About a month ago, a technology analyst concluded that Twitter was a waste of time because it suffered from an incurable signal/noise problem. You had to scan swathes of meaningless “tweets” to find anything of value. He vowed not to waste his time with the troublesome web site. So he signed off with a single dismissive remark. It read: “Real analysts don’t tweet.”

That was me and I was wrong.

I read a post on the Technobabble 2.0 blog the next day that quoted my remark; “Robin Bloor says real analysts don’t tweet” and under it was published a list of 50 or so analysts, all of whom were registered on Twitter and tweeting regularly. So, just for fun, I decided to follow them all. After a while I realized that this was a useful information feed. So I continued….

Since then I have found other reasons why Twitter is not just a good idea, but imho destined to grow much larger than it is now. Here’s a list:

1. Twitter naturally appeals to social groups that communicate heavily via SMS; the teens and twenties. It is fundamentally an SMS bulleting board that you can post to and read directly on anything from a Mac to a mobile phone. You can even post to it and read it from FaceBook.
2. For the same reason, it appeals to anyone who wants to establish an affinity group and listen in. As you can follow anyone (except those who deliberately opt for select privacy) it’s reasonably easy to set up any kind of group and follow it. For me the usefulness of following analysts is that I know what analyst conferences are going on and who is attending which ones. Some analysts also provide one line summaries of what’s new at such events. It could be used in the same way for any common group such as gardeners or poker players,
3. Twitter can quickly become an impromptu info-sharing point, as happened in the California fires and more recently in the Chinese earthquake. It can also be used in this role for a conference. The organizers simply set up a Twitter ID and tweet atoms of information to communicate directly with delegates. Attendees can elect to follow.
4. You can use it as a real-time news feed because a number of News providers, including the BBC and CNN issue News bulletins as tweets. You can even use it to follow the movements of presidential candidates – Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain all have their daily engagements posted on Twitter.
5. It can be used for PR and marketing. Companies can tweet press announcements with links to web pages containing press releases, marketing collateral, et al. Because some companies (Oracle for example, use it in this way, those who follow such companies including journalists, analysts and even company staff, can use Twitter as an information feed) Rock groups use it in a similar way.
6. Similarly it can be used for customer relations. H&R Block, for example, uses Twitter for receiving and responding to customer queries. Doing so provides a complete audit trail of questions and answers.
7. It is fundamentally social in a way that other social media web sites are not (Like Facebook, MySpace etc.) You can form groups with circles of friends on those web sites but you don’t meet new people. If you want to meet new people on Twitter, just ask a question and someone will chime in with an answer. (You need to have built up a bit of a following for this, but it works.)
8. It is a natural medium for bloggers. You can get a Wordpress plugin that automatically tweets your blog postings (the headline and the URL). The converse to this is that you can automatically track the postings of bloggers you follow.
9. It’s a source of entertainment. You have to choose who you follow for this, but it is possible to follow Borat, Stephen Colbert and a host of less well known comedians. The tweets are undoubtedly done by scriptwriters, but they can be lol funny.
10. Finally you can do all of these things together without confusing the information stream by simply setting up multiple Twitter accounts. There’s a  neat little widget called  Twhirl that allows you to have multiple accounts open at once and pull down feeds directly to the desktop.