Right now I’m sitting in a campsite in Taesch, Switzerland, hoping for the weather to clear and to get my first glimpse of the Matterhorn in real life. It isn’t looking good unfortunately.

Fortunately, though, the campsite has WiFi so I can let people know where I am, what I’m up to and that the weather hasn’t been playing nicely. When you are travelling off the beaten track and making up the day’s plans as you go along, easy internet access is not a given. I lay in bed last night beneath these giant mountains, the grey bulk of a previous landside blocking half the valley only a few hundred metres away, and realised that if the mountain above me gave way no one would know we were here.

Yes, occasionally I can be a bit over dramatic. It makes trying to fall asleep peacefully that much more of a challenge.

Now, I do have my mobile phone with me and a contract which gives me international roaming. I can SMS family and friends to let them know where I am, but that’s somehow just too 1990’s. In the glorious new Web2.0 I can message to Twitter directly from my phone.

Twitter is a microblogging platform which lets you send SMS length texts out into the web. You develop a network of followers, who all get your latest updates in their Twitter feed and you can follow others, keeping up-to-date on whatever they’re doing. It’s like mini-RSS feeds, or the status updates in Facebook. Europe a la Carte has one. Because of the brevity, it’s less time consuming to write than a full blog post and more informal. People tend to update multiple times a day and create ongoing conversations with their followers. You can do it all from the web, a desktop application or from your phone; and use it to inform people on life’s minutiae, your latest blog posts or even update your Facebook status automatically.

By tweeting where I am and what I am doing, I can let family and friends all know what’s going on right now. A single SMS is accessible to all of them, and even to my blog readers, via a twitter badge on my site. I can share my experiences with the world, as they happen and without a laptop or wifi connection, and I can fall asleep knowing that should that ravine collapse they’ll know where to erect the headstone: “Here lies Jacinta. She came, she saw, she tweeted.”