Show me the money
With the exception of marketing people, the media and possibly celebrities, there are no obvious commercial benefits to using Twitter. It's possible to spend your entire day (and many people who you would expect to be too busy seem to do just that) monitoring Twitter and telling the world what you had for breakfast, or whatever, but it's still not clear what the point is.
Plenty of other commentators have tried, for example this piece on Information Week a month ago, but as with so much in the Web 2.0 world, including the business model of Twitter itself, the point seems to be to acquire traffic, or followers, and think about how to monetise it, if at all, later.
As editor of HEXUS.channel I confess to falling into the ‘Media' and ‘Voyeur' categories above. I guess the exhibitionist in me is already catered for by me having my writing in the public domain and I probably border on all the other categories too.
What I can't do, however, is spend a lot of time writing tweets in addition to those auto-generated by Twitterfeed. I simply don't have time. So the question I have yet to find the answer to is how those people who spend a lot of time on Twitter pay the bills.
It doesn't generate revenue in and of itself and it can be very time consuming. So notwithstanding the ego-related reasons above, what is the point of Twitter? I would be genuinely grateful for answers to that question in the HEXUS.community.
