The start of 2009 has seen an upsurge in media coverage of Twitter here in the UK. True, most of it either concerns Stephen Fry (talking about it on the Jonathan Ross show, getting stuck in a lift, having nearly as big a following as Barack Obama...) or how celebs are boring us with their mundane tweets.
Many Twitter early adopters (me included) have been bemoaning the fact that one of the best-kept secrets of the internet is OUT. That's right, our precious Twittersphere is about to be overrun by scammers, oiks, ignoramuses and in-yer-face marketers. We have the doom-mongerers predicting Twitter's death and various commentators debating whether it's going mainstream or not.
Despite feeling a little sad to see Twitter being embraced as a celebrity-stalker's dream app, I'm nonetheless quite excited by some of the ways it's being used by businesses, from customer service to fundraising to live wine-tasting. Personally I've been impressed by the service from Campaign Monitor - alerting users to any maintenance issues and answering my queries quickly and with a human tone of voice. It's very different from the personality-free flavour of most 'customer service' emails with their ticket numbers and nauseatingly polite (though often unhelpful) scripts. And it's in real time. Like calling across to someone in the same room and getting a reply.
Of course, for most businesses Twitter needs to reach a critical mass of users if it's really going to have any application. But I see it already having a use in business-to-business environments and among niche communities, as it already has for online marketers, journalists and techies.
A year ago I wouldn't even have mentioned Twitter to anyone outside of my work sphere, thinking it not worth the hassle explaining and even feeling a little defensive about it. But in a discussion today with Rob Shepherd of Press Dispensary, he said he thought Twitter was going to be as big and as revolutionary as texting. I had to agree.
It certainly feels a bit like it did in 2000, when even technophobes realised the internet was here to stay, and my Dad asked 'what's a website?'
