Twitter: Strictly for the Twits?

Twitter is being hailed as a revolutionary social networking technology. Can these claims hold hold water?

Twitter is yet another of the social networking techologies that seem to be proliferating with alarming regularity these days. For the incognoscenti, Twitter is essentially a technology that allows multicasting of SMS (Short Messaging Service) messages, i.e., sending SMSs to groups of people.

One can be forgiven if their first impression when told about this technology is one of complete inanity (as indeed, mine was !).

However, the technology does seem to have assembled a fairly formidable phalanx of support. Business Week seems to think it matters . It has been subjected to some fairly elaborate analysis. And (with some hyperbole), it has been hailed as the most important development on the web in 2008 .

The horse sense view would be that while the technology has been put to some serious uses, it still has a long way to go to prove its credentials as anything much more than a mechanism that supports leisure and keeping up with gossip. And oh, such a development is quite consistent with the need of a telecommunications industry that faces maturity, and is in search of new avenues for gleaning revenues.

And so, the impression of inanity appears set to persist for some time to come.