OK the new kid on the block has grown fast, 974% last year apparently! Everyone’s talking about it, in the legal world it’s on every conference agenda. It’s big news.

So it comes as a shock when people question its value. And judging by recent articles and posts on the web the time is ripe to try and knock twitter from its podium:

• The recent Neilson reporting on the “twitter quitters”
• The big furore in the legal twitterverse with Larry Bodine’s article “Twitter Not Effective for Law Firm Marketing”
• And today Charles Christian posts he’s had enough with twitter (I would link to the post but it looks like he’s deleted his twitter account altogether too!)

And thus it get’s articles written about it, repeated and quoted in blogs and twitter itself (yes I understand the irony!)

To me though people are missing the point, twitter isn’t facebook or myspace so comparisons with them doesn’t work.  It is just a brand for micro blogging (there are plenty of others out there: kwippy, plurk, jaiku, identica etc). Yes, twitter as a brand may fail but micro blogging is here to stay.

Face-to-face, letters, telephone, fax, email, instant messaging (IM) and twitter (micro blogging)

They’re just all just forms of communication, nothing more nothing less. People will prefer one over the other, over a period of time one form may get used much more than others. But none of them are going away.

IM has been around for years, but it’s only just starting to move into the business world (outside IT depts). But in a short time it will take off in businesses and we’ll see email usage fall away, just as we saw the use of telephones fall once email exploded on the scene (don’t believe it, just ask any 16 year old how much they use email!).

Micro blogging will start to appear too in corporate environments as people experiment with laconi.ca and jaiku.

My guess though is that Larry Bodine doesn’t necessarily think twitter is a waste of time, he’s in marketing and one sure fire way to get your name out there is to shout the opposite to what everyone else is shouting (after all it was only 5 months ago that “Twitter is valuable to legal professionals”) . And everyone has taken notice, I bet Larry has more speaking engagements and requests for articles than at any time in the last 12 months!

He may actually be right on twitter not being an effective law firm marketing tool, but as for being “sucked into the black hole of buzz about twitter” it isn’t a black hole, twitter or micro blogging will be just like the telephone here to stay for a long time!