If you dont know what Twitter is by now,you must be living under a very dark rock.
Twitter is bascically a social communication tool that combines web, SMS and IM technologies. Users to the service can use any of the three interface methods to post short messages, upto 140 characters long about what they are doing right now. Users can follow other users and recieve their updates directly to them. This can be done through the web, SMS if you are in the US (mobile provider may charge you) or though third party applications. These range from desktop applications to mobile phone applications.
Twitter first became popular during SXSW 2007, scince then it has grew quite large, but at a fairly steady pace until past few months. Celebrities such as Stephen Fry joined personally, this gave the “new” service small media coverage due to its uniqueness. Since then companies have seen Twitter as a new method of contacting its customers, be it actual support, or to promote and spam inform about products.
With the recent growth of popularity mainly fueled by celebrities and companies trying to use it for personal/corporate gain it has become polluted with crap rubbish. Twitter is a very interesting and unique communication to. You wouldn’t just send a email or text to someone telling them that you have just ate a cheese sandwich, which is known as “push”, you tell them what you are doing. Where as Twitter is “pull”, the users that are interested in what you are doing can simply pull up that information. Its not really blogging, even though it is sometimes referred to as micro-blogging due to its potential nature of being informative in a similar way, although twitter is limited to 140 characters.
Providing you only follow those who you are interested in, you will have a good time and enjoy using Twitter as part of day to day life, similarly to IM and Facebook/MySpace (and all the other junk that’s out there) have become. Instead of following these huge corporate machines that profit in any way they can and ruin your social experience. As Twitter grows, more and more people will join and who knows who you will discover.
So whats next for Twitter? although Twitter itself doesn’t know where its heading, its simply providing a service based of user demand and private investment. It seems to be in the users control, many of the new features recently such as tags, and replies where used by its users before Twitter started to support them. Twitter has a huge user base of around 20million accounts created since it was founded 2.5 years ago and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
Really, nobody knows where its heading except that users will play a huge role on how it evolves and the corporate use will only increase and become potentially a valuable tool for both organisations and clients.