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After following a link from Kevin Dente to a twitter client called Mixero and installing it I thought I would just list my 2 favourite Twitter clients, why I like them and what I dont like. First of all to those who do not see or understand the value of Twitter, its NOT Facebook and it does not attempt to be Facebook. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that has taken the world by storm and clearly if you do not “get it” you may never. I have had friends asking me “What is Twitter?”, “Is it like Facebook”, and I’m like you don’t get it so leave it. I use Twitter for one primary reason, fresh content. I get updates from top Microsoft guys in a quicker way than say through an RSS feed, and Twitter seems nicer than RSS feeds to me. So that is why I keep going back to Twitter, because knowledge is good, and if you know about things its always good.

In essence Twitter uses a 140 character mini-blog post from a user, me or you, about anything you think is important, and sometimes what some people say is important. Scott Gu is easier to follow through Twitter, as is people like Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. The social media’lites also use Twitter extensively. So when you post a Tweet (thats the term used) you have a choice of ways to do it, each with their drawbacks:

• Twitter: Go straight to the source, to the fountain, to the mothership. You will need a browser for this though (Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox) and although it does the job, once you close that browser window the connection to Twitter dies and any new content coming through wont be seen. Your Twitter page itself also refreshes content, but you need to click on a UI (user interface) element to get it to show the new tweets. So this is not my favourite way of connecting to Twitter. I do like the once-in-a-while changes to the main twitter login page though.
• Tweetdeck: I have been using Tweetdeck for quite some time now and I like it primarily because it allows me to update Facebook statuses and Twitter at the same time. I also like it because it notifies me when new Tweets are made. I dislike it because the UI that appears when a new Tweet comes in can get in the way sometimes, even though it has a close buttons
• Seesmic Look: I like it because it has been written using WPF and it looks slick and pretty. It does not display notifications of new Tweets though, which I wish it had

I went to a seminar on SEO and the like last year. A company called Quirk hosted it, and at the time I spoke to one of their people and she indicated to me that they have yet to establish a way to determine the value that social media can bring in terms of monetary benefit. That thought stuck in my head and accidentally I have been a Twitter user for quite some time now and this morning I came across a website called Twendz that ‘analyzes’ trends on Twitter and specifically it listed a lot of American Idol stuff. I know this has probably been done before, but by analyzing what people say on Twitter you get an insight into their thoughts and you can develop trends on those thoughts. I use Twitter to follow developers and I generally get fresh and new articles from them. Following the thoughts of developers might give you insight into their trends. A trend I see sometimes is that a lot of developers from Microsoft are either going to presentations or preparing for them. It also seems developers are developing apps that make use of social media platforms.

Social Media provides trends which to me directly relates to a measurable value. I also think Social Media relates to things such as Cloud Computing.

Does Microsoft, as a big corporate company, live in a vacuum where they think their products can exist and keep on being profitable without noticing how other competitive products work? Take PHP as an example. Microsoft have made sure that PHP can run on their web servers (IIS), and not just Apache, which makes you think that they have realised the importance and relevance of PHP in today’s web development environment. I mean its so easy to make obvious associations that say ASP sites can ONLY run on IIS or PHP site can only run on Apache, but these simplistic associations do not apply to business where a hybrid model often contributes to a business not because it runs better on one or other platform, but because it makes business sense.

Another immediate example I can think of is Twitter, which is used by Microsoft themselves, and not because its a Microsoft product or not but because of Twitter’s reach, and this translates into business sense. Microsoft can make more people aware by using something like Twitter.