Twitter: I Can’t Imagine Life Without It

Is Twitter’s breakneck growth causing a backlash? So goes the title of an interesting CNN article about how Twitter participation growth brings on the “Fail Whale” image more often these days. Twitter users who have experienced down moments know the image pops up during these times. To quote the article:

The conversational Web site, which lets users post 140-character microblogs, saw a 1,374 percent jump in unique visitors between February 2008 and February this year, up to 7 million from only 475,000, according to Nielsen NetView.

Count me in as one of the new users.

For me, the Twitter experience has been similar to having kids. I couldn’t really fathom how my two (I have a third on the way) would impact my everyday routine until I had them. This isn’t to say that I value Twitter as highly as my children, but it is true that the Twitter experience has impacted my daily routine in a valuable and productive way.

For starters, Twitter has provided me the opportunity to be privy and part of  some short but weighty conversations about IT security, social media, PR, communications and marketing that have very quickly added to my knowledge on these subjects. It has also significantly improved my productivity on certain research projects as the trusted experts I follow have pointed me towards resources that might have otherwise taken hours – maybe days – to find. Cases in point, I’ve recently been pointed in directions by Chris Hoff for cloud computing resources, was provided the opportunity to expand my PCI knowledge due to a conversation with Anon Chuvarkin and Jennifer Jabbusch and can always count on Lawrence Liu and Jennifer Leggio for advice on Social Media (or should I say Social Business) and how its being used in the enterprise and by consumers.

I remember once having a conversation about kids with my aunt, we agreed that you can’t really imagine your life with kids until you have your own and once you have them you can’t imagine how you would ever get by without them. I have found my Twitter experience to be similar, now that I have it, I just can’t imagine my day without it.

Posted by Joe Franscella