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The True Purpose Of Twitter

Sep 1

Posted by wallruss in Free Software, Online Services | 2 Comments

twitter-moneySome­one sent me an email ask­ing me what the pur­pose of Twit­ter was. Is it prac­ti­cal? Is it a fad? The own­ers haven’t even mon­e­tized it. It’s a great ques­tion and there are a lot of peo­ple ask­ing it. I believe the best way to answer it is that it’s true pur­pose has yet to be rec­og­nized. I remem­ber telling a friend years ago that he should buy a per­sonal com­puter. He couldn’t see a rea­son to spend the money. He didn’t know what to do with it. He finally got one, of course, and now spends too much time on it. He found many uses for it after he bought it. Like a per­sonal com­puter, per­haps Twit­ter has to be used to help you see its value.

Some peo­ple use Twit­ter to call atten­tion to updates to their blog or site. It’s like send­ing a mes­sage to every client at once. Some com­pa­nies use it to tell every­one what their up to.  Many give away prizes to ran­dom cus­tomers  in a hope that they will stay tuned. Some sim­ply use it as a microblog that imme­di­ately updates it’s fol­low­ers. Imag­ine your­self cre­at­ing a text mes­sage from you cell phone that goes out to mil­lions of inter­ested read­ers. These are just some of it’s uses. Are you cre­ative enough to find another?

As far as Twit­ter being mon­e­tized, well there is some work that needs to be done there. Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twit­ter, on a recent inter­view with Tavis Smi­ley says that Twit­ter will remain free to all but there are some spe­cial new ser­vices that may have value to par­tic­u­lar users. Those pre­mium ser­vices will help bring rev­enue to the company.

In my opin­ion, the true pur­pose of twit­ter has yet to be rec­og­nized or dis­cov­ered. Maybe it has a lot of lit­tle pur­poses. It has many cre­ative per­sonal uses. As a busi­ness owner or mar­ket­ing man­ager you really have to look at how Twit­ter can sup­port your busi­ness plan. What value can it bring your com­pany? You’ll have to judge for your­self. Start by doing some research. Check out these rea­sons why some peo­ple thing Twit­ter has amaz­ing value. Here are a few oth­ers. Feel free to share your expe­ri­ences here. As I find out more, I will do the same.

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Online Backup

Aug 5

Posted by wallruss in Backup, Online Services | No Comments

One of the most imme­di­ate con­cerns for all of my clients is their data backup plan. Despite my urg­ings, most don’t seem to have one. Even some­thing as sim­ple as putting a USB drive on a key­chain and back­ing up their doc­u­ments at the end of the day seems to be too much, that is until they lose impor­tant data. Viruses, com­puter crashes, and ran­dom equip­ment fail­ure can catch you by sur­prise. Losses cost money and time and some data is sim­ply irre­place­able. When it comes to back­ing up your data, it is impor­tant to be proac­tive. If you’d like it done auto­mat­i­cally with­out your hav­ing to do any­thing, con­sider an online solu­tion. There are several.

One online solu­tion is called Mozy Online Backup For a home com­puter, Mozy will pro­vide free online backup for up to 2GB. If you want more, the have an unlim­ited plan for less than $5 a month. If you run an office of mul­ti­ple com­put­ers MozyPro offers a low cost plan that depends on the num­ber of com­put­ers and amount of data (in GB) that you wish to backup. The costs are quite rea­son­able and once it’s set up, your backup can hap­pen daily at a time of your choosing.

Car­bonite is another note­wor­thy online solu­tion. They offer a free trial so you can exam­ine their ser­vices and afford­able annual plans at no cost. Dur­ing this free trial they don’t even ask you for a credit card num­ber. Car­bonite pro­vides sim­i­lar ser­vices to Mozy and is a direct com­peti­tor. Car­bonite also allows you to view your data online and access it from any com­puter with an Inter­net connection.

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