Twitter

There have been dozens of discussions on the rise of micro blogging and if Twitter will be the next step in communications or will it be just ‘another phase’. I think its interesting to see how Businessweek have analyzed Twitter. From the possibility of Twitter being around to serious in depth questions as to its uses and why it matters.

I don’t really wanna dive into that since so many discussions have been going on, rather, in order to see if it will be here to stay, i guess the best way would be to know what is currently being used for.

So what is twitter in case you don’t know, here’s Wikipedia’s definition of it.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message serviceinstant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. (SMS),

Great, now that we know, let’s take a look at how its being used. Citing from Kevin, check the chart across the different geographical regions and how popular twitter is in each region.

You can read more about the stats and why China isn’t larger. But its interesting to see Japan commanding such a huge share of the pie! Singapore ain’t half bad considering we’re so small…

So who uses Twitter and what do they do it for?

I think Lifehacker provides some great examples and possible expansions on Twitter and how it can be used.

Users generally use it as another communications tool. Like an SMS or IM, it serves its purpose for a quick update to friends. And i think the fact that it has such a concise use, it would only grow bigger in the mobile market due to the different behavious of mobile online experience as compared to PC online experience.

Businesses have huge potentials for it. For branding purposes, we need look no further than polictics with Obama and Hillary using Twitter to respond and ‘market’ themselves to voters. Of course, the usual brands have been active on it. Some use it for customer support like HRBlock, others use it for building consumer relationships like Dell,(Amazing how they’re so good at building consumer relations with social media now). Marketing Voix has an interesting way for brands to build themselves and not follow Marketing Guru Seth Godin on using Twitter.

But i think what is interesting is how Twitter has such quick response time. The China earthquake is a great example of social media outpacing traditional media. The arguments here were obvious, Twitter managed to be faster in response to the tremors than journalists but journalists were able to come out with the facts faster. I think its a great chance for traditional and social media to increase the response time to a crisis and that’s where we can see a convergence of the 2 types of media.

So now that we’ve seen the explosion of Twitter and how its being used, will this just be a phase and we’ll eventually join the other camp where we go “Enough already! I wanna know what u’re doing but not every damn second of it!”

Haha, i’m fully convienced that Twitter will stay and i’ll end off with a quote froma twitter fan in response to Mathieu Balez, a Web entrepreneur, knocked the mundane nature of Twitter posts and the voyeurism of readers.

“Yeah sure,Twitter will die. Just as text messages, mobile phones, blogs, the Internet…”

Or are you still with the other camp? Share with me!