It’s taken me a while to warm up to Twitter. I could not see why anyone was interested in what I was doing right now. It’s a bit like acceptable eavesdropping.

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, Twitter is a social network that lets you tell your friends/ colleagues/followers what you are doing at any given time. It also lets you see what everyone else is up to. It’s a kind of worldwide bulletin board of tiny messages that form a huge mosaic of everyday activity.

But that’s really the whole point - Twitter is about the conversation.

I think the best Twitter analogy I have heard is that it’s like a really big dinner party. People are collected together in one place and have snippets of conversations, expanding their knowledge and their networks a little bit as they go. Twitter offers active participants a 24/7 networking event. Opportunities for growth abound on Twitter whether it’s growing your career, your business, or your social life.

You can absolutely have a conversation on blogs, on Facebook and on some other social media sites, but it's a different kind of conversation with Twitter.

On Twitter there are tons of conversations going on at once and every individual is running their own show. You can easily join one conversation, or you can start a new one. If you start a new one, others can easily join in. You can even carry on multiple conversations at once. It's total conversational freedom.

Twitter is taking a bit longer to catch on downunder but, like most new business trends, it's not something you can ignore. And it does have a clear business application. As we’re finding at Ideas Shop, it’s the smart New Zealand companies that are catching on to its power.

In the past, US companies are increasingly using Twitter as part of their marketing mix, where once they would have relied solely on a market research firm to gauge their audience. Twitter has a search function called Twitter Search that allows you to see what people are saying about your company or brand in real-time. It’s fast, honest - the good, bad and ugly - and it’s free. 

And then there’s creating a buzz around a campaign or issue. Just look at the way music fans worldwide are using Twitter (as well as Facebook and MySpace) to protest against a new New Zealand law that could mean users who illegally download music internet see their connections severed.

Over the past couple of days we have seen internet users worldwide have been changing their profile pictures on various social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to a plain black picture as a mark of their protest against the law.

Whether Twitter by itself makes the different is yet to be seen.. .

Oh, and finally, my twitter status updates are here if you’re interested in reading what coffee I’m drinking this morning.