By now most of North America has heard of Twitter. It's even been talked about on Oprah so you likely have an idea about the site and its service. For those who don't, Twitter is basically a social network/communication tool that allows users to write short blog style posts to the world. Unlike Facebook you have very little control over who accesses the information you share with the Twitter world. You either have a public profile or you don't. Each of these micro posts, which are 140 characters in length or less, are added to a host of Twitter search tools so other users can find posts that are of interests to them i.e. dating sites. If you find something, or someone, that you find interesting you can add them as someone you would like to follow.
Let's say you like basketball, computers and cooking. You could find experts in each of these fields and follow their Twitter page. Using the above example you could follow Shaquille O'Neal (basketball), Apple Computers (Yes most major brands now have Twitter pages) and Gordon Ramsay (cooking). The only annoying part about this process is that many of these experts/celebrities will take the time to tell you what they are doing and where they're doing it instead of giving you the information about their respective areas of expertise! For example Shaq spent last Sunday watching movies. Who the heck cares? Sadly there are many that do.
While Facebook is more about communicating with friends and family, Twitter is more about voyeurism! And not surprisingly celebrities have embraced Twitter which explains most of the growth the site has enjoyed recently. Ashton Kutcher had a running duel with CNN to see who would be the first to hit 1 million followers and the sad part is Ashton won. While I am not a huge fan of CNN, a news network lost out to a punk celebrity that likes to tell us what he ate for breakfast!? People are more interested in what Ashton did yesterday than what is happening in the world, which is scary when you stop and think about it.
The value of Twitter is the search, if you can weed through all of the annoying crap and spam. The search is fast; faster than Google. Twitter has the ability to tell you that an earthquake has happened before the aftershocks start. It really is amazing that we now live in a world in which Google news is too slow, but it is, at least for now. Google will probably do one of the two things; buy Twitter which I would see as a smart move and or change how they gather and index the news.
If Twitter doesn't accept the nice juicy offers probably being thrown around by Microsoft and Google they have some areas that will require improvement. First off they have a major spam issues, more so than most social networks and because their search has so much value attached to it they need to figure out how to remove the crap content. Second, they are starting to look a lot like MySpace. You can make your Twitter page as ugly as most MySpace pages and unfortunately most users do. While options are nice, it is in the end one of the reasons MySpace is dying and this could negatively affect Twitter.
So whether you currently use Twitter or not, you might very well be using it in the future. If your business is involved in any type of social media, it is a must. I for one at this point don't really care for the service and to be honest hope it is just a fad. Sadly I am probably going to be wrong about that.
