Thus it was with much interest that I read a press release I received from Kisco System’s Rich Loeber, announcing SNDTWEET, a new Twitter interface designed specifically for System i. My first thought was: Don’t most System i shops also have non IBM i workstations that employees use? But, my thinking was limited by how I happen to use Twitter. Rich is suggesting that Twitter may be a useful system monitoring tool.

• You can add the SNDTWEET to your CL programs to send out notifications when the program is done or when error situations are encountered.
• You can set up a program to monitor your system operator message queue. If a message is sent that requires a response, your monitoring program can react by sending a Tweet to put your following users on notice that there is a problem.
• You may have a situation where you want to “watch” file update activity for a critical file or for a file that should not normally be updated. You could implement a file trigger program for the watched file and then have that trigger program submit a Tweet when update activity (or delete activity, etc) takes place.

Well, that sounds way more useful than learning that fellow AS/400 enthusiast Mike Wills’ “4-yo loves AniMatch.” (To be fair, Wills frequently offers more useful information than that. I was digging to find a silly AS/400 user tweet.) In truth, despite the “Oprah Twitter bump,” there aren’t a lot of System i users on Twitter yet. Some of you may agree with Aaron Bartell’s recent blog post (a Twittering chair) and may not have found a real use-case for it yet.

But perhaps this Twittering thing will catch on, and you will set up your System i to tell you how it’s doing. What do you think?

More System i Tweeps
David Gibbs
Mark Fontecchio