Growing at a YOY growth of 343%, Twitter bagged the top position of the top 10 fastest growing social networking sites for September 2008. Twitter started off as an internal office communicator, but it was officially launched to the public in Jul 2006.  

Moving away from the traditional blogs which requires a long time to write and conceptualize the content, Twitter is a cross breed between blogs and Instant Messaging (IM) termed as micro-blogging. Limited to a word count of 140, tweets are straight to the point, easier to read and invite more comments.

Users are able to update their Twitter feed using the twitter website, SMS, emails and even through applications such as Twitterrific and Facebook. On the other end, the Twitter feed can be received through similar methods and RSS feed.

Interestingly, even though its interface has been entirely in English, Twitter has been very popular among the Japanese. Recently in April 2008, Twitter decided to launch the program in Japanese to cater and attract more Japanese users.

Twitter is also gaining the attention of large corporations such as Cisco who has been using it to provide products and services updates. BBC also uses twitter to send breaking news or sporting updates. During the California wildfire in 2007, the fire department used Twitter to update the Californian community.

Twitter also organizes campaigns on the most popular topics recently and they track what are being mentioned about the topic. Acting as a forum, twitter updates the campaign site every minute to gather the public opinion. One example would be the election 2008 where they tracked the key phrase being mentioned in the tweets and it was found that tax, that one, nuclear, and health care were among the top mentioned.

For marketers, trends with the online community can be easily measured using Twittermeter. Twittermeter uses the Twitter API to scrape the site’s public feed and creates a database of every word sent over Twitter, and then it creates buzz graphs comparing words to find the trend for the day or week.

For individuals, to measure your popularity, you can use the twInfluence that uses the Twitter API to gauge the reach of your Tweets and the people who read them. On this site, it will reveal who is the most influential in Twitter, your personal velocity (how quickly you’ve gained quality followers) and also your social capital (how many high-influence people follow you).

Another application of Twitter would be the Tweet Scan, which you can search for information on all the tweets being sent out before. It acts as a real-time search engine for Twitter, identi.ca and eight other Laconica based sites.

With such rapid expansion of Twitter, I believe that it will become the next generation of Google. We should continue to watch out for it!