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In this week’s edition of Living in the Clouds
Series, I am going to talk about Twitter. Some people might argue that Twitter
is a Web 2.0 app and not a cloud app, etc.. Well, I am not disputing their
arguments. We can go either way on whether we should push the Cloud term on
Twitter or not. But, I would like to consider Twitter as a part of my Cloud
toolkit.
I am a full fledged Cloud user and I don’t have a physical office. My
co-workers are distributed all around the world. Twitter serves as a water
cooler for me and also for many other web workers with their offices on the
Clouds. One of my companies in India use Twitter to keep in touch with the
Clients. Increasingly, we are seeing many brands engaging with their customers
using Twitter. Twitter can be considered as Water Cooler on the Clouds, Helpdesk
Application, Marketing toolbox on the Clouds, etc.
As I was preparing to write this week’s edition in this series, I also came
across Tim O’ Reilly’s post on why he likes
Twitter. I, then, decided to talk about Twitter this week. It is a powerful
tool to have one to many or many to many communications/conversations. It can be
used for chitchats on politics or sports, it can be used to finalize business
deals, it can be used to source information for blog posting, it can be used as
marketing and support tools for a business, etc.. Twitter is fast becoming a
must have web app for the web workers and businesses.
As it is customary in this series, I will include a video on Twitter
Let me talk about the Pros and Cons of Twitter from my Point of View.
Pros:
- Character limit on the messages keeps the conversation crisp.
- SMS support is very handy for businesses using Twitter to interact with
their customers. Twitter is phasing out SMS support in many countries in order
to reduce their expenditure. However, they could offer it as a paid add-on to
keep Twitter stay relevant for businesses. - Twitter search, after integrating
Summize into their application, has become a very powerful tool to monitor the
conversation on any topic in Twitter. - The ease with which Twitter can be integrated with other Web applications
like Remember the Milk, I Love Sandy, etc. makes Twitter more useful as a part
of productivity toolkit. - Twitter’s API has allowed an application ecosystem to flourish.
Cons:
- Intermittent Twitter outage is frustrating for many users. They are
improving on this but they need to do more. - Unreliability of Twitter SMS. People have reported problems in receiving
notifications. - Restriction on API usage. I do understand that it costs Twitter money but
they could charge money and remove this restriction.
Previous Articles in this Series:
