Hosting Professionals and Twitter

For those of you not yet familiar with Twitter, it is a micro blogging service that is catching on very quickly. According to the Twitter website, ''Twitter asks one question, "What are you doing?" Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.'' You can see some examples of the ''Tweets'' (that's what you call it when someone Twitters) by checking out what people are saying at Twitter about HostReview.

Ease of use and the real-time immediacy of the product have lead to explosive growth. For example, It was recently reported by the BBC that Twitter, has grown nearly tenfold over the past year in the UK. Twitter has now overtaken Digg in popularity. If you want to explore what's involved in getting started with Twitter, there is an excellent overview entitled, Twitter: The how to get started guide for businesspeople.

So how is Twitter being used by the web hosting and webmaster industry? Ms. Kelly Kleiner is Vice President of Sales with iNET Interactive and is currently working on the marketing and communications plan for HostingCon 2009. Among the many avenues that Ms. Kleiner will use to get the word out about this year's conference will be Twitter. Plans are still being formulated, but it is likely that some of the news and content from the HostingCon blog will be send along using Twitter as well. On a related HostingCon note, Ms. Kleiner pointed out that the deadline for speaker proposals is just about upon us. If you are interested in speaking at HostingCon this year - you must submit your proposal in the next few days. In early February, the HostingCon Program Selection Team will review the proposals and select the speakers to present.

One very interesting use of Twitter was recently reported by UK hosting provider, 34SP.com. The UK recently suffered through some of the most extreme snow storms in the past 20 years. The BBC and TechCrunch reported that as soon as the snow began to fall, there were Twitter mashups that appeared to track the storm progress. One such application was created by 34SP.com customer, Ben Marsh. Mr. Marsh's application enlisted the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK. Respondents reported their postcode and then selected a number from 1-10 to rate the snowfall amount. The mashup then graphically displayed the results using a Google satellite map of the UK. This produced a real-time graphical map of the snowfall amounts as reported by people who were actually there on the ground. You can read more about the Twitter / Google UK snow mashup here. According to Daniel Foster, Technical Director and co-founder of 34SP.com, ''Our bandwidth is supplied by Level 3, AboveNet, and Cogent. This is a fully BGP routed, multi-homed network. Failure of any two of the three providers won't affect connectivity. Additionally, the 34SP.com network operates far below total capacity, so any unexpected increases in usage will not cause any network disruptions. This is a key consideration when someone like Ben Marsh gets significant media attention in a short period.''

Brett Tabke has worked in the computer industry for almost three decades. Mr. Tabke is the CEO and founder of WebmasterWorld Inc. and Chairman of the webmaster exhibition and conference, PubCon. He was also the founder of PHD Software Systems, a specialty software manufacture that produced a line of software for Commodore computers in the 80's and 90's. Mr. Tabke has also coined several common SEO phrases such as ''Link Farm'', ''SEO Themes'', and the ubiquitous ''SERP'' (Search Engine Results Page). Brett Tabke uses Twitter extensively and lends his insight on the service as a business and social networking tool, ''The most compelling reason to use Twitter is Reach. I posted a tweet yesterday that was retweeted and it was in front of more than 25,000 Twitter users within 7minutes. Other than a TV and Radio, I don't know of another media outlet that can produce those kinds of results that fast.''

Mr. Tabke also related his thoughts on why Twitter has grown so quickly, ''They found a way to reskin the public chat room and make it workable. Before email, there was chat and chat worked until all the rooms got spammed when they reached a break even attendance level.''

One final parting note about Twitter. The company apparently reduced the size of its corporate logo on the main Twitter website on February 2, 2009. This caused a minor uproar from the Twitter community. You can read up on the logo change and the ensuing Twitter mayhem here.