If you’re not already familiar with twitter, then you’re currently missing out on one of the ‘newest’ (although Twitter is past it’s second birthday) social utility/networking websites sweeping the web.

To get a glimpse of the basic concept of twitter take a look at this video introduction from Common Craft:

With the premise of ‘What are you doing?‘  twitter users can post any open-ended message, thought, url/link, question, etc as long as it fits into the space of 140 characters (text letters).  Aside from ‘tweeting’ your own messages, you can ‘follow’ or subscribe to view the messages of others. Now, this doesn’t seem that powerful, does it? Well, it is and hopefully this will be apparent if you’re able to make it through the self-conversation that follows.

The problem with the video above and the basic premise of ‘What are you doing?‘ is that it causes a lot of misconceptions about the uses of twitter.

If you’re a twitter user and you talk to someone who isn’t, you’ll often get responses such as: “So you just let people know what you’re doing 24/7? Isn’t that somewhat creepy – if not stalkerish?” The quick answer would be “Sometimes.” While there are occurrences of people tweeting day and night about what they eat and where they’re sitting, the majority of people have something more substantive and interesting to say, and a smaller minority are using twitter for it’s unique and true ‘power’ – realizing there’s more than meets the eye.

On the most basic of levels, Twitter is the heartbeat of the web and often the world. Unique to Twitter is it’s ‘trending topics’ that show the most talked about unfiltered phrases or words circulating right now in real-time (no delay) across the web. This means if something important (or not so much) is happening or a major event occurs that affects a huge crowd and likely yourself, you’ll see it on twitter before anywhere else. Since trending topics are unfiltered, non-censored, and carry no agenda the most raw and current events display themselves.

To give an example, Michael Jackson died on June 25 and before the news networks and newspapers could announce the news, twitter was erupting in a Michael Jackson panic of speculation and hospitalization announcements. Twitter users broke the news to the majority before the media could, which is an enormous feat considering the power of today’s media outlets.

For most of us though, knowing what’s happening on a global scale might be interesting, but it’s not dire or interesting enough to sign-up for another site we’ll barely visit and less-often use. Going along with the misconception, if Twitter was only about answering ‘What are you doing’ would it be so bad? If you could know that your favorite band just booked a tour to your city,  your favorite author just finished their newest book and is giving away free copies, or the hero you never thought you’d meet could reply to something you wrote, would you want the opportunity? If you could ask a question and get hundreds of replies instantly, would that be beneficial? Could it potentially be educational?

The power of Twitter lies not just in what people are saying, but who is saying it. If I, an illiterate cook,  tweet “I ate the best cheesecake of my life at Mario’s Bakery” it’ll probably go unnoticed. If  Padma Lakshmi or Tom Colicchio of Top Chef tweet the same thing, it carries a new level of effectiveness – at least for those in the food industry, and I’m sure Mario’s Bakery wouldn’t mind. If you’ve ever wondered how something is accomplished or how to improve on an area in your life, all that’s needed is to follow an expert in your field of interest, and twitter gives people this opprotunity.

As an actionscript and flash developer, I follow the most influential flash developers on the web through twitter. The reason I do this is because they’re not tweeting what they ate for breakfast; they’re talking about the new things they’ve learned and sharing them. Grant Skinner has one of the most popular flash blog sites. By following him on twitter i’ve been able to vastly improve on my own techniques that he passes along – often things that never make it to blog articles on his website. By doing this for a number of various disciplines, I’ve vastly expanded my knowledgebase, am constantly seeing things I would never have known otherwise and the best part is that it requires no work or significant effort on my part.

Where else can you get free advice, insight, mentoring, or knowledge from some of the top officials, experts, entrepreneurs, leaders in the world? Typically you would pay hundreds of $$$/hr to step in the same room as some of the people you can follow for free on twitter, and often times they’re more than kind enough to reply to questions through Twitter. How much would it be worth to know what your hero or idol reads or listens to on a daily basis?

These are only a fraction of a percentage of what makes Twitter both interesting and useful. Since the list is truly too large for a single post, i’ll save it for a Part 2 where there will be a more structured list of both the misconceptions and use cases of twitter.

If you’re still reading this, I consider you very patient. hah! If you have some use cases please leave them below as I’d like to dive deeper into the current and potential uses to the Twitter paradigm.