Tweets from Space - Now that's out of this world!

When I initially heard that last Friday astronaut TJ Creamer made history, my mind raced with images of new moons, precious minerals, even E.T. Wrong! In Texas, a sprinkle of snow is considered an arctic freeze and on some media stations, an astronauts tweeting from space is considered a history event.

I will admit that it is pretty cool. Especially for the Twitter.com marketing team who is probably beaming from ear to ear about the publicity.

So is Twitter still a fad? Is it still nothing but spam and porn? Do people waste their time retweets, replying, and direct messaging other members?

Regardless of where you stand on the Twitter-love Scale, one tweet brought Twitter into the spotlight:

"Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s"

What is the deal with Twitter?

I've been social networking for about 4-5 years.  And yes, I believe it when Facebook claims that people spend 3 billion second a day on their site.  What's the first thing I do in the morning, check my email, respond to any linkedin requests, check out facebook - maybe comment on a picture/message a friend happy birthday, and then of course eat breakfast.  It's only the natural order that I love and have grown accustom to.  But recently, I find myself asking what's the deal with twitter.  So last week I hopped on the bandwagon for a bit of research mixed with pure curiosity.  Jumping in with both feet, the sign-in process was extremely simple.  In fact, you could probably count the features of twitter on one hand.  To set up your profile, you can add a picture, short bio and website link.  Once that's complete, you can search for friends, colleagues, companies, etc.. to follow them and in turn you can be followed.  Then the core part of twitter is tweeting.  Each tweet can be 140 characters long and tweets are meant to answer the question...what are you doing?  Oh and you can tweet as often as you want.

So to establish myself in this tweeting-twitter loving world, I tweet every few days, follow several people and as a result several people are following me.  I added a picture, filled out my bio and of course linked my website.  OK. Success.  But now what?  I find myself asking the question "What's so great about twitter?"  Then my marketing brain starts kicking in segmenting their target market, reviewing close competitors, and conceptualizing the major strategic initiatives for twitter.  My conclusion is that twitter has a very different profile than facebook/myspace.  Twitter which has no connotations for attracting a huge body of high school/ college 'kids' is more comparable to linkedin (or wants to be).  The major tweeters are individuals for professional development and businesses.  If I want to tell my friends I partied till 4am or just ate a big sandwich for lunch -- facebook or myspace it is, but if I want to know what's going on with all the various IT networks out there - SEO Jobs, website design companies, wordpress, and share blog stories or freelance jobs - tweeter it may be.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep tweeting (www.twitter.com/webalicious) and take maybe 20 seconds away from facebook time and give it to twitter.