Mr Moodley, WTF Is...

Mr Moodley is my Indian garden gnome who lives at The HQ. Besides being an Indian and a garden gnome, he also happens to be web strategist, quite jacked up on techie and web stuff, and explains it to me as one would explain things to a retarded child, or someone who has been dropped on the head repeatedly.

Mr Moodley, WTF Is... Twitter?

Twitter is basically a cool messaging service, which allows you to send short messages to friends, via computer or cellphone. Basically you can send messages from a central control panel ie: http://twitter.com/YOURNAME/, or from your cellphone, and have it displayed on your website or blog, which I've done and which you can see on the left hand menu.

You can choose to have just YOUR messages displayed, or include the interactions with friends. It's similar to the Facebook status tool ie: "Shaun is... wondering who ate all the pies" except this can be shared with everyone who are "Friends" with you. You get Twitter Friends by inviting your mates via email, or searching for existing buddies who already have Twitter accounts.

When a message is sent, your friends can either receive it on their blog or site, or on their cellphone. My feeling is this may potentially be quite intrusive and annoying, as you could get loads of annoying messages such as "Fred is waiting in the bank queue".

I don't give a flying f**k Fred, but thanks anyway.

Where I DO see the potential in Twitter though, is from a marketing and promotional point of view, as you now have a captive and highly targeted.. well, target market. I'm just thinking in terms of event co-ordination and competitions here, where you can effectively manage a database of potential clientelle in a more personal form of communication. As an example - think of some sort of treasure hunt, where clues are sent via cellphone to a pre-approved set of twenty-somethings, which need to be found throughout the city before eventually leading to a massive party at an undisclosed location.

I'm pretty sure this can be applied to other business models pretty effectively as well, but I'm not thinking outside the box at the moment, as I'm still playing around with it hesitantly, like a young teen playing with his first pair of breasts.

Have a gander by registering at http://www.twitter.com.



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