Twitter, like Facebook, MySpace and SEO companies are always THE HOT thing to do.

Look at the big boys in industry. Does Warren Buffet tweet? Is there a Facebook page for General Dynamics? Does Bausch + Lomb have a MySpace page? Does Apple employ a SEO company?

Answer? No.

Why?

Well some could argue they just don’t get it. And others will say they already are well know and don’t need it.

Myself I look at it this way.

The big boys don’t do it because all Facebook and MySpace does is make a cheap website and domain for people that are either too poor or too lazy to build and maintain a site. These two sites are the Geocities and Tripod of the so-called Web 2.0 generation.

Twitter is just a cheap and easily spammable version of IM or Live Chat. So you just put Live chat on your site and voila! Instant contact with your customers. And it doesn’t get a fail whale because it is being bogged down by NON-customers posting I ate a subway nom nom nom.

The old adage is there is NOTHING new under the sun. And it is true. Everything “web 2.0″ is a reinvention of “web 1.0″ and “web 0.0″.

IM, internet video and radio, free personal sites with ads, peer to peer file sharing, social networking… old old old. From newsgroups to message boards and BBS’, Geocities, Tripod, AOL IM, etc. etc.

Hey if you have a shoestring budget and can’t afford a site and live chat; go for it. But after time when you DO make it, you will have to leave it behind as it will not suit your needs.

Besides, why would you want your customers to have to wade through “Just took my dog to the vet, he got a sad” tweet to make contact with you? Akin to sending messages with semaphore at a Flag Day parade.

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Total waste of time.

I think it’s a great tool for creating backlinks to your website. Other than that, I still don’t get the giss of it yet…

Frequent downtimes? There have been some Fail Whales that last a few seconds but there haven’t been downtimes like existed in May-June 2008. Maybe it’s the Twitter client that you use because the website has been working fine 99.99% of the time.

Not yet, but in the future probably. It’s so popular because of it’s functionallity ( hi5 stuff, facebook, getting new friends, girlfriends maybe ), but don’t know if you can get traffic ( targeted ), today… in the future, don’t know. Well see.

I totally agree with what abby said, “Interesting Perspective”. I use twitter for my website and it works fine. I have a personal twitter account, and its not so good. This is really informative though. I wonder what social media will emerge on the coming years..

It’s worse then a waste of time. It’s time taken away from something that might contribute to actually producing something worthwhile. It’s for the 20′s ad 30′s somethings who don’t have a clue as to how to actually contribute to the community and have an inflated idea that anyone is actually interested in what they’re doing. Give Twitter a few years and suddenly everyone will realize it is unnecessary and it will die. Been there, done that, bye, bye!

By the time you’ve waded through the ovecapacity errors and blocked all the spam followers you’d be forgiven for wondering how anyone can use it all

In my line of work, I’ve found Twitter to be useless. I like to call it Facebook without the fun- just status updates, nothing more. I’ve seen people use it well- like with mobile restaurants- but the same could be accomplished with Facebook. What’s worse is most Twitter users don’t use their accounts and all and the few who do update WAY too frequently. There isn’t enough control of managing all those tweets, either. Even though I have an account, I am not a fan!