Twitter is Still a Tween

The world is suddenly abuzz about Twitter. Twitter is just about everywhere. In actuality, the microblogging service has been around since 2006. However, Twitter has suddenly reached its tipping point and experienced a recent surge in popularity.

Twitter is a simple application with a 140 character limit that asks "What Are You Doing?" Enabled for Web or Mobile devices it is so simple and versatile it's brilliant. Full reveal- I actually had an account sitting vacant for months before I figured out exactly what to do with it. :) Find and follow some people-yes! They follow you back, you start a dialog. Now it's getting interesting.

To compare Twitter to a human in development stages though, I would say that twitter is in it's tween years. It has successfully grown from infant to strong child but is still hiccuping it's way towards the teen years to adulthood.

Why is Twitter a Tween? Besides the fact that the alliteration sounds cool? For starters, Twitter has amazing potential as a communications and networking tool. However, most marketers and communicators are still figuring out how to leverage twitter as a tool for major businesses.

Twitter has been highly adopted by tech/social media/marketing//communications/writer/ artist types. However, other industries are only beginning to scratching the surface. Recruiters, health care professionals, musicians, gardeners, etc- come out where ever you are and join the happy bandwagon.

There have also been some recent Twitter hiccups reminiscent of tween-type growing pains. Last Friday-Monday Twitter experienced a mass outage, broadcasting what seemed to me to be about 25% of the actual twitter posts from those I follow. Worse? Twitter itself did very little to communicate to users on it's blog or homepage about the outage, what they were doing to resolve it, or when it was expected to be back up.

Then news broke today that some very personal private direct messages were exposed for at least one twitter user (probably lots)- third party twitter application GroupTweet was the likely culprit. Yikes!

Twitter may not be responsible for the failure of a third party application, but these third party applications are still so new that users cannot separate the good from the bad, the fail proof from the buggy.

I love my twitter, but I think it's a tween. I can't wait to see what it grows into!