Twitter is one of those social media services that people either love to deathor just plain don’t get. Who wants to read a 140 character update saying things like “I just realized I accidentally had some books on “Judaism” marked as “Jedism” instead. Kabbalah does not give you a light saber”? At least 787 people read that yesterday on my Twitter feed.
Twitter is probably best described as microblogging. It’s the bastard child of blogging, social networking, news feeds, and online forums. Stick web 2.0 in a food processor and chop it into 140 character bite sized pieces and there you go. That’s Twitter.
The premise is pretty simple. 140 character updates on “what are you doing?”. This can be anything from deep thoughts to mundane tasks to actual plugs for your business. And you read the same thing from people you follow. Lots of Tweets are simply passed along links indicating what people are reading. There is where the power lies. Twitter is in some ways like a turbo charged mailing list. You’ll get a fast turnaround on anything you post, generally within minutes. Got a customer that’s given you a vague description of a book but you aren’t sure what it is? Post a query to Twitter and if your pool of followers is big enough, you often will get a response. It lets you pick other people’s brains.
