A colleague introduced me to a new social network site called Twitter. He had been following John Edwards presidential campaign and had seen how he was tapping into online communities to get support from young voters and raise awareness. John Edwards is leading the way with this approach and via his website you can link to popular communities including Gather, Flickr and de.licio.us.
Edwards is also using Twitter which is one of the fastest growing sites with a cute concept. It allows users to send updates via text, MSN or email about what they are doing at that present moment in time - a sort of micro-blogging. John Edwards twitters are usually about where is is or where he is visiting next. Just short personal updates.
There is talk of leveraging Twitter from a marketing perspective - I can certainly see how celebrities, high profile CEOs or politicians can stay up close and personal to their loyal followers. But as to the other possible uses that have been suggested such as SEO, quick updates, focus groups and trend spotting I am not so sure. True, the real potency of something like Twitter is yet to be seen but I wonder who gets the time (or indeed has the inclination) to give a couple of sentences every couple of hours on their whereabouts and activities. It will be interesting to see how active Twitter's user base remains but here's my two pennies worth. I think that these social networking sites are staring to become two a penny and the power of each will lessen as more come to market. Maybe the old originals like MySpace that continue to innovate will emerge as the dominant ones but people will get bored of surfing multiple sites for the same purpose. There just simply aren't the hours in the day.
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