It's ironic that people groan when Twitter comes-up in a conversation: "Another social network I have to maintain? No thanks." The reality is that Twitter is simple and low-key - the antithesis of the typical MySpace/LinkedIn annoyances. The brevity and immediacy of Twitter opens-up the possibility of interesting side applications.

Consider the characteristics:

• Twitter messages are necessarily brief (limited to text message length)
• They can also be immediately viewed if you use Twitterfox, a Firefox extension that sits in your status bar.
• You can easily have a network of many "followers", and there's no cost in terms of annoyance (basically, they're invisible to you until they "tweet.")

Taken altogether, this makes the perfect recipe for setting-up a social media newswire of sorts. You could gather-up friends and acquaintances who post links for fun or profit, and create a Twitter-based network for spreading the word.

To be continued...

Posted in Tags: firefox, social media, twitter