Twitter Case

1. Is Twitter just a smart idea, or a real business opportunity?

User Interface – Pros and Cons

In my opinion, Twitter is a very effective form of communication in today’s society where ‘time is money’ and people are overloaded with too much information. As a result, the leading trend towards modern communication can be described with a phrase, ‘short and sweet’ – meaning that professionals, managers and people with busy schedules now prefer to receive more of direct, concise and short messages. Twitter is an example of perfect application that allow this type of information transfer by implementing word limits to 140 words and enabling real-time updates. For instance, Ernst & Young, one of the largest accounting and advisory firms in the world, now encourages Twitter use for keeping in touch with potential candidates for recruitment purposes (e.g. follow-up tweets instead of sending follow-up emails). The case also outlines another positive example in comparison to Facebook users can only communicate with each other by mutual consent, whereas anyone can log into Twitter and sign up to view any public tweets they like. By allowing strangers (Twitter now enables people who doesn’t even have an account to view the tweets) to access the tweets, it also increases changes of making something go viral (‘word-of-finger’ rather than ‘word-of-mouth’). Tweeter also works as a customer relation facilitator – for instance, as we have analyzed in the case of the ‘United Breaks Guitar’, more and more customer relationships are built and affected through twitter. Twitter has become a tool for approaching readers on a more personal level. For instance, even the Pope who lives in Vatican, tweets through his account and this shows how an ‘holy’ and ‘unapproachable’ figure such as the Pope suddenly can be more personal to readers.

One of the main disadvantages of Twitter, in my opinion, is that the 140 word-limit sometimes restrict users from expressing themselves fully (they...