“Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc. Twitter offers a social networking service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. Users may subscribe to other users’ tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers. (Quote: Wikipedia).”
It’s funny though isn’t it; that a web based service like Twitter could become so popular that creates a whole separate industry of spin-offs! If Twitter is the service, some of these ‘spin-offs’ have become the delivery of that service. I use Twitter a lot, but I don’t tend to use it from www.twitter.com I don’t really get on that well with Twitter from Twitter.com, it doesn’t quite give me all I need from it. Have you heard of; or have you use any of the following ‘Twitter Clients’ on your computer of choice?
tweetdeck hootsuite.com Tweetie (the Mac one), twitterrific destroytwitter twitscoop brizzly twhirl birdherd cotweet twithive – you had enough yet? seesmic twitterwitter (no, I made that last one up!)…
I do! I use Tweetdeck. I would consider myself a big Twitter user, I have many accounts and I use the service every day, but I don’t spend much time at www.twitter.com , I use Tweetdeck, RSS feeds to Twitter,Twitterfeed.com and Twitpic. I’m using Twitter this way right now!
Do you? Am I unusual in this respect? Am I the only one doing this – not using Twitter from it’s main site? Is Twitter missing a trick here? What is Twitter not doing that may-be it should and will Twitter ever make any real money by not doing what-ever it is they should be doing?
Don’t forget, add to all these clients for the home computer of your choice, all the aps for your ‘mobile’ of choice. Aps for our Iphones and Blackberries and Androids etc etc. Aps like:itwtr pockettweets instatweet …
If that wasn’t enough; developers seemed to have twigged on to Twitters ‘faults’ and ‘failings’ and created Twitter add-ons. Twitter add-ons give you all the things that Twitter itself can’t. Twitter itself is text based so now there is: twitpic Twitpic was one of the first available Twitter spinoffs and it has remained quite popular allowing the use of images along with your tweet. Or yfrog The other popular service in this category that allows you to share images as well as share video via your Twitter account. Tweeting just to one person not enough for you? You needGroupTweet is a tool that uses the Twitter API to allow you to create groups. Using direct messages, you and your team can send messages only to the group using your personal account. These messages are not viewable in your public stream, doesfollow – find out who’s following whom?
Need more? What about all those gadgets and gizmos we have on our websites and blogs? You simply have no need to go to Twitter to do Twitter! ‘Post Widgets’, ‘List Widgets’, ‘Search Widgets’, Fave Widgets!’ “Tweet This!” they say, “Follow us on Twitter!” “Reweets! 245 Tweets!” – integrate it, embed it, blog it, link to it!
People say “Market your business with Twitter, use Twitter to make your business more successful, use Twitter to grow your business” – all very well, but is Twitter managing to market it’s business? Is it becoming a more successful business, is it growing its business or is everyone else smothering it? Will the very life-blood of all these add-ons, spins-offs, call them what you will kill off Twitter itself?
Is Twitter in the business of ‘business‘, can every website with millions of users turn those users in a good business? And is Twitter actually good business?