Mullen Twitter Mullen

When David Mullen first tried the social network Twitter about a year ago, he wasn't impressed. "I was already on a few social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and I had heard a lot about Twitter," he said. "I found no use for it whatsoever.... It seemed like a waste of time, a drain on the intellect." But then he came to realize he wasn't using it correctly. "I decided to give Twitter a second try because it became obvious to me that the network was growing rapidly," he said. Mullen works in marketing at Mullen, an advertising agency -- named not for him but for the unrelated founder, Jim Mullen -- and he spoke with a colleague who was using Twitter and finding it helpful in his work. "The concept behind it was pretty interesting," Mullen said, "and I thought, what are the ways I could use it that would be of value to me?" Mullen uses Twitter to share links with fellow marketers and to keep in contact with clients. "You pick up a lot of knowledge from Twitter and from the links that people are sharing," Mullen said. "Some marketers post about case studies, some have links to blog posts.... The Internet is chock full of information, and there's no way I could find even 10 percent of the information on a given day. It's great to be pointed to it." For the uninitiated, Twitter is a social network that lets users send out "Tweets" -- 140-character text messages, which usually amounts to a long sentence -- to people on a message list. The Tweets can be read on computers or cell phones. The service is free. The messages are akin to e-mails sent to a select mailing list, Instant Messages (short person-to-person messages sent across the Internet) or Facebook updates. Twitter started in late 2006, and the Twitter.com Web site now has about 19 million unique visitors each month, according to recent report at Compete.com. That makes it the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace. Despite its success, Twitter doesn't currently make any money. According to the site, "while our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make." Their financing comes from venture capitalists who have invested in the site, but how the service would make money in the future remains to be seen. Some people find Twitter a useful way to communicate with a group of friends without having to send individual messages. Others find it a distracting nuisance that may keep people from experiencing their lives because they are busy tweeting. "There's some risk of that," said Lauren Pressley, a librarian at Wake Forest University. "So far, I haven't felt the pressure to document so much that I wasn't able to be in the moment." Pressley first joined Twitter in February 2007. "A large part of my job is to pay attention to emerging technologies, and how they might impact what we do for our students," she said. "Twitter came up as something a lot of leading-edge people were doing. I decided to play with it, to understand better what the point of the service was." So she signed up and tried out Twitter, and -- like Mullen -- wasn't impressed at first. "I quit using it for awhile," she said. "The benefit comes when there are more people using it, and in the early days there weren't enough. So I just let it sit there awhile." But as more and more people started using Twitter, she decided to give it another chance. The second time around, she found it more useful. "I use it mostly to share ideas about different things people are doing," she said. The idea is that it's almost like a human search engine. If I'm going to give a talk about podcasting, I might ask my Twitter friends what the No. 1 podcast they listen to is."