9. The Trouble with Twitter

By now, you are up to speed on what Twitter is, how it works, and what you can do to build your community. This sounds like a wellspring of opportunity; but while it might promise happy places, unicorns, and gumdrop rain showers, Twitter is still a work-in-progress. This was an experiment in text messaging back in 2006 when Jack Dorsey developed for media search engine and directory Odeo, a method of sharing user statuses across its network. From this experiment came what Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and all of us call Twitter. Could Twitter’s creators have foreseen the immense popularity of this service? Considering that Complete.com in February 2009, ranked Twitter as the third-largest social networking platform ...

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