or more.
Also, it's not clear that Twitter has hit the kind of mainstream adoption that other social networking services, such as Facebook, have enjoyed, making the technology a harder leap for those in the business environment.
"It's still pretty much early adopters and people who are interested in social media," says Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst with Forrester Research who examines social technologies.
In fact, last October, Forrester issued a report that estimated, on average, 78 percent of Twitter's audience is male, 31 years old and draws an annual income of US$78,000. This group, the report went on, was predisposed to using new technologies, especially those of the Web 2.0 variety, such as desktop widgets, tagging and wikis.
But lately there have been signs that Twitter is catching on mainstream. Staff members of both Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John McCain of Arizona have used Twitter to debate the issues of their presidential contest (probably more concisely than in a town hall meeting), and the Los Angeles Fire Department utilized the tool to publish short updates regarding the California wildfires in 2007.
Catching the Eyes of Business Users
Twitter has also led business executives and managers to think about how they might take advantage of the service to improve and streamline internal communications. Drewe Zanki works for Rio Tinto, a British mining company and oversees an IT group in its minerals division in Denver. He heard about Twitter by reading some of his favorite blogs and immediately became interested. He joined just a few weeks ago.
When he first signed on, he noticed that there was a lot of chaos in the amount of communication occurring, but he saw some potential business value.
"Often, the e-mails I get from CFOs or IT directors are half a line anyway," Zanki says. "Being able to get your business case through in 140 characters or less could be very valuable for everyone's time."
Tim Davis, CIO of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, a fast-food chain, says that he joined Twitter back in April after making a commitment to stay more informed about social media.
"This spring I decided I needed to get educated as social media is just taking off and I couldn't continue to shun it without investing the time to figure it out," he says. "I also wanted to figure out how this all fits into business models."
He began following the updates of bloggers, social media gurus and even found other Twitter users who shared his passion for cigars, a hobby for Davis.
Like Zanki, one problem Davis immediately experienced was some Twitter users overusing the service and dominating his cache of messages. "I had to quietly drop Scoble because he would spew out eight tweets within three minutes," he says, referring to the technology blogger, Robert Scoble, who, at the writing of this article, has 28,336 followers. "Personally I don't think that is the right use of Twitter," Zanki adds.
David Elwart, CIO of South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, says that he has experienced similar problems since joining the service. "There can be too much noise," he says. "Some of them you quit following because of it. But some people are really interesting and can turn you on to new things."
For instance, Elwart began following a woman in California whose specialty was state parks and recreation. The messages the two exchanged over the service led to South Carolina state officials, at Elwart's behest, inviting her to speak at their annual conference on tourism so the state could learn from her insights.
What a Business Twitter Would Need to Look Like
The way Twitter works is, true to the form of short messaging, pretty simple. You post a message in 140 characters or less into an open textual field, click a button that says update, and your message is broadcast to the Twitter pages of all the users of the service who follow you.
There is
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