Chris tweeted that Twitter is “just a toy.”
Well, maybe. But if you really want/need to be reachable and you’re on Twitter (and your would-be contacts are too), it’s a one-stop way for people to message you. Twitter permits one-to-one messages (as opposed to its default broadcast mode), and if you’ve set Twitter up for it, these will be sent through chat, e-mail, and SMS. There are probably other ways to “explode” a message to multiple communications channels like this, but none that I’ve seen. So, chalk up one potentially practical use for Twitter.
This suggests a way Twitter might actually make money, one of the questions its members have been wondering about since day one: quality of service. An organization could move some of its communications onto Twitter and actually benefit from this message-exploding function, but Twitter has been too flaky lately to make that practical. But if business users paid for and received a certain QoS, it might be viable.