Less than a year ago a couple of veteran Web 2.0 warriors (Evan Williams and Biz Stone) got the idea to enable posting of personal SMS and IM messages to a public web page. Don MacAskill calls it “IRC Chat to the world”.

Twitter is the next step in the evolution of mobile chatting: Going from point to point communications to broadcasting your stream of consciousness out to the world.

If you have to ask “why” then it isn’t for you. If you’re the kind of person who feels lonely in a crowded room because your Internet connection is down Twitter is a godsend. Now you can let everyone important (your online buddies) know your status every moment of the day. If you have the time and energy.

In traditional blogging you spend 20 to 30 minutes composing your own personal OpEd piece. With Twitter you take a few seconds every couple of hours to shout out where you are or what you are doing. Instead of rants about government policy or Apple TV, Twitter users, Tweets not Twits, give us blow by blow accounts of their day: “Trying (and failing) to install VMware Fusion” and “On a conference call with a great team”.

Twitter pushes the envelope in a number of directions but I have two questions: How can advertising support Twitter? Can Twitter solve a weightier problem than the existential “Hello”?

Looking over several pages of Twitter posts it’s hard to get decent keywords or context by which to target ads. Discussion boards and chat rooms have the same problem. Sponsorships work but require working directly with advertisers. The other option is ad networks, like ContextWeb, that optimize broad offers.

Several Tweets are trying to use Twitter to hawk their goods (like woot.com) or their agendas (like kiva.org). Will twitter enable them to reach a wider, hipper, audience? Or are they just flitting away their time?

Editor’s Update: Twitter is hot.. now the Financial Times is talking about it -as is Steve Rubel, per usual, and Vecosys. Read what John Pavley of Context Web had to say about Twitter.

Tags: twitter, apple, moblog, mobile, blogging, contextweb

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