I’ve had a Twitter account for a long time without ever seeing the real use for it.  But, since it has managed to stick around for so long I figured I owe it to myself to really give it an honest try. 

I have been hesitant to take up other things that just seemed trendy and without substance.  My past hesitation has caused me to unfairly and needlessly avoid:

• LinkedIn (took me at least 6 months to catch on that this was essential for keeping business contacts)
• Facebook (I always assumed it was just like MySpace, simply for the kids)
• Digg (turns out I really enjoy reading the homepage, just like nearly everyone else)

So, I’m going to try Twitter.  Trouble is, I only have like 3 followers.  Any other Twitterheads (Tweets?  What do you call yourselves) want to follow me to make it worth the while?  I added a link to my navigation, just in case.

Friday, the Personal Democracy Forum announced that it will be hosting a presidential candidate debate to be entirely conducted over Twitter:

“We’re pleased to announce a first for the Internet Election of 2008: Starting tonight, a designated representative of both of the major presidential campaigns are going to participate in a free-wheeling debate on technology and government, moderated by Time magazine blogger Ana Marie Cox and channeled via Twitter.”

While the actual presidential candidates will not be submitting their own “tweets“, some pretty respectable figures from each of their campaigns will.  According to the post:

“The McCain campaign will be represented by Liz Mair, the online communications director of the Republican National Committee. The Obama campaign will be represented by Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues.”

For a lot of us in the industry, this marks a pivotal moment.  Not because the candidates look to be a tiny bit closer to embracing the internet as an effective (and cheap) means of communicating their messages to potential voters, but because it may be the first truly meaningful use for Twitter. 

For anyone who lives under a rock, Twitter is a website service that provides one single function: users submit >140 character messages (by web interface, text-message from their cell phone, or third-party application), and they are pushed to all of their “followers” (and for most users settings also posted on the public timeline for anyone to see, even if only available for a brief moment in time).  In this time of text-messaging mania, Twitter provides a useful (if not meaningful or profitable) function.  But, short of using it to quickly organize an audience rebellion at a conference (a great story worthy of reading), most tweets consist of one of the following: a) what is for lunch, b) where to get that lunch, c) how the weather is today, or d) where to eat lunch because of the weather today.  Nonetheless, Twitter has racked up impressive usership (an estimated 1.3 million users in March). 

As a free service, with no on-page advertising visible, many people wonder what the real business model is.  Where is the opportunity for revenue?  That hasn’t stopped investors from pumping Twitter full of money to keep going.  Recent estimates have them as having already collected over $20 million.  Many heads are being scratched as to what they are thinking— I for one am wondering, have I missed something here?

So, while the online presidential debate does not represent a way to make Twitter any money— it does give the site a further boost for its popularity and/or notoriety.  And, as long as the 1990’s don’t repeat themselves for this industry, maybe that will prove to be enough.