Revisting Twitter: Founder tweets, Yearbook Yourself, Hit Me Later

Network World and this Alpha Doggs blog have fiddled around with Twitter, like so many others on the Web, trying to figure out if it's worth the bother.

We and other IDG publications, like CIO, have also been trying to figure out whether Twitter is of any use to enterprise IT pros like those who read us. We do know that a slideshow we ran recently on popular Twitter tools was a hit, based on the number of people who read it.

I recently asked Biz Stone, one of Twitter's founders,  a few questions and got pretty Twitter-sized answers. First, the company doesn't share any numbers about how many Tweets are sent, what traffic is now vs. a year ago, etc.

As for how Stone is seeing Twitter embraced by companies, he says: "Distributed teams use Twitter to stay in touch in a simple way. Other companies and organizations are using Twitter as an interesting hybrid between customer service and marketing." Will Twitter create a corporate-specific version? Stone replies: "We'll continue to evolve and adapt. As commercial usage grows it's possible we would move to support it in a way that makes sense." On the topic of companies using Twitter as a customer service tool, Stone says: "Smart companies are realizing that every interaction with a customer is a marketing opportunity and that's true even when they're complaining. Companies can use Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) to filter real-time mentions of their brand and instantly interact with customers. The more successful companies and organizations on Twitter are compelling to follow. For example, I follow friends, co-workers, jetblue, and wholefoods."

Given that we'd done the Twitter tools slideshow, I also asked Stone about whether he had any favorites. He gave Twitter Search a plug, but also mentioned using Twitterific to access Twitter via his iPhone.

One thing I always do when I visit Twitter is run a few searches on topics of interest. For whatever reason, I was wondering whether the guy ("Pud") who used to run a web site about failing startups called F*cked Company might be Twittering and sure enough he is. The guy Tweets a lot, and I have to say, I did learn a few things after browsing through a series of his messages. For one, he has cooked up a new application called Hit Me Later, that's an e-mail management tool of sorts. You basically e-mail this website to have it send you back your own emails of choice at an hour to be determined (say 24 hours from now).

Pud also introduced me to an application called Yearbook Yourself in which you upload a picture of yourself into an application that shows you what you would have looked like in yearbooks (hair styles, clothing styles) through the decades...Pud was just crushed that the app had apparently gone down.