Be it a testament to the world’s belief in Twitter’s necessity or the world’s absolute confusion with Twitter’s product, TWTRCON SF 09 was packed today as “the first conference entirely focused on Twitter as a business platform: how to use Twitter to reach and engage customers, influence opinions and activate markets.” Unable to attend the conference, I still wanted to learn about Twitter – to appease my own curiosity and also to improve my presentation for class tomorrow morning =). Luckily, the live and thorough newsfeed (provided by who else but Twitter) helped me to easily track the conference events and insights online.

The participant tweets focused primarily around the old news of Twitter’s opportunity to partner with Google, the thoughts that it is too early to develop a robust revenue model, the suggestions to add more features, and the risk of Twitter losing its brand and turning into a “distributed ecosystem.”

Even though the conference was supposed to show businesses how to use Twitter for customer engagement, the stickiest takeaway for me (and also for many, as this quote has been forwarded all over Twitter) was a tweet from @TripAustin that defined Twitter’s edge in the social media space:

MySpace is for people you don’t want to know. Facebook is for people you used to know. Twitter is for people you want to know.
(http://twitter.com/TripAustin/status/1985641175)

Typically, Twitter’s “following/followers” device has been perceived as a detterent for everyday users who feel too much pressure to constantly tweet or too little confidence to believe they could have a great following. @TripAustin’s description could really help Twitter welcome and retain more users. It’s a great example of (a) differentiating Twitter and (b) appealing to the masses. He turns Twitter’s definition around by saying: There’s another smart way to use Twitter. You don’t have to become a broadcaster. Use Twitter to meet the people you want to know right now.