Background: Management strategy consulting professional David Dalka, Florian Hollender, and other management consultants are using Twitter. Ford Harding, world-renowed author and expert on sales (e.g., for consultants and other professional services folks), also has two very recent posts on using LinkedIn and Twitter as part of the business development and sales process.
What else? Twitter raises more than $35 million (just before Valentine's Day) by the big guns in venture capital. Yet – no business model required.
Based on that context, I've started an account to get hands-on experience with Twitter. I think my home page is here. I can't stand to use instant messaging (although I do use it), so I'm not sure a federated "blurting"-thing is going to stick with me. That said, I'm willing to see whether carpal tunnel or Twitter wins out. I am also interested in developing my thoughts on both how Twitter communities form and how businesses might capitalize on Twitter.
Update (2/24/09): Link to approximately 8,414 consultants that Twitter? Side note: compare this to approximately ~1.2 million consultants on LinkedIn.
Welcome to Twitter Steve!
Sincerely,
@dalka
plus, thanks for pointing out twellow – aweful layout, but nice concept – of course first thing I did was claim my profile 🙂
Cheers
Florian (@floho)
I’ve had Twitter running for a couple of days now. Not yet sure how to make it more effective. I suspect that a lot has to do with either:
– small network size with Twitter as a whole
– lack of features within Twitter
– my specific interests
– my inability to decipher short tweets that basically look like “gronk-gronk-gabble-pop-tart-@-^^&&”
– my light usage of SMS on mobile phones
– a convoluted and formative tools ecosystem surrounding Twitter.
I did notice that of the hundreds of contacts in my address book that very few have Twitter accounts.
Early verdict. Lots of promise, but twitter needs the concept of private groups and messaging for the tool to be most useful for me. I think that is the main item. Lots of other things could be improved for usability, integration, privacy, etc., but the concept of private groups and messaging is at the top for me.
Welcome to twitter Steve!
Find me on @gautamghosh !
If you want to be a heavy twitter user, I’d suggest you use TweetDeck (an AIR application) to better manage the interface