Figuring Out Twitter

So it’s obvious that Twitter is a phenomenon. Everyone’s been signing up for one (or many) accounts. It doesn’t really matter that only a handful of those who sign up actually use it. It’s clearly been the top-of-the-shelf buzz maker for the last year or so.

Yes I have an account. But I don’t use it. Not yet, anyways.

I may not be the best “statistic sample of one” to measure the trend against, but the fact that I’m not a daily user of it tells me there are others who’ve done the same thing, and it makes me wonder why.

 I think it’s mostly because it is really at a plumbing / foundation concept at this stage, rather than a full fledged “ready-to-use” service, albeit a very popular foundation.

There are so many writers on twitter, so many different categories / areas written about at any given second so it’s becoming quite difficult to find your crowd to hang with and follow. However, it has great potential, as soon as someone figures out the services to build on top of it.

Obviously, there are a number of subsets of user types that are already making great things happen for them via Twitter. Jeremy Schoemaker for instance, uses it as an announcement tool for many of his online marketing adventures and is probably raking in a lot of money that way. Smart move. Kudos to him.

Others are using it to announce their actions in the financial markets. As you may know I’m nerdishly interested  in the financial markets, and a couple of services has already popped up out there acting as financial filters to Twitterers around the world stepping in and out of the market so you can follow the guru of your flavor without having to “know of him / her” beforehand.

I think that’s basically what’s going to happen around Twitter – or any other “mini-broadcasting” engine that will be available; it’s the services on top of it that will make the real hay.  

This poses a lot of questions around the business model for Twitter, but at least they have the attention of a lot of people now (traffic), so they’re in a great position to leverage upon their foundation concept and offer these services themselves. The only question remaining is how to go about making it happen. This is the area to follow for the coming months. I wish there was a Twitter channel for it that I could follow.