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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:

• Living in the Clouds
• Living in the Clouds - Gmail
• Living in the Clouds - Google Calendar
• Living in the Clouds - Remember The Milk
• Living in the Clouds - Gmail Contacts
• Living in the Clouds - Google Notebook
• Living in the Clouds - Evernote
• Living in the Clouds – Diigo
• Living in the Clouds - Flickr