by the big bad wonderful Internet. In some cases not being able to do something means you get something else done.

Also, while I’m tweeting away remotely, I’m NOT draining the battery on my mobile phone. I’ve got double power.

I'm sure there are plenty of other valid situations where the TwitterPeek makes sense as an economical solution and maybe some of the other TwitterPeek owners will add their own uses to this blog.

The ensuing comments in Adam’s public headache progressively got more and more vicious attacking both the TwitterPeek and then Twitter itself. I think my favorite comment of all was:

"I still can't believe twitter exists. It's a blog site that ONLY lets you post 140 characters at a time."

Ironically that comment is only 104 characters long.

I would have to say that any one that doesn't see the value of a global asynchronous conversation that makes the speaker get to the point and allows you to mark keywords, resend the message, share links, or directly communicate with people of interest to anyone who has a cell phone capable of text probably would have a brain that hurts trying to grasp the Twitterpeek and should just stick to debating whether or not Superman could beat up the Hulk in the forums.