One of the questions that I get all the time from readers is, “why is Twitter such a big deal?” One great example of why Twitter matters is to look at what happened with the Tiger Woods car accident this weekend. Twitter users knew within minutes of the accident that Tiger had an accident, had hit a fire hydrant and tree and that his wife had knocked out a back window in order to get him out of the car. A full 45 minutes after Twitter was already alive with this information, with many users passing the news on to all their followers with the predictable blossoming of delivery, the mainstream press reported that Tiger had an accident and… Not much else. In other words, you can get more complete news faster on Twitter than from the mainstream TV providers. This brings us to the concept of Real Time.

So one answer to the question of why Twitter matters is that it has a nearly real time ability to deliver information. In addition, if one uses some of the filtering tools that are available, a user can also filter what real time information is really important to them so they do not get swamped in real time news that might not be important. It should mean something to people that in just a few short years of existence, Twitter has become a staple for many people in how they get news and information from not only their friends (trivial news) or their business associates (more pertinent news) but also the world in general. Oh, by the way, the news you get is nearly real time – in other words, you get it in a flash directly to your phone if you choose to.

Real Time as a concept is getting more and more press these days. TechCrunch recently held a whole conference devoted to real time software applications that are being delivered to facilitate people getting information very quickly after it happens. This will lead people to the next question, which will be, “why do I need to get information in real time?” The answers to that can range from the excitement of being the first in the know, to the very real business advantage of having information sooner than your competitors. My observation is that we have concentrated more on the ability to just get information, versus getting it in real time. As we get more sophisticated with business intelligence tools, and social technologies, we will start to see that being able to receive critical information faster is a huge advantage. To get there, we will have to get better at using filtering tools in order to instruct the gigantic flow of information we can tap into as to what is specifically important to us.

Reason number three is now explained as to why Twitter matters, so that you can have access to important news faster than your competitors. If you missed reasons one and two, they are that you can use Twitter to create a river of information into your brain (through who you follow) and you can become an industry expert (based on getting people to follow you.)

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

p.s. If you are not following me on Twitter, then why not? Do so now here: @sklososky.