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Twitter describes itself as a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. That’s the official description. Unofficially, many web pundits put Twitter in the category of micro-blogging. As name suggests, micro-blogging is a smaller version of blogging. You have a quick opinion about something and you want to blog about it in one or two line. Micro-blogging serves that purpose and so on Twitter. But, my question here is – What is Twitter? Just a micro-blogging service or more than that? If more than that – then what else it does?

There is an official answer from Twitter as what else Twitter can do. It says, Twitter is the best way to discover what’s new in your world. It could be used as a news aggregator, to develop business links, for social networking, etc. Check out more about official answer here.

When I evaluate Twitter, I find several interesting use cases:

Date Finder: This is a different breed on Twitter. Those who ruined Orkut, spoiled Friendster and Spammed Yahoo Chat rooms are here as well. They are categorically hunting for dating partners. Twitter is another tool in their never ending hunt.

Self Booster: This use case is mainly for celebrities, or so called celebrities. People from Hollywood, Bollywood, Media Houses, and other Web Evangelists fall under this category.

Ego Massager: Those who can’t find themselves in celebrity category but eager to be there, use this platform as their ego massager.

Chit Chatter: People who are bored from other services and need some change fall under this category. There are some other serious workers who find some time in their busy schedule and come here to have some fun.

Business-aholic: It’s raining social media experts, entrepreneurs and marketing gurus on Twitter. Bunch of jokers trying to be expert in their domain. They spend almost entire day on Twitter and claim to know everything, the the past of Twitter to the future of social media.

Apart from these serious categories, there are some not so serious use cases as well. I hope you are exploring something which is not listed above.

Happy Tweeting ! 

“Yes, we could make history, I guess”, the statement from Sergey Brin was not just a mere prediction. It changed the history of internet like never before.  Many players like, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos were doing business, but it was Google who created history. It changed the way people were looking at search engines. It changed the way people were doing business through search engines.

In early years of this decade most of the web players were suspicious about a revenue model around search engine. The scene was looking very gloomy to them and then came the innovative search concept from Google, Page Rank. It gave Google an edge over others and Google never looked back thereafter.

As we say, “History repeats itself”, the scene around search engine market is changing again. This time there are some other new concepts which are gaining attention. No, I’m not talking about Microsoft’s Bing. I’m talking about Twitter, WolframAlpha and Scoopler.

A new trend called real-time search is getting popular on web. FriendFeed, Facebook and others have already started using it but two key players which are doing some real serious business in this area are Twitter and Scoopler. The idea behind Scoopler is to search entire web in real time. This would be a key concept for all future search requirements. We need to keep an eye on this. Check out one example of real time search here.

Stephen Wolfram says, “Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine with one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.” Few experts claim that it should not be treated as a Google killer though going in details of this discussion gives a different view. Check out an article on this here.

Google still dominates the search engine market though the monopoly is not going to last for a long time now. Let’s hope to see some more innovative concepts.

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Yet another internet meme and this time it’s going bigger and bigger. As the typical nature of internet meme suggests, it’s spreading from person to person, inbox to inbox and from chat windows to YouTube videos. Yes, I’m talking about Twitter, the latest sensation on Internet. It is getting lots of attention these days. The craze is so that when we arranged a small tweet up in Kolkata, it was covered by media without any hesitation. When we analyze the usage of twitter, it gives interesting results. Starting from spreading business to connecting to the fan bases, it is being used for all possible communication channels.  I also found few college going students who are using twitter as their regular diary. This proves the diverse use of Twitter and that makes it vastly popular amongst all sections of the society.

When we look back at the history of Twitter, we would agree with the Wikipedia which says, “The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity came at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.” It was the event which changed the fortune of Twitter and it never looked back from there. It was an excellent marketing thought, well planned and well executed.

Looking at current developments in-n-around twitter it seems to be going stronger than imagination. It’s not going to be just a fashion mark on social networking turf but it’s going to challenge biggies like Google and Microsoft.   Very recently I read that Google is going to launch a search engine for micro blogging services like twitter, an important development in web world. Marketing experts are writing tons of theories as how an organization can leverage twitter for their business needs, one of those theories is here. Even the evolution on twitter has also become a talk of the town and online technical magazines like TechCrunch are also reporting it. These all developments show that Twitter is going to become the next BIG thing on internet.

Like entire world, I too have started tweeting. You can follow me @nambuj.

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