social media

Twitter is one of the tech wonders that really took off last year. According to Compete.com number of unique visitors to Twitter has increased almost 10 times from Dec '07 to Dec '08. If we also account for the fact that most Twitter users use it from desktop applications that are not easy to track, the actual usage numbers are probably even more impressive. No doubt, that's a mind-bobbling success for any Web-based business.

But what is Twitter? The Twitter website describes itself as follows:

Now, that does not sound too interesting. Let's be honest: most people don't do anything worth announcing across the world. Unless you are some kind of serious travel-addict or a wild celebrity of sorts, which most of us, are not. Who wants to read meaningless messages like: "Went out to get some food from McDonalds. Recession, indeed" from dozens of people?

Then why do millions of people use Twitter?

... or his campaign team does. Either way, when I logged into my Linkedin account yesterday and saw a banner spotlighting Barack Obama's participation in one of my interest groups, I could not help a "wow" reaction.

We have already blogged that 2008 Presidential campaign is being run in an unprecedentedly Web-savvy manner. Pretty much all candidates, in both parties, have a MySpace page and a bunch of YouTube videos, at the least. This may sound trivial now, but if you look back 4 years ago - the picture was quite different, was it not? The candidates have come a long way, but Barack's team is taking it a notch further. Whilst most candidates do suffice with the minimal - MySpace, YouTube, maybe FaceBook, the featured participation of Obama in a specific interest group on Linkedin is a great example of entering the conversation on the Web at the right spot.