To tweat or not to tweat?

So, after slightly manipulating Shakespeare's famous words into a Twitter like feel I can start my article on the pro's and cons of Twitter.

For those of you who don't know and really there seem to be so many lines like this (everyone should know by now) - Twitter is a blogging/social service that limits your blogs to 140characters and only people who 'follow' you on Twitter will receive your 140 characters.

You can have thousands of follows or none and follow thousands yourself, you can even follow me but if you don't say anything useful no one will follow you! So why use it when you can just use Facebook updates and let all your friends know whats going on, for me this is what kept me off Twitter for ages. I signed up towards the end of last year and only really started posting my 'tweats' this year, think I just reached my 100th tweat!

I've come to realise that Facebook is nice to keep track of my friends and see whats going on in their lives but with Twitter for me its more business like in a sense that all the people I follow are people I find interesting and who I think have interesting things to say. If you just had your mates on there there would be just random crap going to and fro.

Now I can get updates of John Battelle or Guy Kawasaki which I find pretty interesting except that post tweats at an incredible rate. Its a great way to network with all your relevant peeps and keep track of what they are up to, its also a great way to market yourself, your website or anything basically.

Now what I have against it is the potential spam one could receive from it - you can setup an outside/external program to twitter to run through all twitter profiles and add them as your feed. All these people will receive an email saying that 'YOU' are now following them and generally they will click through to see who you are and if they want to follow you back.

Now if you do this with 20,000 peeps thats not bad marketing, whether its good PR is another thing. I don't think it is, I'd rather have 20,000 people re-tweeting away about a new blog I just posted or website I just launched.

Twitter was recently rumoured to have been valued at $250million which isn't too much but this is the first rumour... the next one could be way higher considering the press its starting to receive and the increase in traffic.

Either way I find Twitter very useful and urge you all to sign up and to start tweating away!