Twitter is IM (Instant Messaging) on steroids.

People keep asking why Twitter is important. Twitter is IM (Instant Messaging) on steroids.

You sign up with friends, or people you want to follow. And if you’re signed on to your Twitter.com home page whenever your friends make a 140 character post or ‘tweet’ you see it instantly. You can also sign up to receive twitter on your cell phone, which I recently did when I spent a couple hours at the pool, it certainly was entertaining. Basically you use it to stay current with friends and other people you want to follow.

In our business (internet marketing consulting), we need to know about the latest tools and technologies 1) to be able to catch ‘hot’ applications before competitors and client’s competitors (do you remember the early days of the pop-up? your competitor was popping up over your site and you didn’t know how to stop it) 2) to have an answer to what the application is, if any for each client.

What I like about Twitter is that I have set up ‘friends’ relationships with ex MSN videoblogger Robert Scoble, famous podcaster Adam Curry, AOL’s Jason Calacanis, etc and I get to see what they’re up to and what they’re discovering, and share my insights with them. John Edwards is Twittering too. And there are a TON of new Twitter applications coming out, here is a really cool application called Twittervision that lets you see people’s twitters from all around the world.

Here is the Wikipedia definition.

And a blog post by Steve Rubel about the sell value of Twitter:

And a Financial Times Article on Twitter

Please check out twitter and sign me up as a friend!

Jay Berkowitz