Jason Hiner, Executive Editor, Tech Republic, shares this interesting insight on Twitter – something you heard a lot about at the Digitas Bootcamp:

For those who have never used Twitter, my biggest challenge here might be giving you a concise definition. Here are some of the common ones that you’ll hear:

• It’s micro-blogging
• It’s a 140-character note about what you’re doing
• It’s an up-to-the-minute status update for all your friends
• It’s a great way to keep up with what your colleagues are working on
• It’s a very timely source for news and links
• It’s like being part of the Borg but you choose your own Collective

Here’s how I explained Twitter to my mom a couple weeks ago:

“It’s like a text message or an instant message —
limited to 140 characters — that you send to everyone on your buddy
list. You use it when you’re doing something interesting, you have some
news to share, or you have a Web link that you want to bring to
people’s attention.”

If you don’t think that sounds very exciting or useful, you’re not
alone. A lot of the most active Twitterers I know didn’t take to it
right away. There’s
an interesting phenomenon with Twitter where a user gives it a first
try and then sort of abandons it, while still occasionly checking on
the messages posted by the people on their contact list. Then, the user
eventually starts doing and seeing stuff and thinking, “I should post
that Twitter.” Pretty soon they actually start remembering to post that
stuff, either from a Web browser or a cell phone, and before long they
are hooked.

Five reasons why Twitter matters

1. Twitter provides a method for tapping into the brainwaves of people whose thoughts and opinions are valuable to you.
2. It can help you catch breaking news very quickly. It’s the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth.
3. It can allow you to communicate and network with people that you’ve wanted to meet.
4. Twitter lets you keep track of colleagues, see what they’re working on, and better understand what they do.
5. It can serve as a messaging tool to quickly communicate with multiple contacts.

Twitter for IT

I primarily use Twitter for three things:

1. Posting a lot of the stuff that doesn’t make it into my blog. That
   includes links, breaking news, thoughts on current events in the tech
   world, and occasionally a few off-topic notes about digital living and
   civilization as we know it.
2. Keeping up with current and former co-workers and other friends and
   colleagues — mostly people in the IT industry or the media business.
   I’ve learned more about some of my co-workers from Twitter than I did
   by working with them in the same office for years.
3. Responding to thoughts and notes from my network of contacts and get to know some of my contacts better in the process.

You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jasonhiner.

Because so many of the early adopters of Twitter are techies, it can
be a valuable tool for IT leaders, who can not only follow pundits like
me but can also follow like-minded IT experts. In this way, they can
build their own custom community of people of interest for IT. That’s
the greatest strength of Twitter, and that’s why it will end up being
the most important development on the Web in 2008 — the year it really
started to gain critical mass.

There’s another reason why IT pros may be interested in Twitter, and
it has nothing to do with its use for communication. As an online
application built on RubyOnRails,
Twitter has run into scaling problems that have recently led to several
outages of the service and repeatedly dogged the IT department. In
fact, the outages have become so common that they are — dangerously —
becoming one of the distinguishing characteristics of Twitter. Check
out the TechCrunch article Twitter At Scale: Will It Work? and this blog post form the Twitter staff to get up to speed on the issues involved.