Danny Gorog04 February 2008, 12:36 PM
Twitter, a new micro-messaging platform, might just be the tool you needs to stay in touch with friends, family and business colleagues.
If you haven't heard of Twitter before you should check it out. Twitter sometimes gets bundled in with the new wave of 'social networking' applications that are now live but Twitter is different because it's short, sharp and efficient - a new micro-messaging service. Twitter lets you send small messages, up to a 160 characters in length (about the same length as a single SMS) called 'tweets' to anybody who chooses to follow you.
Twitter was developed by Obvious Corp, a San Francisco based company, and was written in Ruby on Rails. According to Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious Corp,
'Twitter works well for distributed teams and in-conference environments.'
While Twitter is sometimes billed as a social networking tool akin to Facebook the reality is very different. While Facebook requires lots of time and energy from its users, Twitter is simple to setup, and can be accessed across a range of different platforms including the web, SMS or desktop clients like
Twitterific (Mac OS X) or
Twitterlicious (Windows). This is different to Facebook which predominately needs to be accessed via the web.
There are lots of different situations where Twitter can be useful in a business context to stay in touch with colleagues or customers. The Los Angeles Fire Department for example use Twitter to keep other members up-to-date, and recently put it to use as a messaging system during the recent California Bush fires. During the upcoming US Elections several candidates, including
Barak Obama,
John Edwards and
Ron Paul are using Twitter to keep their fan base in the know.
On a more local level, I've recently come across an IT consultancy that is using Twitter to keep in touch with technicians who are out on the road during the day. Instead of techs calling in when jobs are running over time, they send a simple 'tweet' that gets relayed through to other techs, and to manager who can then schedule resources more efficiently.
If you haven't tried Twitter I'd urge you to give it a shot. If you're running a business where communication is key you should consider using Twitter as an efficient, concise and cheap micro-messaging platform.