Why Businesses Can’t Ignore Twitter

Posted by Bill on Jun 27, 2009 in MeshBlog | 0 comments

Chris Abraham says Twitter is everything the much-hyped Second Life was not: “light, cheap and open” – and it will outlive the hype cycle.

Businesses that built presences in Second Life might now be gun shy about trying the latest social networking to enjoy such massive attention and rapid growth, but that would be their loss. Twitter’s simplicity is the foundation of its rapid growth and its long-term prospects – its open-source development ensures new Twitter-based tools and products will continue to emerge.

Example: the recent launch of Act.ly, a Twitter-based online petition site. Example: Tweetboard, the Twitter-powered “microforum” application embeddable on websites, reviewed here.

And here are 19 more examples of Twitter-based desktop applications, some better than others.

Businesses that don’t learn how to use Twitter now are not just leaving a valuable marketing tool on the shelf – they’re intentionally falling behind a technology that is rapidly moving forward and likely to spawn many useful new services you haven’t even thought of yet.