Twitter.com - What's It All About

Just got back from Adelaide yesterday and over the course of the week, I’ve been chatting and presenting to lots of real estate principals and sales people and I talk about social media and other tools they can use to communicate and create cut through in a very cluttered market. Well they looked at me like I was a real live alien in their midst when I mentioned Twitter.

I’ve been using Twitter for awhile now and have posted about it a number of times including this post Hackers Strike at Twitter.com and Barrack Obama , I use it as an instant communication tool to let my followers know what I’m doing, reading, listening to etc as well as promoting my blog,podcasts and video updates. I’ve started to pick up a nice following, as well as following a number of like minded people and their travels and interests on the net.

I can’t get out of my head the image of me standing there and talking about Tweets and Twitter and trying to explain to them what the concept is, well I’m hoping it might just get a little easier from now on, given the growth that Twitter has gone through in 2008. Mashable has reported that Twitter.com has grown 752% in the last 12 months, that’s massive growth in the popularity of the service. Twitter had around 500,000 unique browers at the start of 2008 and finished the year in December with 4.43 Million Unique browsers.

So for those that don’t know what Twitter is, here’s a quick snapshot, and of course the best way to find out about the site is to sign up and follow me:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or email, or through applications such as Tweetie, Twinkle, Twitterfox, Twitteriffic, feedalizr, and Facebook. SMS available only in the US,Canada,India and the UK at this stage. So there you have it.

This still leaves Twitter behind the giants Facebook and Myspace, although interestingly enough , Neilson Online have reported that Facebook just finished the year ahead of it’s rival Myspace in the US, more on those stats in a later post.

So after this post, when I’m back in Adelaide next week, I’m hoping that I won’t come across as the Klaatu of real estate. If you’re interested in following me on Twitter here is the link: http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre