Twitter can be thought of as a blend between Facebook and instant messaging. It gives users the openness of Facebook and combines it with the simplicity of tools such as Windows Live Messenger. The result is a solution that is incredibly simple and has massive potential.
Social network tools such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube have all found their place. We are still in the phase of discovering where Twitter fits into our lives, but every day people are finding new ways of making it work for them.
What is Twitter?
The latest social network platform is still a mystery to many. The concept is simple - users can send messages, called 'tweets', that are no longer than 140 characters in length. This enforces brevity.
What's not so clear is who they send the messages to. In effect the user is broadcasting their message to everyone on Twitter. From June to September 2009 the estimated number of Twitter users grew from 10 million to 45 million. That is a lot of people to broadcast to.
Users choose to receive messages from particular people by selecting to follow specific users. However, they can also perform searches on keywords, allowing them to pick up messages, containing those words, from any user. This is how users make new contacts, by finding people with common interests through searching.
Basic Uses for Twitter
Twitter can be used as a way of keeping in contact with a group of friends. This is similar to Facebook, but without many of the additional applications for sharing photos.
Another obvious use is for marketing. Twitter actively pursues an anti-spam policy, because it does not want user to be swamped with irrelevant messages. But this has not prevented organisations from pushing this policy to its limits. A Harvard Business School study found that 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the traffic - suggesting extensive marketing activity.
Alternative Uses for Twitter
Twitter hit the headlines in late 2008, during the attacks in Mumbai. The security forces discovered that monitoring tweets gave them extra information about what was going on. The Los Angeles Fire Department send out real-time alerts via Twitter to over 6,000 followers. Remember the Milk, an online reminder service, offer a tweet option.
The uses that the Twitter social network can be put to are limited only by imagination. Some schools in England are experimenting with sending of school meal menus to parents, to encourage a more active involvement in making healthy choices.
Twitter was established in 2006, but it was not until 2009 that it became mainstream. The variety of uses that this system will be put to in the coming months and years will increase dramatically, along with its user base. It is an exciting new communication channel with a huge amount of potential still waiting to be discovered.
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