I have decided to due a series of articles on a few of the social networks. Twitter is a bit different from Facebook and MySpace varieties of social networking. There are no photos or albums and you have followers instead of friends. When you log in to Twitter the first thing you’ll see is the question, “What are you doing?” This simple phrase has caught on all over the net and is nearly as ingenious as AOL’s, “You’ve got mail.”
Twitter see’s it self as an ongoing conversation. I say something, you say something. Tell me what you’re up to and I reply what I am doing and so on.
Many internet based businesses rely on social networks to spread the word about them, twitter is especially a good tool in this regard. One VA forum, VA Revolution has a very good article on Twitter here.
Interestingly with the popularity of Twitter the advent of tools to further extend twitter have been developed, VA Revolution’s article informs:
“Twitter’s arrival has also lead to the creation of different platforms and applications to make it appealing to just about everyone. Popular applications include, Twitter Fox, Twhirl, TweetDeck, and TweetMyBlog. Twitter Fox and Twhirl give users who are prefer the instant messaging look and feel a way to use Twitter in somewhat the same manner. Twitter Fox is an extension for the Firefox browser and Twhirl is a desktop application.
TweetMyBlog is a way to automatically post updates from a user’s blog to Twitter. In order to use it all one needs is a Twitter account and an RSS feed from their blog. It will automatically posts a tweet using your account when your blog is updated.
Tweet Deck is another desktop application that allows for more organization of updates. Instead of posting all a users tweets one right after another, it allows the user to organize tweets into separate columns within the application. For those who have customers and friends on Twitter this is a great feature.”
From Crunch bas, some background on Twitter the company:
“Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July 2006, is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for external and third party tools that interact with Twitter and a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks.
The service was started by Obvious Corp, who also started Odeo.
In April 2008 Twitter launched Twitter Japan in partnership with Digital Garage.
So as you can see, Twitter is a relative newcomer as compared to Facebook and MySpace who both have been around since 2004.
So, I end my write up with a poignant question, “What are you doing?” Let me know on Twitter.
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