Laura (twitter.com/pistachio) is an independent consultant whose two very young children create some lifestyle choices. Basically, she has to work mostly from home. Twitter has been her business network and support group. Without really trying, she has collected an entourage of nearly 900 followers, and that has led to business, speaking invitations and personal relationships.

Laura Twitters constantly, describing professional and life experiences in 140-character bursts. She supplements her text posts with videos from Seesmic.com, an instant video messaging service that’s still in test phase. It’s a type of journaling called moblogging (mobile blogging) and it has an appeal all its own.

For active mobloggers (Twitter is the preferred medium) blogs are a collection of short bursts that spark mini-conversations. The structured thesis of the type that you’re reading now doesn’t fit this model. Blog entries are a sequence of miniature thoughts and observations, each expressed in the charmingly succinct language of a space-limited medium. People cover hour-long conference keynote speeches as a sequence of Twitter messages. There’s even an emerging style of Twitter language that prompts the greatest possible response. I can’t say I understand it, but it’s a great topic for a follow-up article.

Back to Laura. The other day, she was pondering what to make for breakfast. She Twittered “pancakes or waffles?” to her followers and within two minutes had 10 responses. Today she recorded me talking about my proposal for how Starbucks should be the next great media power (e-mail me for more on this). She posted the video using Seesmic and, within 20 minutes, had a half-dozen comments. Conventional bloggers should be so lucky.

I spent the lunch hour today at a table full of Twitter enthusiasts. It struck me that they are exhilarated by the idea of making connections. To them, Twitter is a lifeline to people they’d never otherwise meet or stay in contact with, and that serendipity is one of the service’s principal attractions.

The chance to find out information provided by those connections is another appeal. One Twitterer proposed that the service is actually a corollary to daily newspapers. In the same sense that newspapers provide guided discovery to information identified by editors, moblogs offer discovery of information identified by trusted sources of any kind. The two approaches fulfill a similar need. They just do it in different ways.

Labels: twitter blogging small_business

¶ 11:52 PM