Twitter: take the 140 character challenge
What are you doing right now?
That’s the tagline of Twitter, one of the profusion of social networking services to emerge lately.
So what is Twitter, and is it relevant to you? Twitter allows users to send “updates” (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, email, to the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific, free of charge.
The second question is more difficult to pin down. At first glance Twitter seems like a simple way to prattle on about nothing at all, to nobody in particular, albeit in the space allowed by the 140 character limit per post.
This was my attitude also, until recently, when I came across a post titled The Tao of Twitter by Mike Mindel.
Actually to call what Mike has put together here a blog post is to fail to do justice to it. It’s also a very thorough guide and tutorial about everything you might want to know about Twitter, how it presents new opportunities and applications to business, all lashed together with interesting insights and quotes like this one:
To understand what makes Twitter so successful I have to go back to an amazing book by Paul Zane Pilzer called Unlimited Wealth.
When Paul was writing this book he had one rule: ‘a new technology will be accepted and used once it is better and easier to use than the preceding technology’.
Look at Twitter. It fulfills that rule beautifully. What does Twitter replace? Letting people know what you’re doing and letting them follow what you’re doing.
What used to fulfill that role? Group phone msgs, group email, bulletin boards, forums, and gossip…
Thanks Mike for a great effort.
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