Legal Commentary

Thoughts About Twitter

By Patrick J. Lamb

I have not been able to figure out Twitter.  Here's the description from Wikipedia:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. The service is free to use over the Internet, but using SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

As you can see, individual messages are known as "tweets."  Cute.  But I still can't see how this helps me be a better lawyer or develop new business.

My own lack of imagination, however, should not be read as an indictment of Twitter-ing or Twitter-world.  It is, instead, a confession that I need to spend some time pondering the value of this social-networking phenomenon.  In the meantime, I bring you Matt Homann's 100 Tweets: Thinking About  Law Practice In 140 Characters Or Less.   My friend Anne Reed from Milwaukee now has 606 people following her tweets.  Anne writes the highly regarded Deliberations blog.  And I often see people linking to this blog from Twitter.  So there clearly are discussions of interest going on in Twitter-world.  Time to start thinking.

Perhaps the biggest challenge here is figuring out whether I could ever say anything worthwhile in 140 characters or less.

ADDENDUM:  After posting this, I ran across a Fast Company FC Expert Blog post titled Why Guy Kawasaki Is Wrong About Twitter, which links to Guy's post, How to Use Twitter as a Twool.  Both are good reading if you share my ambivalent feelings about Twitter.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on May 11, 2009 (boomark / email).