Twitter

Is this a solution looking for a problem to fix?

The fascinating thing about Twitter is that it is a community experiment. People and organizations are using it in different ways. Ways that may not have been anticipated by its creators.

Jack Dorsey set up Twitter for the purpose of keeping up with what his friends were doing. At the top of the page, Twitter asks you "What are you doing?"

The idea is that it is easy, short and fast. You are limited to 140 characters and you can send and receive updates from whomever you want on a phone using SMS, by email (using twittermail.com) or through the Twitter website.

So how is Twitter used?

• Many people use it for the original purpose to stay in touch with a group.
  
• Politicians use it to communicate to a large group of people. Barak Obama has 134,375 followers, but the feed suddenly ends on Nov 5th!. Bob Rae just set one up. I'm following it to see what he does with it.
  
• Many bloggers use it to share what they find online, voice opinions, take polls and ask questions. Check out Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scoble, Jason Kottke and Paul Dunay.
  
• Jesse Hirsh has a thoughtful article on his experience and strategy using Twitter. You can find it on his blog: http://www.jessehirsh.com/how-ive-been-using-twitter
  
• There are several third party applications and sites that let you use Twitter in other ways. For example, I am using Twitterfeed to post my RSS feeds to Twitter. Every time I bookmark something in Delicious or Google Reader or post on my blog it is feed into my Twitter account.

Twitter is an experiment and we need to keep experimenting! At Space Database, our staff travels a great deal for site work. We think it will be a great tool to help teams stay in touch. At our sailing club, I think it would be a great idea for the race committee to be on Twitter for delays changes and results. We'll try that out next year.