Tweet At LastTweet At Last

So after much reluctance I have finally entered the world of Twitter so I could follow various folks reporting on events at this week's Cisco C-Scape event in San Jose. Within a few minutes of registering I was able to quickly find friends and colleagues and follow their feeds. Without so much as posting a single "Tweet", I already had folks following me. So I'm still a little skeptical of the whole Twitter craze, but there are some key value propositions....

For those of you who haven't made the plunge, Twitter is sort of what happens when IM, blogging and RSS converge. You set up your twitter page to subscribe to "tweets" from your friend, which can be delivered to you via a variety of different ways includng over 140 mobile or desktop clients, or just the twitter web site. I think Twitter is well suited to be an effective way of keeping up with fast-moving events, such as key conferences, or news events such as the recent Mumbai attacks. I've also talked to a few who were using Twitter for business, either as a marketing tool, or through one of the Twitter-like services such as Yammer that are designed for a closed group.

I do wonder about Twitter's business model and there has been a lot of speculation as to Twitter's future, with recent reports suggesting that Facebook backed away from a deal due to Twitter's huge SMS bill.

Given the prospects for companies to use Twitter as a marketing tool to get info out to customers, it's surprising that there's no "Twitter for Business" service yet which would allow companies to enable multiple individuals to post under a single corporate group account that they could track. I assume we'll see this before long as Twitter builds on its business plan.

I'm curious to hear some feedback from those of you who are twittering, why are you using it? What value have you seen? Would you pay for it if it were no longer free? Post a comment or tweet me at "imlazar".