So many people seem confused about what Twitter really is and what it is good for. First, let’s clearly disabuse anyone of thinking Twitter is just like Facebook status updates. It is not that. Facebook status updates are more personal in nature and tend to answer the question “What are you doing now?” Tweets on the other hand answer the question,”What have you learned

Now let’s compare Twitter to an RSS feed. You can sit in your RSS reader (usually a browser or an email client) and the updates come to you,, which is great for blogs and news sites you are already aware of and trust.  

Then there are the sites that are full of information you never knew you were dying to know about.. So how can you possibly know about all the cool content you could know about? The answer:  find someone you trust, who spends their time discovering and reporting on things you want to learn about and follow their every move. They effectively become a human RSS feed for tons of information you would never find out about otherwise. Enter: Twitter.  

Eventually the vast majority of users will realize that Twitter is a personal promotional tool (I promote my content and I also promote what I find interesting elsewhere ), it will become more and more valuable,  providing you with the “Wisdom of Crowds” to get recommendations for what you should spend your time looking at. Once that happens, tools that aggregate the best Tweets from the best Tweeters on a specific subject will become the most important way to deal with not just Tweets, but entire conversations over multiple platforms including email, chats, texts and every other form of electronic communication. Twitter is another step in the process as we try to figure out how to deal with the complexity of so much input of information in our daily lives.

I believe the Millennials who have not converted over already will actually find microblogging very useful in the near future. The network effect still needs to kick in for these services but it’s well on the way. Groups, organizations, news outlets, companies are all creating Twitter names and are starting to generate message streams. As the Millennials develop their unique expertise or they work for a company whose products and services they want to promote, microblogging will be the way of choice to reach a large group of people quickly and easily. Even if the same people read the same message on a social network, the context is completely different and the message will not be effective. This is the key point I think most people miss. It’s not about the social networks adding a stream up status updates and suddenly they are just the same as a microblogging site. Why would I expect the place where friends share pictures and where they are going for dinner to have messages about a new product I should check out or where I should go look for some authoritative information that may help me in my job?

Social Networks and Microblogging are very different services, have very different user demographics and users use them for very different purposes. Tweetdeck is a great way to see this because it allows you to very easily see Facebook friend status feeds and Twitter update feeds side by side so we can see how very different they are. In One Place I mostly see things like where people are, what they are doing, who they are seeing and what they like. Great stuff when I have my social networking hat on. In the other, I see blogs I must go read, lectures I might want to listen to, new products to check out and lots about good causes I might consider helping. Also great stuff when I want to hear what my friends, whose judgement I depend on to cut through the market chatter, think I might get a lot of benefit from.