I will come out and say right away that I am a Twitter addict. I have been tweeting (posting on Twitter, for those not in the know) ever since I discovered it at a conference more than a year ago now.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is a really big deal and will be for a long time. Even with zero revenue and no current plans for monetization, the web company has raised more than $150 million to date and is worth about a billion dollars.

So what is it? Well, the common explanation for it — that it’s sorta just like Facebook’s status update — is very lacking. It’s much more than that.

Once you get on the Web site, you are constantly answering the question, “What are you doing right now?”

Constantly is a relative term, left to your unique interpretation. Some users will only update it on important events; others will let the whole world know every single detail of their life, from what they had for breakfast, to what brand tooth paste they used. You can then follow others to get their updates and people you know can follow you too.

That’s it. The Web site is simple. But simplicity is too often mistaken for irrelevance and lack of meaning. What is truly remarkable is the amount of uses Twitter has.

Take this for an example: Someone’s going on vacation somewhere for spring break and they want to know the conditions. Rather than check the regular travel site’s rating of venues in Cancun, which was probably written many months or perhaps even a year earlier, they can easily go on Twitter to find out the conditions right now; what happened yesterday and what’s hot right now? 

Just Saturday, when I was unable to go to the game, all I had to do was log onto Twitter and subscribe to the feed of tweets coming out regarding the game, letting me follow our shutout. What I ended up with was an instant play-by-play of the entire game sent directly to my phone, thanks to tweeters at the game.

These examples don’t even scratch the surface of the possibilities behind the service. Because of its real-time capabilities and the huge community, Twitter has broken news before any reputable news organization many times. The Hudson plane crash, Mumbai bombings and the latest California wildfires were all examples of stories that first broke on Twitter.

Twitter is not an over-rated, meaningless fad of a service. It’s not going anywhere and will only continue to grow, becoming ever more relevant. It also has amazing potential and could possibly be the next revolution in search technology and innovation; perhaps the greatest reason why it’s able to raise so much money. It has the potential of revolutionizing social media, a topic I couldn’t possibly discuss in a 400-word editorial.

Feel free to either completely ignore what I just said. Or, you could try Twitter for yourself. As skeptical as you might be, I invite you to just give it a try for a week or two and see what you get out of it. When you do, add @iHany, my twitter id, to start following me.
Happy tweeting!