Posted by simon at October 31st, 2007

The Webpronews.com newsletter is always very informative and this morning was no exception. It was all about social networking and micro-blogging. Twitter seemed to be the main focus of the article so I thought I would give it the once over.

The Twitter site seemed very basic in design and uncluttered. I would say overall Twitter is more like a cut down version of Facebook than a mini blog. It's got the social element of Facebook and the posting functionality of a blog, only you're limited to 140 characters for your posts. So it's more like a status update than a blog post.

As it didn't cost anything I had nothing to lose by creating a profile. The signup process and creating my profile was very straight forward and was all complete within 1 minute! I signed up with a very generic username that complements a personal site I'm currently working on. Suppose that's one of the benefits of being an early adopter.

I went ahead and did a few searches for profiles (twitters) with relevant interests and found a UK based competing snowboarder with a very interesting blog so I added her to my Twitter profile as someone I was following. You can see in your profile when someone is following your posts. Turns out she noticed I was following her posts and must have thought my profile was interesting as she has started following me!

Now everyone that looks at her profile will see my image/twitter link. So from the action of following one interesting Twitter I now have exposure on an established twitters profile. Not only established with a number of friends/followers but also very relevant to the market I'm trying to target.

I'm not going to waste too much time on Twitter right now but I can see it does have potential in the social media marketplace.