INTRODUCTION

While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks, MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year.

As Twitter grows it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce, and create communities for their users.

individual consumer the chance to choose which firms he is willing to get messages from directly

Whole Foods and JetBlue have successfully marketed themselves as being “customer centric”, the kinds of companies that would not misuse the opportunity to have access to a customer’s private Twitter information.

Twitter users have set up their own rules for conduct when using the service, not unlike MySpace and Facebook.  These rules were not put together by Twitter itself which only mandates rules of use. Like many social network sites, Twitter is “self governed” by its members and companies must take that into account as they join the service.

SUGGESTED TOP BUSINESS IMPACTS IN THE NEXT 2-3 YEARS:

1 Hyper-local marketing

2 Marketers using outdoor ads will have to give Twitter users an incentive to report that they have seen a billboard

3 Twitter will become a huge platform for discussing stocks and other financial instruments and will probably replace message boards.  This kind of information market for stocks has already begun to emerge through services like StockTwits.  Twitter is one of the most disruptive technologies to become part of the financial markets in decades.

4 Twitter will allow content operations which have limited numbers of employees and small distribution budgets access to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users based on the community’s views of the “merit” of their content.

5 Data mining. Collecting data about what people think about products or services is among the most expensive activities of large companies that rely on consumers for their sales.

6 Large media companies are already using Twitter as a way to alert people to breaking news and new features.  Twitter has the opportunity to become a distribution method for premium content.

7 The use of Twitter for “micropayments”, small loans or payments to companies for services, which is essentially no more than an extension of a user’s PayPal, checking, or credit card accounts is already is in its early stages.  Twitpay and services like it will extend the reach of operations like eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal. eBay, Amazon (AMZN),

8 Twitter may not replace the landline, the cell phone or voice and texting communications but it will certainly supplement them as a way to get around telecom data plans.

9 Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs that allow emergency notices to make their way to citizens quickly.

10. Philanthropy “as business” use of Twitter will involve social activism and fund-raising.   The Twitpay aspect of Twitter will become essential to fund raising as people can make donations to a cause while they are in the middle of a march for that cause.

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