Twitter has already proved that its not a fad. Besides the large number of users and clones, its becoming an influent service. You can simply check whenever the website is down, the interface changes or they just release a new tiny feature, the proportions of the buzz it can generate. Its influence can also be measured by the several voices that raised to question Twitter’s value and utility and the service’s ambiguity doesn’t help. Typing 140 characters maximum messages about what we’re doing at the moment doesn’t seem much, but it’s simplicity helped the growth of a new kind of social medium.

I’ve made a short list of the most common examples of uses given to Twitter, from what I’ve seen so far.

Short Messaging Service

This is basically the main feature sold. And it’s what I usually use to describe Twitter to non-geek friends: you can send a short message to a large number of friends, via Internet, mobile phone or instant messenger. You can tell them about the party you’re going next Saturday night, the book you just bought or just that you going to bed early tonight. A good away to keep your friends closer, although this kind of usage is regularly described as personal spam. It really depends on what purpose you’re looking for.

Micro-blogging

Since many early adopters and frequent users of Twitter are bloggers, they’ve begun to see in Twitter a solution for they’re need to get in touch with their audience quicker. They found themselves sending more short announcements, sometimes a quick link or just a notice for their readers, and then writing less but longer articles on their blogs. This helped to define better the two mediums. And through Twitter the conversation is always more direct and instinctive.

Chatting

Many of us still miss the IRC days. Even though Twitter’s ability to create a line of discussion through replies is lacking, I found myself several times chatting with a couple of friends about topic, usually triggered by someone message. The messages are usually directed to someone, but since everyone is listening, it doesn’t take much until others start dropping their opinions.

Notifications

Got a product? Want to keep costumers/readers/users updated? Just create a Twitter account. This is becoming quite common, since the platforms popularity started to rise high enough to be noticeable. Sometimes it’s just a RSS feed turned into a messages timeline or an automatic update from a new released version. But you can talk directly to users who care about what you have to sell and make them receive updates in harder places to get in, like while they’re walking on the street with a mobile phone on their pocket.

Anything Else…

Releasing an open “API”: for everyone from the project’s start has proved to be a great idea for any kind of service, and it became a special ingredient for Twitter users. Now they can enjoy many different clients and mashups, community made, besides new kinds of services based on its platform (my TwitterNotes project is a good example of this). Then Twitter can simply be useful for anything else.

I’m not saying you should you use Twitter for anything, however. The saying “do one thing well” applies to many services on the web. If you mix ambiguity with simplicity you can get an almost universal platform, but that doesn’t mean you’ll start developing large websites using notepad, for example.

Twitter’s purpose is communication, and while some might only find value on 1/3/5/10% of the messages shared, a large proportion of users would agree that the value of something as random as a thought, might be very important to a small group of people, even if it’s just your next door neighbor.

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