You can’t do anything online these days without hearing about Twitter.  I’ve written a few posts about it in the past (found here) and I have to admit that I am impressed with how it has been “blowing up” the past couple of months.  I have had discussions with friends and co-workers about the staying power of Twitter and wanted to share my thoughts with everyone else.

Twitter is a force; an unstoppable force I feel right now.  The only thing standing in its way is itself.  With its huge growth, it has hard times with big events that come with a lot of tweets at the same time.  For example, at the Macworld conference, Twitter experienced a few “Fail Whales” for a couple of hours.  The same with CES that same week.  Other times, it goes down without much of a reason.  But other than that, I really don’t see anything or anyone getting in their way.

I wrote a post comparing Twitter, Plurk and Pownce a few months back and since then Pownce has bowed out of the battle.  Plurk is still just a blip on the radar.  I have an account but don’t really ever use it.  It seemed like a good idea but I never could catch on.  Too many of my friends were on Twitter already and like most people I thought, “Do I need this twice?”

Twitter is not going away any time soon.  I have heard others say that they don’t expect to be on it in 2-3 years time but when I hear that, I can’t help but to think “what will you be on?”  To me, Twitter just has that “it” quality and will soon be mainstream.  I mean, even my mom has an account   I can’t think of anything taking its spot.

It’s one of those things I see people realizing how they lived without before it existed.  Kind of like me with my DVR, I don’t know how I ever was without it.  I feel the same about Twitter.  I have met a ton of people and learned a lot of interesting things in the time I have used it.  I think that Twitter has the power to be around for a while and only grow stronger, probably with the assistance of a bigger company buying them out.  I just hope that They stay true to their initial idea and only imporove upon their infrastructure and stop all of the “Fail Whales”.  Twitter can be a big force like a Google if it plays its cards right.  I guess only time will see.

So in today’s world of Web 2.0, everyone knows what everyone else is doing because of micro-blogging. If you’re not sure what micro-blogging is, here’s my definition. Micro-blogging is the idea of posting blogs of 140 characters or less. Because of the shortness of the blogs, they are posted at a much more frequent nature. Most people update what they are doing at that time while others use it to update a new blog post or a song that they just listened to.

Because I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge of what is going on in the Web 2.0 world, I have accounts on a few of these micro-blogging sites. Following the release of Twitter at the 2007 SXSW, I signed up for it. I used it for a while but I didn’t get much out of it. But I’ve written about that before. I’m using it again on a pretty regular basis. I like to post things that I’ve done, heard or have opinions on.

Twitter is the biggest micro-blogging app out there with 2,955,142 users based on numbers from http://twitter.com/digijustin
Pownce – http://pownce.com/digijustin/
Plurk – http://www.plurk.com/user/digijustin

I’m also looking to meet new people and see what others are saying.

The other day a co-worker, Scott, tells me about this new blog syndication network called BlogRush. It’s a simple widget that you place on your site and it will show blog entries of other blogs. How is works simply is for every time the widget loads from one of your pages, you earn a credit. That credit in turn will buy you a spot on someone else’s widget. You show a blog, your blog is shown. A simple one-to-one exchange. So sites that you have no affiliation with whatsoever can potential drive people to your blog. How cool is that?

They also have a pretty nice referral system where the impressions on the sites of people you refer also earn you credits. Could be really cool if you get a lot of people to use you as their referral.

I’ve had it running for about 4 days now and so far it says I have 173 credits. I don’t really have any confirmation that my blog showed up on any other blogs but why would they lie? So far I would have to say that I like it.

On negative thing that I have noticed is that it seems that my site is running slower since I installed it. I actually read that on another blog about BlogRush today and that’s what made me realize it. In fact, their site is slow currently and I hope that this is not an indication of how things are to come, but rather a sign of growth exceeding projections. Hopefully they will straighten this out soon.

So go out there and add it to your blog. And while you’re at it, it can’t hurt to refer me so check them out here. Also if you have tried it, let me know what you think. I would love to hear other experiences with it. If you haven’t, give your opinions on it.