Twitter witter

It has been around 6 months now since I created an account on Twitter and it's been 3-4 months since I have spent like 70 % of my so called "social networking time" on Twitter. For beginners it is a bit difficult to understand it at first. But when you get the hang of it, you know what was missing in your online life. You can say this post is more of an awareness campaign for my friends of which only 10 or 20 % are there on Twitter.

So, What is this Twitter witter ? As per the About page on Twitter "Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now. Twitter asks “what’s happening” and makes the answer spread across the globe to millions, immediately." In short, its a online platform for social interaction, news, jokes, views, marketing and anything that you can imagine. You can post only text on Twitter. Although you can post URLs to images or videos or anything that does not qualify as text. The best part is your post (rather your tweet or your update) cannot exceed 140 characters. An added advantage is you post directly via your mobile device just like you can do on Facebook. And the speed is awesome. All this has combined to make Twitter the best (or may be the only one) real time search engine. Even Google Search these days shows results from Twitter updates. You can imagine the potential and the popularity of Twitter in today's world. When I wanted to read any news or updates about the recent riots in my native city, I used Twitter for 2 reasons. First, there was no option as a very few news sites were covering it (forget the TV channels). Second, I could get real time updates by the minute and you can say that those updates are mostly trustworthy.

Most of the online social networking geeks know that Orkut is dead. Facebook is still there and safe, but it will have to evolve to keep pace with Twitter. On Twitter, you get to create your own handle and post updates. The updates may be your creation or someone else (Retweet option). You get to follow interesting people on Twitter apart from your friends. People like celebrities (SRK, Deepika, Farhan, etc.), politicians (Shashi Tharoor), TV anchors, Journalists, columnists, social entrepreneurs etc.

So, will Twitter be a threat to the ubiquitous Google ? I think yes. In fact it already might be giving sleepless nights when the real time search is concerned. Twitter currently does not have a revenue generating model yet. But I hear that some advertising based model is going to come very soon. Twitter has a projected 25 million users at the end of Q4 2010. And it is estimated that the number will go up to 1 billion by 2013. Like Google is called "the face of the Internet" or the "doorway to the internet", Twitter is called "the SMS of the internet".

Twitter or rather the Twitter community has its own limitations. Some people tweet every little happening in their lives, which not many are interested in. The people you choose to follow should not bore you or fill up your Twitter time lines with senseless tweets. Even Twitter should consider an improvement to its user interface. There is no obvious problem with it. But sometimes when you want to read what happened last night, you need to go way down to read Tweets from that time. Also, there is no such button like "Go to Top". Sometimes it is annoying. It should introduce a time slot based tweet reading mechanism. Till then, Happy Tweeting.