Are twitterers twits?

Hot on the heels of blogging comes micro-blogging. 140-character quick thoughts addressed to your friends, your followers or the world at large. Average number of posts per person per day are between three and five. Clearly targeted at a generation brought up to think that the world revolves around themselves, twitter is narcissistic in the extreme.

I mean, who cares where you are or what you’re doing? Okay, maybe your mum does. Mostly, people couldn’t give a toss. Many of the messages just smack of showing off. A bit like blogs really. Oh dear, did I really just say that?

Okay, at least in a blog you have enough space to try and inform or entertain. In a 140-character message you’re not going to be able to say much.

Let me explain a bit more: you can send and receive twitter messages via your computer or your mobile phone. People who want to receive your messages are your followers. People who are part of your group are your friends. It’s essentially a broadcast mechanism within those limits. You can, however, send private messages to individuals, without needing to know their mobile phone number. Hmmm. That’s neat.

Thinking about it some more, there could be some useful business potential here. What if you had a delivery service and you wanted to warn drivers about accidents or holdups? What if the driver wanted to let you know about progress? Some people sell some darned expensive equipment to achieve that kind of status reporting.

The idea of keeping in touch through the phone (regular SMS) or the web was quite inspired. You could even put your mum on the friends list or ping her directly.

Maybe it’s worth a look after all.

David Tebbutt is an award-winning columnist and feature writer who specialises on the subject of using software and technology to increase business productivity. He's an analyst with Freeform Dynamics but, in previous lives, wrote for Director magazine, Real Business and was also editor of Personal Computer World. http://freeformdynamics.com