I have been using twitter now for about 3 weeks. I heard about it several years ago. When I checked into it for the first time and read some of the tweets out at that time, I couldn’t understand what the point was. Especially after reading a couple of them that said, “in the car driving up the 101 to San Fran” and “I just walked into Starbucks at Union Square” I was very doubtful about the future of this technology. But over the years I have been hearing more and more about the uses for business which grabbed my attention. Having network security training, I am still wondering how you can have meaningful business updates in twitter without compromising business security whether that be network or insider sales data. Although from a marketing prospective twitter is a free way of updating the world on new products or services. Twitter can create a buzz about these products or services just like a viral video does with YouTube. Here is an interesting example of the use of twitter at ad:tech in New York a couple of months ago.

This is a picture of the screen at the entrance to the conference that is displaying what people were saying about ad:tech in twitter. If you put @adtech in the tweet then it would show up on this screen.
Pretty cool.

Here is another use for twitter although not for business but the programming behind this could be used for updating twitter for some other business reason (for example updating the sales dept. on new client numbers on a flat screen in the office). Although these numbers would be available to the world, simply putting up a number may be cryptic enough to the world but meaningful to the sales staff.


Here is another interesting video about relationship building with twitter. It also gives some good websites to use to keep up to date with what people are tweeting about.


The twitter technology seems pretty simple. From a micro view it is just you updating a status that can only be 140 characters long. From a macro view it can be a view on the here and now in the world. Everyone putting up status updates that may collectively explain something from different viewpoints can have an unbelievable impact on our world and the way we see it. The Hudson River plane crash last week is a great example. Janis Krums posted the first photos of it on twitter.
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/us-airways-crash-rescue-picture-citizen-jouralism-twitter-at-work

Take a look at twitter, it may seem overly simple. But that is the beauty of it.

www.twitter.com.bradfoutz

Brad