One tweet can sink a product - and it's fun

"Do you tweet?" asked my colleague (a right-wing philosopher and distinguished technophobe), looking at me over his spectacles like a magistrate inspecting a lap-dancer arrested for public order offences. He'd been listening to the BBC Radio 4, which has recently discovered Twitter.

"Yes," I replied nonchalantly.

"As I thought," he snorted, and shuffled off. The idea that sentient human beings would waste energy by posting 140-character messages about their thoughts and doings struck him as barmy.

And one can see his point of view.

It is a doddle to use. Go to www.twitter.com and sign up for an account absolutely free. You are then presented with a small text box 140 characters wide and the question "What are you doing?" Type a reply and instantly this is broadcast to the world, or at any rate to the Twitterverse. You can, if you're a shy and retiring type, "protect" your tweets so that only your "followers" see them.

Twitter has been around for ages, but it's now gone "mainstream".

Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) has 321,578 followers. A few months ago he pronounced on the BlackBerry Storm, a new phone being touted by Vodafone.

"Shockingly bad," he tweeted. "I mean embarrassingly awful." His tweets effectively shut down that corner of the market.

Last week an entrepreneur named Jason Calcanis created a stir when he offered Twitter US$250,000 ($446,200) to make him one of the "suggested users".

Mr Calcanis runs a start-up called Mahalo Answers (http://bit.ly/15h9pP) where people can earn money by answering questions posed by net users. It attracts about 50,000 users a day and he would like to increase that.

"I was only half-bluffing with this move," he wrote in his weekly newsletter. "I was 90 per cent sure Twitter wouldn't take the money and I wouldn't have to pony up ... However, if they did call my bluff ... I would have gotten what I wanted: two to 10 million Twitter followers and the ability to drive one to two million visits to Mahalo a month from Twitter."

The folks who run Twitter didn't swallow his bait, but his move garnered a lot of free publicity. And he's just raised the ante to US$500,000 for a three-year slot as a suggested user. Something to tweet home about.

- OBSERVER