Facebook turned 5 years old today. What’s that mean? Who’s that affect? Does Mark Zuckerburg have to worry about his “feisty five” year-old. Great, grand, wonderful! I’m glad he’s worth 30 billion theoretical internet dollars.
So Twitter you say?
Twitter‘s only a terrible-two, having surged to the frontlines around 3Q of 2006 (if you can even call it completely “frontlined” yet). For those of you who have yet to experience Twitter’s near infinite potential, the site is designed as a “microblog” or micro messaging service. Basically, you have 140 characters (about the same amount of characters of previous, standard text messages) to say what you’re thinking, doing, needing; anything and everything is at your fingertips (in 140 keystrokes).
I was a self-proclaimed early skeptic of the service. Finding two major flaws: 1.) The overall lack of information (seemingly limited profiles with seemingly limited content) and 2.) An interface that is at best overwhelming and at worst disheveled (like a magazine rack hit with a hydrogen bomb). It was hyped by just about every Social Media guy I had run into, but of course the fraternity of second-tier-marketing-geeks would think so (hey, I consider myself part of that industrious group, we’re definitely not always the “cool-kids”). That’s the great thing about social media; you can’t really pigeonhole anyone (we’ll talk about the resurgence of the “me” somewhere down the line). But I digress…
I sucked it up, signed up and 20-minutes later found myself “tweeting” with people I had never met, let alone heard of. I’ve been on Twitter for about 6-months now in varying degrees. My experience has been great, reaching out to potential clients, vendors and friends in a succinct and somewhat fashionable form. That’s the great thing about Twitter, you can “follow” people without that weird “morning after” feeling you get after connecting with someone on LinkedIn that you knew was a stretch from the beginning (You know who I’m talking about Mr. LinkedIn creep-job). Following someone on Twitter let’s you reach (either through a private direct message, or public @message) anybody (literally, a potential client, consumer, vendor, friend). It’s a relatively early-adoptive, open community so there’s always someone looking to help.
Back to my major problems with Twitter: 1.) Lack of info. False. People update and post great info all the time on Twitter. In fact, the first pictures of the downed U.S. Airways flight in the Hudson surfaced on Twitter about fifteen-minutes before any of the major news networks we’re broadcasting (through a service called “TwitPic” that lets you link pictures directly to Twitter). Yes, cool pictures of an amazing commercial jet landing are awesome, but more selfishly, your customers are on Twitter talking about you. Have a consumer brand? go to Twitter Search and type it in. Watch and be attentive (you see a whole set of brands listening and learning on Twitter: @comcastcares @zappos @MolsonFerg to name a few prominent members of each company).
Problem 2.) Crappy interface. False. Sort of. The Twitter web interface is a little strange and not the easiest to navigate. But the great open source developers out there have your answer. Need a Twitter program on your desktop? I use the Beta version of twhirl that runs using Adobe Air. Although the Twitterverse’s prominent service is the TweetDeck.
Need Twitter on your cell phone? Blackberry has an app. The iPhone has countless Twitter apps, with my favorites being Tweetie and the free-version of Twitterific.
So on the 5th Anniversary of Facebook what can we take away? Twitter is an efficient (by design), highly powerful tool that let’s you branch out, connect with friends, and make that dreaded cold-call in a manner that won’t put you on a “Unsubscribe” list. Oh yea, it also let’s you peer into the day to day happenings of anyone who is willing to share. George Orwell is rolling in his grave.
Peace.
mjb
(I know this post is about a year out of date, but we’re still newbies here in St. Louis so bear with me…)
