A couple of months ago, May in fact, Donncha posted about Twitterfone.

If you use Twitter, this is another way to tweet. Essentially, all you do is phone the local number and leave a message. When Donncha mentioned I thought it sounded cool so asked for an invite from the Twitterfone website. It came through the other day.

I had a chance to have a play this morning, signed up and left message. At this point I must issue a warning.

Think about what you’re gonna say before you phone!

My first Twitterfone tweet ended up as:

Oh! Some people need to know they got a lot to answer for. Hello, it’s me. I have absolutely no idea what to say, so I’m going away again now. Bye!

Far too long to fit in Twitter itself, the Twitterfone software did an awesome job of translating my voice to text. It only missed an “um”. You can listen to it here.

I have absolutely no idea if I will use the service much, if at all. I don’t even use Twitter much. I should, it’s awesome! I might start using it again and put updates into the sidebar of the blog. We’ll see…

I love RSS feeds. For those readers that don’t know what RSS is it’s Really Simple Syndication and is a great way to pick up the latest information from blogs and websites that are regularly updated. I have an RSS for this blog, Mini Mini MIni has an RSS feed, as do websites such as Lifehacker, BBC News and Donncha.

Why would I specifically call out Donncha in this post? Well, it’s thanks to his RSS feed I found his post mentioning that Phoenix, the Mars lander is using Twitter for updates on the lander’s progress towards Mars.

According to the Twitter updates, Phoenix is 170 million miles from earth and transmissions take 15.3 minutes to reach earth, travelling at the speed of light - 186.000 miles per second.

Clicking through to the NASA TV website, there is a scheduled webcast for 6pm EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) which will broadcast, live, the Phoenix landing on Mars. EDT is 4 hours behind GMT. As the UK is one hour ahead of GMT at the moment, I think, the webcast will begin at 11pm BST. I am going to try and check at 9, 10 and 11 pm as I really want to see this unique event.

Phoenix was launched in August 2007 and has only just arrived. It’s aiming for the North Polar region of Mars and will be travelling at 12,600 mph when it hits the atmosphere. As a comparison, the shuttle is travelling at 17,000 mph when it breaks earth’s atmosphere.

Nerdy excitement ensues…

Update: According to the Phoenix page the lander will touch down on Mars at around 12:45am BST Monday 26 May 2008. Thank gods it’s a bank holiday tomorrow!