To Tweet or not to Tweet

When the chap from Cow PR came in to our PR class to talk about social media, he made mention of a social networking application called Twitter. It was, he said with the conviction of a man on the bleeding edge of social technological evolution, the next big thing.

Twitter does indeed seem to be making something of a splash online. Its growth in terms of unique visits has been a sizeable 640% in the last year, and there appears to be much excitement in the blogosphere about the service (no need to link...just Google it). In brief, the website asks users the question "what are you doing?" and gives them 140 characters or less to respond. It is traditional blogging stripped to the bone for todays go-getting information professional.

And yet when Mr Cow asked for a show of hands about who was using Twitter, noone in the class had even heard of it. I have since carried out a snap poll of my friends, and have even posted a thread on an online forum enquiring about who is using this amazing new microblogging site.

The answer is that if anyone is using it, it is not my contemporaries. One response from a friend was that they were too tied up with Facebook, and that they didn't see the difference between status updates on Facebook and so called "Tweets" (the name given to an utterance on Twitter).

But elsewhere I have got the impression that Twitter is something more. Droves of bloggers, including a mass of PR and marketing professionals can't all be wrong. Plus a respondent on my forum thread (which I have purposely not linked to here in an effort to retain work/life balance) stated "The bloke I sit opposite at work is obssessed with it - I get to know the exact moment Stephen Fry has a dump."

You don't get that kind of dirt on facebook: I have decided to catch the zeitgeist.