I like Twitter.

At first, I thought we were all nuts. A year or so ago, Twitter was described to me as text messaging what you are doing every minute of the day to your friends and then getting text messages of what all of your friends are doing, every minute of the day.

Buzzz
“I am eating ice cream.”

Buzzz
“I am doing nothing in particular.”

Buzzz
“I am wasting your time making you read this.”

Buzzz
“Are we nuts?”

Twitter is like a combination of micro-blogging and social networking. Micro-blogging, meaning blog posts of no more than 140 characters. Social networking means connecting these micro-blogs directly to your friends.

I started to like Twitter the minute I turned off the alerts on my phone. No more buzzing.

Now, I open a browser tab with Twitter and it looks like this.

Why do I like it? The same reason I like reading blogs — I get interesting information. But the best part is that each of these info tidbits are no more than 140 characters long. Long thoughtful blog posts are nice, but so is something that says:

Hear free teleconference w/Andy Sernovitz on getting started with word of mouth. Use code ‘wommafreebie’. http://tinyurl.com/5na6gm

That’s a tweet from @Nedra (Twitter-speak for username Nedra who is social marketing guru Nedra Weinreich.)

She’s telling me about the Word of Mouth Marketing Association free teleconference with Andy Sernovitz. And she told me in 131 characters, including the URL.

With Twitter you can build a following for your organization and send updates, with links. It’s a smart way to communicate. You can send Twitter updates from a mobile phone, so someone in the field in Uganda could send mobile updates that your Twitter followers can learn from.

No, don’t drop everything and have 10 employees Tweeting full time. But you can start playing with it, see what it’s about and you might find it proves to be useful.

Congress is actually starting to pay attention.

From CNN:

Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is at the forefront of a new effort to reach constituents by using services such as Twitter.com, Qik.com, and Utterz.com. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to publish short text messages known as “tweets.” …

Word quickly spread last week via Twitter.com that regulation of congressional use of the site might be coming. It prompted the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization advocating for greater use of the Internet in order to make information about the federal government more available to the public, set up a Web site as well as a Twitter-based petition.

House Franking Commission Chairman Mike Capuano, D-Massachusetts, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each weighed in on the matter and sought to make it clear that any new regulations would be limited for now to use of online video sites such as YouTube and Qik.

In my first job as a political consultant based in San Francisco I wrote Congressional Frank Mail for a half dozen Members. Frank mail are those free newsletters that are sent at taxpayer expense and tell you how hard your Member of Congress is listening. With Twitter — and YouTube and MySpace and Facebook et al. — we’ve come a long way since then.

Link [CNN]
Link [Twitter]