There has been a lot of debate over the microblogging tool launched last year called Twitter. You have only 140 characters to get your message across to whoever is following you or just “out there.” No doubt, much of what gets “Twittered” is inane and useless information. But it is growing leaps and bounds with consumers, and not just the Tween to Under 30 crowd either. The +30 Ancients are using it as well. And there are issues around monitoring for online reputation and yes, there are productivity gains in the workplace.

We are in the 90-Second Economy, whereby many of our tasks we want to be short so we can make decisions and concentrate our time value on where we feel it is more important. When Instant Messaging (IM) came out in the late 90’s (AOL AIM and MSN IM) it was seen as a consumer toy. By 2000, AOL and Microsoft were offering Enterprise versions for IM’ing within the corporation. There is no reason Twitter won’t end up going the same way.

Twitter forces you to truly compress your concept, question, answer into a concise set of 140 characters. There’s no time for subtlety or diplomacy. It is what it is. Links can be shared, and this is where corporate usage comes into play. Large organizations who run their own, for example, Google search server internally, will have links to the many documents stored there. Workers can use Twitter to communicate links to people, faster than IM or Email. Quick requests, direction changes and such Knowledge Transactions can take place across a broad spectrum of people immediately. Tie in geo-locating and you’ve got something interesting for organization of events.

Twitter can be used as a corporate tool, for inane commentaries and for marketing. Some clever marketers use Twitter to drive traffic to their blogs and websites to drive traffic and sales. And it’s working. It’s a social tool that currently fills a gap between IM and email and helps us navigate information and make decisions on how we want to spend our most valuable personal resource - time.