Despite a litany of uptime issues that have faced Twitter as it has grown more and more popular, the service has maintained its popularity, especially amongst the early adopters in the tech community that love its simplicity and ease of use on mobile devices.

While a good number of technorati have taken well to Friendfeed, Twitter dovetails quite well with it (as well as Facebook) and when comments are made, people generally do them on Twitter rather than directly on Friendfeed.

Twitter is reporting uptime this month 99.96%, with 99.88% last month. That is about as good as it gets. Even Amazon.com had downtime worse than that during June and July this summer.

Unfortunately, this uptime has come at a price. The tracking and IM features that a lot of people claim they joined Twitter for have not returned. For me, it’s not a big deal because I’m not hardcore and didn’t use those features, but for some of the biggest, baddest Twitter fiends, it’s irritating.

Additionally, Twitter has seen an influx of around $13 million in cash, so maintaining uptime shouldn’t be a problem with the resources they have to offer.

Of course, the question still begs to be asked: what value is Twitter? How can it be monetized? What are the Internet marketing possibilities associated with it? Someone smarter than myself may be able to help you out with this one, but it seems as though the biggest possibility with Twitter is to aid in building relationships. Twitterers are generally a very tech-savvy breed, and getting hooked up with them through Twitter is an excellent way to advertise yourself and network your ideas. Just make sure not to go overboard with selling yourself and provide useful, helpful information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pmand is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.