there’s been some arguments on blogs and actually on twitter about the uses and usage of twitter. someone suggested it was just a pyramid scheme and quite rightly @JackBastide stood up for twitterholics everywhere and gave a few sensible reasons to bother using it

i thought i’d throw in my thoughts. i love twitter and think it’s incredibly powerful, but for perhaps different reasons:

1. as an ESFJ (myers briggs) I relish any chance to meet new people. i’m friendly, be my friend! you can keep in touch with current friends and make new ones
2. it will eventually completely replace SMS; if not twitter – at least microblogging will. why have a number string when you can have a name? and why limit this communication to your mobile phone when you could access your friends from any net connected device?
3. i’m a postgrad student and a keen learner. i read twitter timelines to learn things
4. debate and discussion are at the heart of twitter, and that makes the learning interesting and interactive. there’s even # tags so you can use those in a summize search or sites like twittergroups.com to find literally anything you’re interested in and join the topic
5. the semantic web is a fantastic concept, but it’s not really in full swing yet, so in the mean time twitter has you covered. people post a lot of links to twitter that are usually worth a read, so here twitter covers any gaps that rss, stumbleupon and anythng else might leave unchecked
6. to get help. whether it be technical support, an answer to a random question, or an appeal for an organ donor. someone out in the twitterverse will have the answer
7. the reach of twitter is insane. think outside the box for a moment about things like widgets, sidebars and other places that twitter feeds appear from people. the visibility of your words has no limit
8. it’s the norm. when you go to a conference, people want to know what your twitter is so they can follow you. at fowa there was a massive sticker you could add to your pass for you to write your “@mled” on, for everyone to see. people, myself included, put their twitter on their business cards. it’s looked for, people want to communicate with you on it
9. it’s addictive. not just the updating and chatting constantly, but keeping a track of the wider scene. there are a billion clones and expansions for twitter. from blip.fm, to url shortening, to feed imports and exports… the list of things you can add on to twitter is stunning
10. it’s faster than the news. anything big that happens anywhere in the world will take professional media time to arrive and set up on scene. members of the public already there can and do tweet out events straight away. if you watch twitter with things like twitscoop.com you can see what’s being talked about. word gets around very very fast. it’s crowd sourcing on an epic scale
11. marketing marketing marketing. the early adopter crowd on twitter are the techies, coders, startup entrepreneurs, social media & networking junkies, journalists & bloggers, marketing specialists and people with related jobs / interests to those. searching habits in these circles are changing, we don’t all look just to google, we look for people and companies on twitter. putting out your brand is very simple and effective with twitter

as a postgrad student, i’m going to need a real (career start type) job in about 8 months time. with all the last 11 points helping out, i think twitter makes me more marketable and attractive to an employer

there’s a use for twitter that i think is completely overlooked – using it as an actual website. i’ve just bought the domain http://mled.me to try to collect together and manage my online presence in one single location. i’m not a coder, developer or any other title that implies i know how to get down and dirty with html, css, php and mysql. i have some knowledge of those things, but it’s limited. i’m a believer in playing to your strengths, which is why most of the blogs and features to mled.me are not actually on my hosting, i’ve just used cnames, a records and sub domain forwarding. the root – http://mled.me – was to have nothing stored on it, i just wanted a page that linked you on to my blogs

rather than mess around with amaya, dreamweaver or any other software package, i went immediately to twitter because it meant i could skip straight to input of content. think about it for a minute – twitter has an acceptable layout, with the top post larger like a title, and easily customisable look and feel. it also gets better google juice than anything i could afford. so i made a background image, i made the account follow me on twitter, and that’s it! i believe it’s quite a natural and different choice. http://mled.me just forwards straight to http://twitter.com/mledme

there you have it: with out of the box thinking comes twitter use number 12 – a static webpage!