Now Twitter is actually still just a BETA. That means it isn’t even in a finished form yet but the tool’s utilization is growing quite rapidly. So much so that the company has a hard time maintaining it in a live state where it can be used . Such outages are short lived but they exist so its obvious the service isn’t quite ready for the mainstream.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and feedalizr. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.
Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has grown extensive notability and popularity worldwide. It is often described as the “SMS of Internet”, in that the site provides the functionality (via its application programming interfaces) for other desktop and web-based applications to send and receive short text messages, often obscuring the Twitter service itself.
Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS — short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. There is also a short code for Vodafone users from the UK. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.
Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third most used social network (Facebook being the largest, followed by MySpace), and puts the number of unique monthly visitors at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visits at 55 million.[3]In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a growth of 1382%, Zimbio had a growth of 240%, followed by Facebook with a growth 228%.
In social media information is currency. The more targeted the information is for a specific audience the more its worth. In Twitter is the difference between being a focal point on twitter or just another ignorable user. Twitter can be and will more than likely become a large part of social marketing for B2B companies. It needs to grow a bit more as a service as well as the B2B audience needs to become more of a presence within it. Until then Twitter will remain a tool for blogs, B2C, entertainers and marketing professionals.
