Communication through Twitter

Twitter, as a social networking site, is viewed useless by many people, but when I checked out its rank in Competeinc, based on unique visitors within a month it was in top 50 (it got the 38th position). Twitter looks simple and lack of features, but it could manage to be popular. Hence, I am trying it.

This is the screenshot from Twitter.com (without log-in) when I searched for "@dell":

Picture 1 Twitter Main Page

It is (mostly) possible for people to search and read Twitter user's posts about certain topics. Twitter has many users from around the world who post various topics, so the results (which are sorted based on time of latest posts) can be considered as up-to-date news.

As a Twitter user, I could follow (receive posts) from other users that I follow, so whenever they post a tweet (= a message) I will receive it. The good thing is, Twitter user could only make a message (= a tweet) within 140 characters limit (look at the picture below), so Twitter could send it to the Twitter user's followers through text message. In that way, information could be spread from a Twitter user to his/her followers in short time (time is valuable).

Picture 2 Twitter Home (after log-in)

For personal purpose, if I follow my friends and they are active users, they will often tweet and I will get up-to-date information from them about themselves, rumors around them, world news, etc. (similar practices were seen on Gossip Girl Season 1 Episode 1). Basically I will get information from users that I follow, so if I follow the right users, I may get information that I wanted such as weather forecast, discounted products, match results, world news. It can be like making your own newspaper. Furthermore, it can be used for team work. If each team member follow each others, spreading information can be faster. As an example, a team is separated into small groups in different locations. One group has a problem, the group post a tweet, then everyone in the team receive the tweet. When another group has already done something about the problem, they post another tweet and everyone don't have to worry about it anymore.

For organizational purposes, if I follow a firm then when the firm has a special offer, the firm posts a tweet and its followers will get the information about that. Furthermore the followers may also re-tweet (RT) the post to their followers, and so on. Thus, information can spread to many more people. Moreover, the firm itself will be able to get responses, such as the keywords get into trending topics can mean that it is interesting, people's comments on the tweet, etc.

Those are some uses of Twitter.

Additional Information:
1. You can visit http://bit.ly to shorten URL (because URL usually consumes a lot of character, for example URL for this post is http://icetrack.blogspot.com/2009/10/communication-through-twitter.html
(71 characters) and we only have 140 characters to write).
2. Share your photos with http://tweetphoto.com (log-in with your Twitter account).
3. You can browse Twitter data through Bing Twitter (a search engine).
4. See statistics about Twitter user at http://twittercounter.com.
5. When you visit Twitter, if you find Twitter down such as

Picture 3 Twitter down

Picture 4 Twitter down-2

Don't worry, it usually will not take a long time, just refresh a couple seconds later.