Tweeting and Twittering
by Gerald Trites

When Twitter first came out, many people thought - yes, another silly fad. And a ridiculous one. Who wants to know every little thing anyone is doing all day? And sure enough, a lot of people started to use it that way, reporting over the World Wide Web that they are going out for a coffee and will be back in 15 minutes. And so on.

But others saw something else in it and started using it to get out short simple messages about an event, conditions, policy - a host of things.

Twitter started to gain some attention.

And then along came Barack Obama, and the world of Twits changed forever, not to mention the world of politics. Of course, Obama's use of technology in his campaign extended beyond Twitter, but it became firmly established as a smart political tool, useful not only for getting a message out, but for fundraising as well. Now just about every politician you can name has a Twitter account, with periodic updates, including Steven Harper, and numerous provincial and municipal leaders.

Corporations have also taken notice and there are some beginning to use Twitter as part of their corporate reporting tools. A good example is Dell Computers, which uses Twitter as well as a corporate blog for these purposes.

Facebook has taken notice as well. One of the core concepts that started it was the idea of "What are you doing now?" But of course Facebook went well beyond short tweets. Now they are modifying the Facebook functionality to include Tweet-like messages to ulimited friends. A direct response to the impact of Twitter. See more at this article.