Notwithstanding all the .com failures over the past 15 years it’s unusual to see an Internet phenom change the waterfront so much as twitter. If you were otherwise not aware, twitter with a member base of about 4 million is a micro-blogging service which limits its messages to 140 characters and it just announced that it raised $35 million in third round of funding. However twitter has never had a marketing plan, and as a matter of fact twitter just hired its first director of business development. There was a lot of media attention on twitter when President Obama planned to use twitter to announce his running mate in 2008.

Is twitter on its way to being an Internet giant?
 

A recent article speculated that twitter is replacing Second Life as a business tool because of twitter’s ease of use on cell phones, takes little time to set up, and requires no software. On the other hand Second Life and other virtual worlds, require substantial time and resources to set up. Not to mention that one cannot conduct business in Second Life on your cell. Many B2B marketers are using twitter including BearingPoint, British Air, and McKinsey & Co. Dell Outlet sold hundreds of refurbished computers in a couple of hours by merely sending tweets (a twitter message).
 

Security Concerns for Social Networks
 

At a recent security conference researchers reported that apparently, without much surprise, individuals who use social networks are naïve and as a result have absolute trust in communications they receive from friends in twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. As we are all aware, with the growth of Web 2.0, millions of individuals around the world are spending vast amounts of time and energy with to these social networks. However, these security researchers demonstrated how imposters using these various Web 2.0 networks can steal identities and personal information with great ease. Given these warning of security issues we need to stay tuned for the continued evolution of twitter and the other social networks.
 

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