Maria Spassova

To be quite frank, the first time when I heard about Twitter I remembered the great Bridget Jones line, with which she defined the lawyers (her husband Mark Darcy’s colleagues) as “balding, Tory, upper middle class twits,” and of course provoked their justified resentment. The first thing I did when I heard about Twitter was to open the dictionary and check them meaning of twit and twitter.

It is also interesting to tell you when I first heard about Twitter. The magic word appeared on my horizon during the December riots in Athens, when with the help of this social contacts network, online surfers had the opportunity to view the events in the Greek capital for the first time live. A little bit later, I wasn’t surprised that the hostages of the Mumbai terrorists used Twitter to send messages to the outside world, while they were kept captive in a hotel room. In January the former military pilot landed an US Airways plane in Hudson River and an accidental witness recorded everything on his mobile phone and gave it to Twitter – all global news agencies reported from Twitter.

“If you still have not been acquainted with Twitter, then that means that you spent the last year with your head under the keyboard,” says Dan Nickerson, vice president of the company for internet analysis toponenetwork.com. And really – what is the thing, which differentiates Twitter from all the other social networks and what makes it so important and interesting for users and for analyzers?

In contrast to Facebook and MySpace, which are networks for creating and finding old friends, Twitter can be defined as an “interests club.” Each member of the “twittering” network declares his/her interest and signs in as a follower of other members with common interests. Those who have won him/her as a follower, return the favor and ad him/her to their list as well. Their followers also add him/her and this is how the network is created.

What does Twitter do for you? When you have declared your interests and have created circles of followers, they alarm you of everything, which could be of your interest in a message of 140 characters. In other words they twitter that an airplane has landed on Hudson River and if you are interested, then you go to the network and watch the video.

Based on data by Nielsen, Twitter is the fastest developing website in its category with growth of 1382%! Its users in the US are over 7 million and throughout the rest f the world – 3 million. Things have gotten so big, that in the States there are already twitterholics who can visit www.twitterholic.com. If you enter this website, you will see that the biggest twitterholic in the world is CNN and fourth place is taken by the US president Barack Obama, who during his election campaign had communicated with more than 600 000 of his voters through Twitter. Not long ago, grreporter.info became a member of Twitter, so if you would like you can find us there.

After all this, it makes sense that Google wants to buy the twitter network for $1.5 billion, which means that the owners of Twitter can divide among themselves $500 million each. They are Jack Dorsey, Ivan Williams and Isaak “Biz” Stone. Jack Dorsey starts working online in 2000, when he develops dispatch station for different services – taxis, couriers, etc. Even then he was interested in creating a real time connection, independently of where a person might be. Together with Stone they start developing the software and a little later Williams joins them, who had just sold his Blogger program to Google. His program supports millions of websites worldwide.

In order to create the “twitter” network they needed capital and it came from Benchmark Capital, Industrial Venture Partners and Bezos Expeditions, the company, which created Amazon. In 2006 Twitter is a fact. It qualities were firstly evaluated by the media – the global network practically put all medias in direct competition. To be the first one to announce news is no longer a guarantee for success. You have to show a picture, you need to report it live, online and you need to provide some type of an interactive link. Twitter offers all that. After the media, all politicians, actors and any professional understand the importance of this network. If you want your work to reach as many professionals around the world as possible, then you need to bet on Twitter.

So run and sign up in the “twitter” network so you don’t have to chase after your competition.